asia

Can Myanmar turn the corner in 2025 ?

Amitav Acharya , , , ,

Hopes of imminent defeat of regime may be optimistic but resistance is making gains

Amitav Acharya

Nikkei Asia, January 9, 2025,

When Myanmar’s military under Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing seized power on Feb. 1, 2021, abruptly ending the country’s decade-long democratic experiment, no one expected a quick resolution to the ensuing conflict and humanitarian disaster. But the fallout — including death, destruction and economic damage –has exceeded even the worst fears. Will 2025 be any different?

The regime has been fighting various armed resistance groups. These have included ethnic armed organizations, consisting of minority groups that have been fighting for autonomy since the country’s independence in 1948; the People’s Defense Forces (PDF) that were  et up in  opposition to the military takeover in 2021 under the banner of the rebel National Unity Government; and local defense forces (LDF) that were also established in 2021 by activists. In October 2023, there was a dramatic turn in the conflict when a coordinated offensive by three opposition armed groups, comprising the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army and the Arakan Army, launched an offensive campaign known as Operation 1027 after the date it started. The so-called Three Brotherhood Alliance inflicted significant losses on the military. This led to hopes that the stalemate on the battlefield had been broken, with the advantage shifting decisively to the armed opposition groups seeking to oust the regime.

While Myanmar is no stranger to internal strife, this is the first time that the Burmese military is fighting not only ethnic groups, but also armed pro- democracy groups among the Bamar majority in the country’s heartlands. The proliferation of resistance groups has also led to unprecedented levels of cooperation. The crisis monitoring group, Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), estimates that the PDF and LDF have captured some 80 towns and 200 military bases across Myanmar.

But hopes that the victories of the opposition would lead to a quick and total defeat of the military have proven too optimistic. Part of the reason is that those areas where the opposition scored its most sensational victories were particularly favorable to them, but they constituted only a small — if significant — part of the conflict areas. While the loss of some border posts might underscore the regime’s vulnerabilities, they did not prove decisive.

The opposition groups are also plagued by infighting. While they often display substantial cooperation, there are also plenty of military clashes. Ironically, victory on the ground has exacerbated tensions among the opposition units as they compete for territory and administrative control over areas seized from the military. ACLED recorded more than 300 cases of such armed clashes in 2024.

China has played a crucial role in limiting the regime’s losses. Closing border posts to Kachin and northern Shan state rebels, it has put pressure on them to strike a ceasefire with the regime. While China’s primary motive is to ensure security along its border with Myanmar, the result of its actions is to give the generals some breathing space.

The regime has also benefited from diplomatic intervention by Thailand, which stepped up efforts in late December to find a political settlement. Bangkok last year hosted the first of “informal consultations” between Myanmar’s military and representatives from neighboring countries: China, India, Bangladesh, Laos and Thailand. It has also been holding meetings with other ASEAN members on a ministerial level.

Thailand’s move is not surprising. Bangkok had already shown impatience with ASEAN’s muddled approach that had been marred by giving Laos, which just finished its one-year term as ASEAN chair and handed over to Malaysia, the exclusive prerogative in appointing ASEAN’s chief interlocutor with the Myanmar regime. In addition, the Thai military enjoys a special relationship with the Myanmar military.

Sharing a 2,400-kilometer border with Myanmar and hosting hundreds of thousands of Myanmar refugees in border regions and many more inside Thailand, Bangkok can claim to have a special interest in seeking a quick resolution of the Myanmar conflict.

Thailand played a similar role in ending the Cambodia conflict in the 1980s. But there are notable differences this time. While the earlier efforts involved all the warring Cambodian factions, the NUG, Myanmar’s government-in-exile, has not yet been invited to the Thai-led informal consultations. It is not clear if and when the NUG will participate in these talks.

Whatever its motive, the Thai initiative is viewed as providing a lifeline to Min Aung Hlaing, who has faced battlefield defeats, defections from his forces and internal dissension. His battered regime faced another major setback in late December, when the Arakan Army, a member of the Brotherhood Alliance, captured the headquarters of the military’s western military command center in Rakhine state, a humiliating defeat and the second such command to fall after the Alliance’s capture of the northeast command headquarters in Lashio in August 2024.

The regime promised elections soon after it seized power in 2021. But it has delayed conducting them, citing instability in parts of the country. China is applying pressure for them to be held. The election issue was understood to have featured in discussions when Min Aung Hlaing made his first visit to China in early November.

