The Great Democratic Success Story That Wasn’t

The Obama administration seemed to take special pride in its policy toward Myanmar. American statecraft had coaxed the country’s reclusive military dictatorship onto a path of democratic transformation, Kurt Campbell, who served as an assistant secretary of state at the time, wrote in his 2016 book, Pivot: “One of the world’s most isolated, tragic, and magical lands had finally opened to the world because of intrepid American diplomacy, perhaps fundamentally changing the trajectory of Asia.”

Then, in February 2021, Myanmar’s government fell to a military coup. The country had known little peace for decades, but now it was spiraling into untold violence: Protesters poured into the streets, the junta cracked down, and new armed groups joined those that had already been fighting the military. Campbell, serving in the White House under President Joe Biden as Asia czar, had precious little to say about Myanmar then, nor did lawmakers ask him about Myanmar during his recent confirmation as deputy secretary of state.

Myanmar was once the buzziest of foreign-policy causes. It commanded immense bipartisan support; lawmakers and officials clamored to take credit for its success. Then, in its hour of difficulty, it all but vanished from view in Washington. The limited U.S. response to the country’s travails has “been sort of in the right direction, but lacking energy and commitment,” Scot Marciel, who previously served as U.S. ambassador to Myanmar, told me.

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Myanmar’s crisis is growing and threatens to destabilize the region. The country’s armed opposition has gathered strength in recent months. The military, facing its most serious battlefield test, has resorted to ever more brutal tactics. Waves of refugees are overflowing the country’s borders. Myanmar’s junta has reluctantly turned to China for support, and Beijing, initially displeased with the coup, has begun inserting itself into the conflict and country more forcefully than in the past.

Myanmar’s trajectory was never as simple as Washington wanted to believe. But that doesn’t mean that its long-term prospects for democracy are hopeless, or that the United States should leave the country to the tender mercies of warring factions and Chinese intervention. Myanmar is a good example of a country where the longevity of U.S. commitment matters, and where the most constructive measures call for patience and pragmatism, not declaring a victory for democracy and walking away.

In 2012, Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Myanmar, as the country’s repressive military dictatorship cautiously, haltingly opened to the world. In 2015, during that brief flowering of diplomatic relations, Myanmar held its first freely contested election in a quarter century. The military-drafted constitution prevented Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s Nobel Prize–winning opposition leader, from serving as president, but her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), won the vote handily and came to power. Suu Kyi created the role of state counselor to work around the military’s obstruction and became the de facto head of state.

This seemingly golden moment lasted only a short time before the military cracked down on the ethnic Rohingya in Rakhine State, in the country’s northwest, in a campaign that has been widely condemned as genocide. The civilian government sided with the military: At The Hague in 2019, Suu Kyi argued that Myanmar’s armed forces had their own justice system that was capable of punishing those who may have committed crimes. The position perplexed her foreign admirers, given the military’s history of impunity—and that it had specifically punished Suu Kyi in the past by locking her in her lakeside villa for 15 years. But Suu Kyi’s defense of the campaign against the Rohingya didn’t seem to taint her in the eyes of her most ardent Beltway supporters. Nor did it faze voters in Myanmar, where many endowed her with a saintlike stature. In the 2020 election, the NLD carried off an even more resounding victory than before.

But Suu Kyi’s second electoral victory was apparently one too many for Min Aung Hlaing, the country’s politically ambitious commander in chief. On the morning of February 1, 2021, military vehicles sped into the country’s capital, and Min Aung Hlaing and his cadres supplanted the elected government. The coup “was, at its core, an immense act of political revenge,” a former high-ranking government official, who asked not to be named out of fear of reprisal, told me. Suu Kyi was jailed in a hastily constructed prison designed for one, protests mushroomed across the country, and the country’s armed forces responded with unrestrained violence.

[Read: Joe Biden’s challenge was Barack Obama’s ]victory

Over the next two years, the junta and its proxies battled a sprawling patchwork of resistance forces, including some preexisting armed groups representing ethnic minorities. International bodies issued toothless statements of concern as Myanmar’s military reportedly burned entire villages, dropped bombs indiscriminately, and raped civilians. The junta leaned into its relationships with old allies, most notably Russia, as it attempted to carry on the functions of the state.

Late last October, the conflict reached a head. A group called the Three Brotherhood Alliance, consisting of three armed ethnic groups, carried out coordinated attacks, including many along Myanmar’s border with China, where Burmese organized-crime syndicates had set up compounds housing sophisticated cyberscam operations. Beijing tacitly approved the attacks because the scams were a nuisance to China.

