Jim Webb
As Myanmar’s military junta fails to regain control of the country, the Trump administration should move toward recognizing the determined opposition. As President Trump finalizes tariff agreements in the world’s most populous and vibrant region, his administration should pursue a historic opportunity to free the people of Myanmar from a repressive regime and to allow the country to take its deserved place in the international community. The administration’s position to date has been the opposite, revealing very little understanding of both Myanmar’s present situation and the potential impact if the United States leads the way toward ending the Southeast Asian country’s ruinous civil war.
An Asia Times article on June 18 entitled “Donald Trump’s Craven War on Myanmar” lamented that Trump “has declared war on the conflict-stricken country with a series of ‘reforms’ that will only benefit the ruling junta,” then criticized an odd presidential proclamation to “fully restrict and limit the entry (into the United States) of nationals from Burma.” In another puzzling turn, the White House demanded that Myanmar “release all unjustly detained prisoners, cease violence against civilians and engage in dialogue with all stakeholders to end the crisis.”
Such demands imply the administration’s belief that Myanmar’s situation over the past four years is simply a “crisis” initiated by a group of misbehaving political activists against an established government: that, naively, the “crisis” could be quelled by freeing prisoners who were “unjustly” detained, ending violence against carefully selected groups of civilians, and bringing together a plethora of “stakeholders,” most of whose unifying goal has consistently been to remove the very junta that took power at the end of a gun in the first place.
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