No easy way to handle Myanmar

US has taken the sanctions approach; India has to factor in ties with the Tatmadaw and China's greater heft

With echoes of Trumpian rhetoric of election fraud, Myanmar’s military Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing staged a coup in Myanmar on February 1. He claimed that the military takeover was to avert potential widespread protests by opposite sides of the political divide, both in support of election fraud claims and in support of the elected government.

The ruling National League of Democracy (NLD) had won 396 of 476 seats in the November election, allowing it to govern for another five years. The military claims that at least 8.6 million irregularities were found in the voter lists. The USDP, or Union Solidarity and Development Party, founded by retired generals in 2010, won only 33 seats in the 2020 election.

Except from 1948 to 1958 and 2010 to January 2021, the military, locally known as Tatmadaw, has governed the country with absolute control, apart from fighting a dozen insurgent groups, monopolising the political economy by running enterprises like breweries and receiving licensing fees for lucrative jade mining in the north. In the last five years, occasional attempts by NLD leader and de facto foreign minister Aung San Suu Kyi to fully civilianise the political structure were firmly opposed.

Outside Myanmar, many countries, particularly varying kind of democracies, have expressed concern over the developments. Notably, the US has emerged as one of the most proactive countries in demanding the military to backpedal. On February 10, President Joe Biden said he was “imposing sanctions that would prevent the generals who engineered the coup from gaining access to $1 billion in funds their government keeps in the United States,” and warned of more sanctions to come against military leaders and their families. There are many reasons at play for Biden’s approach.

First, the coup in Myanmar coincided with the first month of the Biden administration, which has promised to bring back the values of democracy and respect for human rights to the core of US foreign policy. In the Biden cabinet and his senior appointees, there are a number of people who have worked closely on the Myanmar file. Samantha Power, who now heads the United States Agency for International Development, which is primarily responsible for administering civilian aid and development assistance, had worked closely on Myanmar-related issues as the US ambassador to the UN; Kurt Campbell, now Biden’s senior official for Asia policy, had worked on Myanmar as the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the Obama administration; National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan had worked with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as deputy chief of staff and director of policy planning, and had reportedly played an important role in shaping a new ‘Burma’ policy.

Second, Myanmar is one of the foreign policy issues that enjoys a rare bipartisan consensus in the US in an otherwise polarised political landscape. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who was reportedly consulted by President Biden, has been one of the diehard supporters of NLD leader Aung Sung Suu Kyi for nearly three decades. He has often led the initiative in sponsoring a number of ‘Burma’-related sanctions measures in the US Senate. There is little doubt that the Biden administration, with a surplus of experienced hands on Myanmar, didn’t factor in the limitation of sanctions in changing the military’s behaviour in that country. To have an impact on the ground in Myanmar, the US will need tangible wheels in Asia.

In this connection, President Biden’s maiden call with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on February 8 provides some cues. The White House readout of the call noted that “the President underscored his desire to defend democratic institutions and norms around the world and noted that a shared commitment to democratic values is the bedrock for the US-India relationship. They further resolved that the rule of law and the democratic process must be upheld in Burma.” It is not hard to understand why the US wants to engage closely with India on Myanmar.

First, with a 912-mile-long border between the two countries, India-Myanmar defence cooperation has strengthened with India emerging as one of the major military hardware suppliers to Myanmar. India recently announced that it was to sell a Soviet-era Kilo-class submarine to Myanmar. Second, the two countries see China’s economic and military influence over Myanmar as detrimental to their own interests. However, the US and India will be cognizant of each other’s constraints. Myanmar’s military maintains close linkages with the Indian security establishment to assuage the latter’s security concerns in the North-East. On the other hand, India’s overall economic heft is far weaker compared to China’s economic influence in Myanmar.

With countries formulating their Myanmar policy on the basis of their own assessment of geopolitics and national interest, the enthusiasm over Myanmar’s democratic consolidation, which has over the decades vacillated from oscillation to skepticism to enthusiasm 10 years ago, has once again reversed to skepticism.

(The writer was a member of the UN Secretary General’s Good Offices on Myanmar)