It’s a shame our disgraced former president seriously, literally, couldn’t find Myanmar on a map. Because if he knew where it was or what happened in the last few days, think about the agony he would endure if he found out that a coup d’état had just happened based on the baseless allegation of widespread electoral fraud. last November. .
He would no doubt be brimming with jealousy to know that in a place where he couldn’t start spelling, Myanmar’s capital, Nay Pyi Taw, the military was actually doing what he hoped ours would do for him and the will of the people reversed, the rightful winners under house arrest, shut down the media and placed their elected leader in power.
While in Myanmar’s case that leader is now General Min Aung Hlaing, the public statement read on behalf of the new leaders would undoubtedly have left the instigator of the failed US coup green with envy. It claimed that the voter rolls used in the November elections “turned out to be very different,” and the authorities responsible for resolving such issues had not. That the elections, which should have been postponed because of COVID, were plagued by ‘terrible fraud’ that had sparked unrest across the country and that they would therefore be forced – on behalf of democracy, mind you – to declare a state of emergency. It concluded that “the authority of the law, administration and jurisdiction of the nation is transferred to the commander in chief.”
What a melancholic moment it would have been for him to read those words – or if someone had read those words to him – and remember how close he got to living that anti-democratic dream of his. The coup leaders are also said to have aroused his envy for having to put their high-profile Nobel Prize-winning predecessor under arrest, when that has remained mere threat for him to be sung at massive rallies of red hat yahoos.
Of course our failed insurgent in his narcissism sees this week’s events in Myanmar certainly in terms of his own life and his shattered dream of the dictatorship that might have existed, and not in terms of the deep setback it represents for the people over there. In his deep simplicity of mind, he could not have fully grasped the underlying complications of this coup – that while the true victors of Aung San Suu Kyi’s party were stripped of their rightful roles and the votes stolen from their supporters, the deposed itself not the outspoken democracy advocates we had hoped for when they first won elections in 2015. Since then, they have been monitoring, enabling and trying to excuse the ongoing genocide against Myanmar’s predominantly Muslim Rohingya minority.
These complications pose a challenge to anyone facing the reality of the coup. When Suu Kyi took power after 15 years in custody, President Barack Obama quickly embraced her like a hero. His government lifted sanctions while overseeing democratic reforms. Many of the new president’s foreign policy team, Joe Biden, participated in the reform of US policy at the time and had high hopes for the strategically located Southeast Asian nation. I know from conversations with some of them that they felt whipped and were betrayed to some extent by Suu Kyi’s position on the Rohingya.
That said, Biden and his secretary of state responded quickly and clearly to the news of the coup. Monday around noon, Biden condemned the coup as an “attack on the country’s transition to democracy.” He stated that the US would stand up for democracy and claimed that his administration would immediately assess whether the coup justified the re-imposition of sanctions against the new regime. The day before, within hours of news from Naypyitaw, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called on the leaders of the coup to “release all government officials and civil society leaders and respect the will of the people of Burma” .
The clarity and speed of the Biden administration’s response – including arranging briefings with Congress late Monday afternoon – was welcome. Promoting and defending democracy is one of the clearest issues raised by the foreign policy team of the new government. Similarly strong statements promising punishments had already been made regarding Russia’s attempts to quell protests after Alexei Navalny’s arrest and regarding the abuse of the Chinese regime in Hong Kong.
While the previous administration responded to such cases, they often did so slowly, and in the case of some abusers of democracy, such as Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un, toothless and sometimes even fawning. In the case of others, such as in China, Saudi Arabia or the Philippines, their message was also mixed. And imagine how difficult it would be for that government, while they were still in power, to condemn military leaders in Myanmar. What would they say? “We are condemning your coup that was exactly the same as the coup we attempted, based on exactly the same reasons.”
Nevertheless, the challenge for Biden, Blinken and their team will be to devise a policy that works to restore democracy without at the same time restoring leaders who continue the persecution of the Rohingya. Moreover, because unilateral sanctions are so ineffective, they will have to find a way to cultivate meaningful international pressure, including from neighbors in the region who have been risk-averse in the past and are delaying the Chinese on these matters. China, which has significant stakes in Myanmar, has so far taken a neutral stance on recent events.
But the Chinese warned the Myanmar military against taking such steps when the Chinese foreign minister met them last month. In recent years they seemed more comfortable with Suu Kyi’s government than with that of the mercurial military leadership. Chinese pressure would be the key to turning it around, as it was with the containment of Kim’s threat in North Korea. This is where international diplomacy gets even trickier, especially given the new administration’s many points of contention with Beijing.
Nonetheless, the new government has made a commitment to implement the kind of old-fashioned diplomatic block and approach associated with international coalition building and the Myanmar case, such as those related to the defense of democracy in Russia and elsewhere, will be a first test of whether they can not only restore America’s position, but also actually work on developing new, better-functioning forms of international cooperation.
According to White House press secretary Jen Psaki, the new foreign policy team has already begun “intensive multi-level consultations” with international partners and allies. Biden called on the international community to come together on this issue. And so the work begins on one of the first international crises facing this less than two week old government.
But even in the early hours of the response, the Biden team was a welcome contrast to its predecessors by responding quickly, defending democracy, embracing diplomacy, knowing where Myanmar is on the map and, of course, by not having recently participated in exactly the kind of coup that we now rightly condemn.