In 2012, I co-authored a piece with Dan Twining in the Washington Post warning that the Obama administration’s decision to lift the investment ban on Myanmar was going too far, too soon—and that the United States would come to regret handing away all its leverage while Myanmar’s military still had so much control over the country. That day has now come. On Jan. 31, the military staged a coup that ousted State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi just as she was poised to lead an overwhelming majority in parliament after her party’s landslide victory at the polls last November. For the generals who held real power behind the scenes, the prospect of a complete democratic transition was too much. And so they struck, claiming with a new standard for truth set by former U.S. President Donald Trump that there was “massive election fraud”—a charge no independent observers accept, just as no U.S. court accepted Trump’s outlandish claims.
This was all foreseeable despite the champagne corks popping in 2012 among the spinmeisters in the Obama White House about having played the Myanmar card against China by normalizing U.S.-Myanmar relations. Now the veterans of that policy, many of whom have reentered government under the new Biden administration, will have to pick up the pieces. In some respects, finding a way for Washington to react to Myanmar will be much harder than it was during the Obama administration. The United States already gave the military what they wanted most in 2014: removal of restrictions on investments in the oil and gas sectors that would lead to injections of cash into their coffers. Though the United States imposed targeted sanctions in response to the Myanmar military’s crackdown on the Rohingya minority in 2019 under the Global Magnitsky Act, more stringent sanctions are now much harder to reimpose. Myanmar’s immediate neighborhood also looks less democracy-friendly today, with a military junta in charge next door in Thailand and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte suppressing political dissent and unleashing extrajudicial violence in his country. Finally, China’s political and economic influence is now seen in Southeast Asia as greater than that of the United States. Beijing will have no problem cozying up to a new authoritarian government against the people of Myanmar.
