[It was the first concrete step the U.S. government has taken since President Biden demanded that the generals restore democracy and release Myanmar’s civilian leader.]
It was the first concrete step the
U.S. government has taken since Mr. Biden demanded
that the generals restore democracy and release Daw Aung San Suu Kyi,
the nation’s civilian leader.
Noting that protests
were growing, Mr. Biden warned that “violence against those asserting their
democratic rights is unacceptable” and that “the world is watching.” The
president said he had consulted with Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican
leader, and a range of nations across Southeast Asia.
But Mr. Biden’s options are
limited.
Myanmar has relatively little trade
with the United States, and the key partner Mr. Biden needs to join in the
sanctions is China — which is building much of the isolated country’s
infrastructure, including a 5G telecommunications network. So far, the Chinese
have not publicly condemned the coup or announced their own sanctions. If China
acted, it would most likely not do so with public announcements.
Administration officials have
acknowledged that they have to organize the pressure campaign on Myanmar in a
way that will not drive the generals further into China’s embrace.
Mr. Biden did not address that
trade-off, other than to say that “we’ll continue to work with our
international partners to urge other nations to join us in these efforts.”
Mr. Biden has used his response to
the events in Myanmar to accentuate the contrast between his administration and
President Donald J. Trump’s. Mr. Trump used sanctions frequently, but usually
did not invest much time trying to get allies to join in. He rarely spoke about
human rights violations, except when the perpetrator was Iran or, in his last
year in office, China.
Myanmar, though, was a conspicuous
exception. In July 2019, the
Trump administration imposed sanctions on some of the same military
commanders for their roles in the atrocities
carried out against Rohingya Muslims. They included Gen. Min Aung Hlaing,
the army chief who took control on Jan. 31 after the party supporting the military
lost a critical election.
The Trump administration also
penalized three of his highest-ranking generals and barred their immediate
family members from entering the United States. Mike Pompeo, the secretary of
state at the time, declared that “the United States is the first government to
publicly take action with respect to the most senior leadership of the Burmese
military.”
The problem is made more complex by
the fact that Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, a
Nobel Peace Prize laureate from her days as a dissident, defended the
military’s actions against the Rohingya ethnic minority and denied that the
atrocities, including murder, rape and arson, amounted to genocide. The
military forced more than 700,000 Rohingya to flee across the border into
Bangladesh, where they live in squalid refugee camps.
For Mr. Biden, the response to the
Myanmar coup is a test of his declaration that American foreign policy will
emphasize American values, from democratization to human rights. The
president’s emphasis on the need to call out, and punish, those who undermine
free elections has a rarely spoken subtext — his own effort to show that the
United States overcame Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential
election.
But there is another test underway:
whether Mr. Biden can use the events in Myanmar as an early test of his ability
to work with China while also competing with Beijing for economic and military
power in the Pacific.
Kishore Mahbubani, a longtime
Singaporean diplomat, wrote in The South Morning China Post that the coup
“could quietly jump-start discreet geopolitical cooperation between Beijing and
the new Biden administration,” because China would not want to see Southeast
Asian nations divided on whether to side with the military or with Ms. Aung San
Suu Kyi.
An isolated Myanmar and a rift in
the region would create openings for other powers to divide nations against
Beijing, he argued.
“Fortunately, trade-offs among
great powers are an old game,” he wrote, “although to be honest, they are best
done under the table with little public scrutiny.”