Myanmar’s foreign minister has reportedly suggested that officials from neighboring countries would be invited to observe elections when they take place. But there is much skepticism that the regime would hold free, fair and inclusive elections. The NUG almost certainly will not attempt to participate as it is now an outlawed group and might urge people to boycott the elections under conditions that it deems unfair.

The NUG has scrapped the 2008 constitution that allowed the military to occupy 25% of parliamentary seats. Drafting a new constitution to eliminate or reduce the military’s privileges will take time and may be politically impossible. There is always the danger that fighting could severely disrupt the electoral process unless all sides in the Myanmar conflict agree to any new arrangement.

The success of the Thai approach and a diplomatic solution will also depend on how other ASEAN members respond to it. Malaysia, Indonesia and Singaporehave shown a deep distrust of Myanmar’s regime. But this might change as ASEAN member states feel more desire to move on from Myanmar issues. Malaysia, as ASEAN chair in 2025, will have an especially critical role. While Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has been fiercely critical of the Naypyidaw regime, he once advocated for “constructive intervention” with Malaysia’s then- military rulers in the 1990s when he was Malaysia’s deputy prime minister. Western nations would reject any election that did not involve the NUG and the other major opposition parties. But even a rigged election could help the regime gain legitimacy as long as ASEAN members and other regional powers such as China and India accept the result.

The West, distracted by conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, might pass the buck to ASEAN to solve the Myanmar issue. Although ASEAN so far has failed to make much diplomatic headway in ending the conflict, the Thai-led initiative might give a new opening to ASEAN in addressing the Myanmar crisis. But time is running out as Myanmar’s economy is close to collapse. With half the country’s townships affected by the fighting and millions of people displaced, poverty levels have doubled since 2021. A string of natural disasters, including two major typhoons in 2023 and 2024, have delayed a recovery from the COVID pandemic.

According to the World Bank, Myanmar’s economy is expected to contract by 1%, in the fiscal year ending March 2025. With a third of the population in dire need of humanitarian assistance, it warned of severe long term consequences, including “the risk of a lost generation.”

The coming year could be a decisive one in Myanmar’s political situation and might determine whether an end to the fighting is possible or whether the country is condemned to permanent Balkanization.

(https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Can-Myanmar-turn-the-corner-in-2025)

A Brief History of the Indo-Pacific Idea and How to Make it Endure

Amitav Acharya , , , ,


Originally published as “Turning the idea of the Indo-Pacific into reality” https://eastasiaforum.org/2024/06/13/turning-the-idea-of-the-indo-pacific-into-reality/

China's Premier Li Qiang arrives at the 43rd Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in Jakarta, Indonesia, 6 September 2023. (Photos: Reuters/Mast Irham).

IN BRIEF

Regions are not permanent entities — their names and boundaries change. The concept of the Asian region has evolved over time due to strategic, economic and cultural drivers, leading to its classification into different concepts such as ‘Asia Pacific’, ‘East Asia’ and ‘Indo-Pacific’, shaped by economists, culturalists and strategists respectively. Most recently, the Indo-Pacific idea has emerged, with a more culturally and politically diverse range than East Asia. But the Indo-Pacific idea’s future depends on it becoming more inclusive, multilateral and non-hegemonic, moving towards a framework that allows regional benefit without dominance by any one country.

‘Asia’ was built by nationalists, the ‘Asia Pacific’ by economists, ‘East Asia’ by culturalists and the ‘Indo-Pacific’ by strategists. To endure, the Indo-Pacific architecture would have to become more inclusive, multilateral and non-hegemonic. The idea of ‘Asia’ in the modern era was anchored on pan-Asianism. Earlier, Western imperial powers, Britain in particular, had called the region ‘Far East’. But Asian leaders wondered: ‘far from where? east of what?’ and coopted Asianism as a new identity.

While Japanese imperialists used the term to exclude Western powers, India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, former Chinese president Sun Yat-sen and Japanese scholar Okakura Kakuzo promoted it as a cultural and anti-imperialist construct.

India’s efforts to lead pan-Asianism by convening two Asian Relations Conferences in 1947 and 1949 in New Delhi and establish a permanent political organisation — Asian Relations Organization — petered out after the 1962 China–India war.

Since then, the Asia Pacific idea has taken off. This occurred with the creation of a number of economic forums, such as the Pacific Basin Economic Council (1967), Pacific Trade and Development Conference (1968) and Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (1980). Economists, businesspeople and academic and think tank policy experts played the key roles in these forums. In 1989, governments stepped up by establishing APEC. In 1994, the ASEAN Regional Forum — the first Asia Pacific multilateral security group — was established in Bangkok. But neither APEC or the ASEAN Regional Forum were founded on shared culture and identity.

