Episode #241: Promises Unfulfilled
“When we look back now, it's easier to look at that [transition] period darkly and dismiss it and say it was kind of a mirage,” says Timothy McLaughlin, author of a recent piece in The Atlantic, titled “The Great Democratic Success Story That Wasn’t.” He continues, “I do think there were some real things happening and definitely benefits. Was it equal across the board? Of course not. And was it halting? Yes, for sure.”
Before speaking about his article, however, he discusses his background in reporting on Myanmar, starting with the 2010 and 2012 elections, and then the sweeping, unprecedented changes across society that followed. “The general projection and feeling was one of positivity, especially leading into the 2015 election. It was just a huge amount of excitement and hype around that, with many people getting to vote for the first time.”
As the thrust of McLaughlin’s recent article centers around current US policy in post-coup Myanmar, he first tracks American involvement over the preceding years, describing how Obama took office hoping to make a fresh start in reaching out to pariah states that the Bush administration had isolated through sanctions and harsh rhetoric. “The idea behind the reengagement [was] looking back at the country and trying to figure out a new path forward, because obviously the old path wasn't working,” he explains, attributing that thinking as coming from the top, with Obama, Hilary Clinton, and Jake Sullivan leading the way. But just several years later, that bubble of optimism was burst with the Rohingya tragedy. As the ensuing genocide unfolded, McLaughlin describes the resulting Beltway thinking as, “Okay, we've invested a lot of time and energy in here, what’s the end goal?”
McLaughlin characterizes the American sentiment after the 2021 military coup as expecting a fairly brief resistance followed by a bloody and inevitable military takeover… which obviously is not how things have played out. He describes the subsequent American sanctions as essentially “performative” in nature, seeking more “punishment” than holding any hope of effecting real change. He notes, too, that some of the people that had been involved years ago in helping craft Obama’s Myanmar policy are back with the Biden administration, and in higher positions to boot. McLaughlin describes them as giving themselves “probably way too much credit,” for their Obama-era policies, especially in their claims of “shifting the mindset of the generals,” and they are notably silent today on Burma issues.
Overall, McLaughlin describes this crisis as one that most policymakers, anywhere, would simply rather not engage with. “Myanmar is a mess for everybody, not just the countries on its borders,” he says, pointing to the cyber-scams, the drug trade, and human trafficking now running rampant, not to mention the possibility of the conflict spilling over borders. “This has become a transnational, criminal state,” he says. For that reason, McLaughlin’s piece was intended to “call attention to these people who were these great champions, they claimed that they changed everything in Myanmar and that they had forged this new US policy. And now they pretty much have walked away from this issue!”
Then there’s China. While some observers have posited that China may have implicitly supported the coup, McLaughlin notes that like everyone else, Beijing is quite unhappy about what has taken place. Indeed, he points to the cozy relations that the NLD had been developing with them before the coup, from investment deals to foreign policy alignment. But he points out that China’s position can be best understood when considering the US, as both superpowers are equally wary of how their own Myanmar policy might affect the other. As an example, McLaughlin notes that “when the US decided to say that the military had… carried out the operations against the Rohingya with genocidal intent… we know that the US didn't do that before in the Trump administration, because they were afraid that it would push Myanmar closer towards China.” McLaughlin spoke to people on the record who admitted this concern, providing a slightly different angle on the eventual genocide declaration that Secretary Blinken eventually made under President Biden (which was detailed in a podcast interview with the Holocaust Museum’s Andrea Gittleman). Still, like many other observers, McLaughlin can’t explain the almost complete lack of US engagement, noting that “you would certainly think that with a country that's in Asia, that is at the nexus of China, at least geographically, we'd be getting sort of more attention from the US admin, if only in a self-serving of kind of way there.” (And it is certainly a far cry from countries like Russia, which are continuing to provide the junta arms and legitimacy, and now even taking measures to begin promoting Myanmar’s tourism industry!) In any case, the US and China are “both in the [same] boat right now in having to deal with the junta’s instability.”
McLaughlin finds it very odd that the US has shown so little interest in a people who have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to risk everything for ideals that America supposedly holds sacred. But he believes this again points back to the primacy of China in their foreign policy calculations. “The overarching issue seems to be where countries in this region fall on China, and that is where the tally is kept.” In other words, Myanmar’s revolution—and with it, the overall promotion of democracy in the region—isn’t as relevant to American policymakers now as where those respective countries stand vis-à-vis the Chinese question. As for the Burmese, he recognizes the enormous confusion and frustration they feel about why their situation has been so neglected, to the point that the imprisoned Win Myint is, in McLaughlin’s words, “the most forgotten president that ever lived… They've been jettisoned by the greater international community that was supposed “to be this torchbearer not that long ago.”
The next topic that McLaughlin addresses is humanitarian relief. “For many years now, even before the coup, the aid situation in Myanmar was so complicated and very contentious,” McLaughlin says. He describes an age-old problem within the large donor/international organization community: whether to go through military actors who claim a veneer of legitimacy—but the aid is then unable to reach critical populations in sensitive areas while cronies skim off the top—or to by-pass the military and go through local, informal networks. This is a subject that Shade went into great detail on a recent podcast episode. The typical donor response has been to use military channels, thus recognizing a kind of legitimacy of the junta, but McLaughlin echoes what many others have said, suggesting that “maybe it's time to start thinking about how to get this aid to places through local actors cross-border, and not through the formal channels that have been obviously controlled and disrupted and used as a weapon by the military in some ways.”
So where does that leave American engagement at present? In a word, as with everything regarding Myanmar these days, it’s “complicated.” Noting that the US is now overwhelmed with problems in Gaza and Ukraine, McLaughlin quips that this excuse doesn’t really fly as Burma predates both crises! Between questioning the involvements and roles of such diplomats as Derek Chollet and Kurt Campbell, he points out the obvious in the form of the upcoming US election between Trump and Biden, and the massive implications that will have on everything related to the US after November. And then there is the Burma Act, which was a major accomplishment to pass, but has since taken some time to figure out actual funding mechanisms for.
That Myanmar is “complicated” also cautions McLaughlin when working out his own analysis and prognosis. “I f anyone tells you 100% sure about anything in Myanmar, I think they're lying,” he says. “When it comes to Myanmar, people throw up their hands and say, ‘Ah, it’s really tough. It's really complicated.’ Well, yes, it is, most places that are in the state that Myanmar is in are tough and are complicated! If these solutions were super easy, someone would have done it already. This is what we're seeing that… from Beijing to DC to Bangkok, everyone just wants this to go away… But having that that mindset, do you really hope it just vanishes? It's self-defeating from the start.”
And like Anthony Davis and so many other guests have opined on the past, McLaughlin is well aware that this society is going through a moment. “Myanmar is not going back to what it was,” he says. “What it is in the future, we obviously don't know. But I don't think it's going back to what it was in 2012, or the 2003 era. Something fundamentally is changing here, and it's going to take a while for that all to be seen and sorted. Unfortunately, it's probably going to mean more lost lives and destruction. But I do think that something different is going to emerge from all this.”