The Three Brotherhood Alliance captured dozens of high-ranking officials and killed hundreds of soldiers. A few months later, in February, the junta announced a conscription drive to replenish its depleted ranks, setting off a rush for visas and the exits.   

Myanmar has long been a problematic neighbor—now it’s an outright disaster for the region. The country has largely lost control of its borders. Rake-thin, exhausted soldiers were filmed earlier this year fleeing Myanmar into Bangladesh. India has said it will begin constructing a border fence. Officials in Thailand have warned of a possible influx of 4 million undocumented migrants from Myanmar this year, with potentially “catastrophic effects” on Thailand’s “economy, society, and security.” And at least twice since the coup, errant bombs have landed inside China, which has become ever more frustrated with the instability and disruption in Myanmar.

[Read: China is the Myanmar coup’s ‘biggest loser’]

The effects of Myanmar’s troubles extend even beyond the country’s immediate neighbors. “Production of illicit drugs, not only opium but also methamphetamines, including ice, is soaring and reaching markets as far afield as Australia and Japan. Rohingya from both Bangladesh and Rakhine State are fleeing to third countries, particularly Malaysia and Indonesia,” Thomas Kean, a Myanmar analyst for the International Crisis Group, told me. “The list goes on and on.”

Which is to say that even if Myanmar isn’t likely to be the next great democratization success story, its future matters. And if the United States can’t bring itself to care about it, China will be the main power determining its course.

The American response to the coup in Myanmar and the turmoil that followed has been anemic, especially compared with its once full-throated championing of the short-lived civilian government.

Following the coup, Washington downgraded diplomatic relations with Myanmar and imposed sanctions meant to punish the junta’s leaders and cut off its flow of funds and weapons. In 2022, the Biden administration declared the campaign against the Rohingya a genocide, a decision that the previous administration had pushed off for reasons of its own. And the Burma Act, a long-delayed piece of legislation promising aid to the country’s people and stepping up pressure on the junta, was signed into law in 2023 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act.

But sanctions are not a substitute for a policy. They are merely a tool, and they come with limitations, particularly as Myanmar’s economy has become more international, and its web of military bagmen adept at evading sanctions has grown. As for the Burma Act, it was originally devised in 2019 and passed only after being watered down significantly. Its measures, now, are little and late.

In fact, the Biden administration has outsourced much of the responsibility for Myanmar to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a 10-country regional bloc of which Myanmar is a member. That group has achieved next to nothing and clings rather humiliatingly to a five-point plan that the junta has blatantly disregarded for the past three years. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan continues to reiterate America’s support for the all-but-dead five-point plan. Backing ASEAN’s feckless approach is not just ineffectual; it further diminishes American credibility by tethering Washington to a bloc that much of Myanmar has come to loathe.

Many in Washington never quite got over Suu Kyi, whom they saw as Myanmar’s sole avatar of democracy. With her gone and no replacement, the country lacks a visible champion. But it is transforming. The military’s savagery, long known to ethnic minorities, is now broadcast daily to the wider public on social media, leading many Burmese to reevaluate the armed forces’ role in society. The country’s prodemocracy forces have formed a parallel civilian government in exile that has promised a more inclusive and equitable model of governance than Suu Kyi’s party ever offered. Some members have even shown a bit of concern for the plight of the Rohingya.

The U.S. can’t deliver Myanmar from its dictatorship. But it can do more than abdicate responsibility and shift the burden to unhelpful neighbors. Washington could, for example, provide technical assistance to local governments in areas controlled by resistance groups, and direct U.S. humanitarian aid to stranded communities through avenues not controlled by the junta.

Myanmar’s new reality is complex and fractured, and engaging with it means engaging with democratic forces that fall outside official channels. Even a fraction of the high-level attention that Myanmar got during the Obama years would demonstrate to the country’s rightly frustrated people that American interest is genuine, long-term, and not just a fleeting diplomatic vanity project.

The United States likes to reiterate its commitment to helping “restore Burma’s path to democracy.” That path is not visible at the moment. The military has proved itself as durable as it is brutal. But there could one day be another opening, and if the United States hopes to support the democratic development of Myanmar, it should not stand back and wait for that day but begin now to rebuild trust.

In his book, Campbell acknowledges that progress in Myanmar is very often paired with “heartbreaking setbacks.” But, he writes, “the question for the country is not whether it will return to the past but how it will move into the future—and whether the United States will assist it as it does.”