That changed with the 1997 Asian financial crisis, when the Asia Pacific idea was challenged by a turn towards East Asian regionalism. This was prompted in large part by resentment against the United States for its unwillingness to help crisis-hit Southeast Asia and its heavy-handed rejection of Japan’s Asian Monetary Fund initiative.

East Asian cooperation took on a culturalist undertone when analysts called it ‘East Asia minus the Caucasians’ — or for that matter, the Indians. The 2001 report of the East Asia Vision Group, set up by then South Korean president Kim Dae-jung, described East Asia as ‘a distinctive and crucial region’ and called for ‘fostering the identity of an East Asian community’ based on ‘shared challenges, common aspirations and a parallel destiny’. Interestingly, these were almost the exact words in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s idea of a ‘Community of Shared Destiny’.

Another East Asia group emerged in 1997, when Japan, China, South Korea and ASEAN set up ASEAN + 3 to foster financial cooperation, leading to the Chiang Mai Initiative in 2000 — a bilateral and multilateral currency swap system.

Yet when the East Asia Summit held its first meeting in Kuala Lumpur in 2005, India, Australia and New Zealand were allowed to join despite China’s objections, as Indonesia, Japan and Singapore sought to balance China with the participation of other powers. The United States and Russia joined the group in 2011. Here, security attempted to trump identity.

Unsurprisingly, the East Asia Summit was stymied by US–China rivalry. At this juncture, the Indo-Pacific idea came into vogue. The term was not new, a 2007 paper on India–Japan security cooperation by a retired Indian naval officer, Gurpreet Khurana, gave it contemporary policy prominence. But the term was initially sidelined in US policy, which under president Barack Obama was promoting ‘rebalancing’ or ‘pivoting’. But his successor president Donald Trump dumped the ‘pivot’ and embraced the Indo-Pacific. President Joe Biden has continued this embrace.

Regions are not named purely based on geography, but are often shaped by strategic, economic and cultural drivers. Thus regions are not permanent entities and their names and boundaries change. India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Pakistan — now considered South Asian states — were members of a group called the Conference of South East Asian Prime Ministers, which officially sponsored the 1955 Bandung Conference, along with Indonesia and Burma (now Myanmar) in the 1950s.

The Indo-Pacific is a particularly fragile idea. If it is not just two huge oceans, it is a region that encompasses more cultural diversity than Southeast Asia or East Asia but has economic links within the region are also weaker than those in the Asia Pacific or East Asia.

India is not well integrated into East Asia nor the trans-Pacific production networks that were crucial to the Asia Pacific idea. New Delhi is not an APEC member and pulled out of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership negotiations out of concern of competition with China as well as deep internal vested interests that resisted opening up the economy. India’s interest in the Indo-Pacific idea owes to security considerations, especially to counter China, geopolitical flattery and to achieve a geopolitical prominence that it cannot enjoy in the Asia Pacific or East Asia constructs.

While the Asia Pacific and East Asia are anchored on multilaterals — such as APEC, the ASEAN Regional Forum, the East Asia Summit — the Indo-Pacific rests on minilaterals, such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, promoted by the United States, is another minilateral. The Indo-Pacific idea lacks the support of a vibrant track II community, like the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council or the Council on Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific.

ASEAN has been relegated from being in the ‘driver’s seat’ in the Asia Pacific to the ‘passenger’s seat’ in the Indo-Pacific. The ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific is a limited response out to avoid being sidelined by the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue.

The Indo-Pacific suffers from an aspirational gap — between the US idea of ‘free’ and ‘open’, terms meant to isolate China and China’s ‘inclusive’ vision of Indonesia and the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific. This leads to vastly competing visions of the Indo-Pacific idea.

These considerations are cause for caution. The historical Indian Ocean region before the arrival of European imperial powers was a thriving commercial and cultural region that no one country dominated but everyone benefited from. The future of the Indo-Pacific idea could learn from that experience.

Amitav Acharya is a Distinguished Professor at American University, Washington DC, and co-author of Divergent Worlds: What the Ancient Mediterranean and Indian Ocean Can Tell Us About the Future of International Order with Manjeet Pardesi. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300214987/divergent-worlds/

https://doi.org/10.59425/eabc.1718272800