Two years after coup, Myanmar junta adapts to isolation

1 February 2023

Two years ago, Myanmar’s armed forces seized power from the elected government, detaining civilian leaders including State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint. Under Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, the military junta has killed more than 2,660 of its own people, including children, and has detained and tortured many more. People’s Defence Forces have sprung up across the country with the aim of toppling the State Administration Council (SAC), as the junta calls itself, managing striking successes in its asymmetric war against the dictatorship.

Despite a recent resolution by the United Nations Security Council condemning the coup and calling for the junta to release political prisoners, the international community has failed to rally a meaningful collective response. Western governments announced punitive economic sanctions against the generals immediately following the coup but since then have shied away from coordinated action, such as implementing a no-fly zone or providing armed support to the resistance forces.

The prolonged conflict in Ukraine has distracted Western leaders from devoting more attention and resources to Myanmar, the complexities of which further undermine the willingness of democracies like the United States to lend substantive support to the resistance. In defiance of Western sanctions, the junta has deepened its partnerships with China and Russia, as well as its sympathetic neighbours India and Thailand, to sustain trade and investment and to mend its international reputation.

Few parallels between Myanmar and Ukraine

The contrast between Western support for Ukraine following the Russian invasion and their reaction to the Myanmar coup the year prior is striking. The United States government alone has sent more than USD 3.75 billion in military assistance to Ukraine. By comparison, the US has provided less than half a billion in humanitarian assistance to Myanmar since the coup and just USD 1.5 billion over the last decade. Several reasons explain this stark difference in approaches to the parallel crises.

Western aid is far away and will remain hostage to both Myanmar’s immediate neighbours, with whom they must coordinate, and broader concerns about security on the European continent, where Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will grip Western leaders’ attention for the foreseeable future.

First and foremost, the world views Myanmar’s conflict primarily as an internal challenge (though it has significant repercussions for regional stability). Myanmar’s military toppled the civilian government but did not violate the territorial integrity of another country in the same way that Russia did when it sent troops into Ukraine – the latter being a clear breach of the UN Charter. Therefore, while lamentable, the coup did not trigger the unequivocal response that Putin’s war in Ukraine mobilised.

As a result, Western governments have defaulted to rhetorical support for efforts by the regional Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which announced a Five Point Consensus in April 2021 but has so far been unable to compel an end to the violence.

Second (and equally important), Western democracies are unwilling to countenance entanglement in a parallel conflict on the doorstep of China, which the United States sees as its primary competitor. While supporting Myanmar’s resistance would not entail a direct proxy conflict with China, Beijing is a major arms provider to both the Myanmar military and several large ethnic armed organisations in the country’s north, where the two states share a long geographic border. A lack of understanding of the complexity of Myanmar’s myriad armed groups further undermines Western willingness to become involved in a new conflict.

In this way, with the European Union and NATO bogged down with the war in Ukraine, Myanmar’s resistance is left on its own, a pitiable sideshow to the struggle against Russian imperialism. Distracted by a land war in Europe and facing elections next year, the Biden administration seems to have forgotten about Myanmar’s crisis.

Finally, the delivery of military equipment would put Thailand, a US ally with close ties to the junta, in an uncomfortable position. Washington already relies on Bangkok for coordinating humanitarian assistance inside Myanmar and has therefore refrained from imposing sanctions on the Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise, with whom Thailand conducts business, for fear of alienating its wary ally.

Going it alone

Facing Western pressure, the SAC has largely turned to friendly authoritarian patrons in Moscow and Beijing. The junta also maintains friendly ties with New Delhi, where Indian leaders have placed geostrategic considerations before any preference for the return of democratic governance in Naypyidaw.

In a meeting shortly after the 2021 coup, Vice Chairman Soe Win, the second highest-ranking official after Min Aung Hlaing, told former UN special envoy to Myanmar Christine Schraner Burgener that the junta was prepared “to walk with only few friends”. Burgener said that she warned the general that they would face extreme isolation and pressure from economic sanctions. In response, the general said, “We are used to sanctions, and we survived”.

But Myanmar is not completely cut off from the world. While the UN has refused to recognise the junta’s preferred representative, Myanmar managed to secure nearly USD 1.5 billion in foreign direct investment in 2022-2023, according to the junta’s state-run mouthpiece. Singapore, which has refused to enact sanctions of its own, remains the largest investor, providing approximately 80 per cent of total investment in 2022. Japan, Korea, and Thailand all continue to invest in Myanmar (though some Japanese and Korean businesses withdrew or scaled back operations following the coup).

Myanmar’s military has a long history of indifference to international condemnation and has weathered financial sanctions for decades following a brutal crackdown on nationwide protests in 1988. As I argued in a recent paper with Andrea Passeri, Myanmar’s junta has now returned to its Cold War-era doctrine of “negative neutralism for group survival”, which sustained it in a past period of isolationism.

As long as the international community remains divided and Western countries refuse to take a stronger stance, the junta can afford to rely on old authoritarian partners, who have no qualms about working with Myanmar’s generals. Even coordinated action to support Myanmar’s resistance would confront Chinese (or Thai) opposition and likely be short-lived. Given the current divide between democratic and authoritarian countries, the generals calculate that they can live within a smaller circle of friends.

Dim prospects ahead

This is the unfortunate reality of the situation in Myanmar. It is not that the international community does not care. In some ways, Myanmar is cursed by geography, living between two giants, India and China, one of whom Washington sees as its primary strategic rival, and the other with its own strategic interests at stake in maintaining military ties to offset Beijing’s influence in the country.

Western aid is far away and will remain hostage to both Myanmar’s immediate neighbours, with whom they must coordinate, and broader concerns about security on the European continent, where Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will grip Western leaders’ attention for the foreseeable future.

As long as the military holds power, it will be locked in a zero-sum struggle for survival. For Myanmar’s armed forces, everything else is an afterthought. The junta has diverted much-needed resources from the health, education, and social services sectors to boost the defence budget. Investment will continue to trickle in from the likes of Singapore and China, while India and Russia provide convenient alternatives for the junta to play off one another for influence.

With more rigged elections planned for August, perhaps Min Aung Hlaing is betting that recognition by a few of these friendly powers will give him the ‘fig leaf’ he needs to hold onto power. The junta knows that tough rhetoric from the West is largely just that and will not lead to direct interference. It will not relent to international pressure unless battlefield losses compel it to make concessions.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Author biography

Hunter Marston is an Adjunct Research Fellow at La Trobe Asia and a PhD candidate at the Australian National University. Image credit: Wikimedia/Mil.ru.