America in Asia: Great game in the East

By C Raja Mohan

When Hillary Clinton travels to Myanmar this week, she will be the first American Secretary of State to visit the country in nearly half a century. Clinton’s very presence in Myanmar marks a big shift from the American policy of isolating the country during the last two decades and more.

The brutal crackdown by the military rulers on the pro-democracy movement led by Aung San Suu Kyi at the end of the 1980s saw much of the Western world shun Myanmar. As it enters a period of potentially historic internal change, Myanmar’s international isolation too is coming to an end.

That a top American diplomat is visiting Myanmar after a gap of five decades reminds us that long before Washington sought to isolate the country, the Myanmar ruling elite had turned its back on the world.

Myanmar’s rapidly changing internal context and external orientation will demand that India recast its own engagement with Myanmar. Let us consider two interconnected imperatives brought into sharp relief by the Clinton visit.

The first is the China question. Losing ground to Beijing was an important strategic consideration of New Delhi’s Myanmar policy since the early 1990s. Although Delhi’s economic and strategic effort never matched that of Beijing, the sense of an all-encompassing rivalry with China became one of the defining elements of India’s Myanmar policy.

Myanmar now wants to reduce its economic and political reliance on Beijing. Its decision to suspend work on the Myitsone hydel project — being built with Chinese assistance — and its outreach to Washington mark a definitive turn in Myanmar’s search for strategic autonomy.

America’s own quest for a new relationship with Myanmar has an unambiguous geopolitical dimension. Clinton’s trip to Myanmar is an integral element of America’s determination to retain its primacy in East Asia and contest China’s growing influence in the region.

This brings us to the second question of democratic change in Myanmar. Despite the strategic dimension of Clinton’s engagement with Myanmar, the issue is being framed very differently in Washington.

Powerful single-issue groups in Washington — focused on human rights, religious freedom, and non-proliferation — want to condition American engagement with Myanmar by measurable progress on these issues.

Having turned the domestic debate on Myanmar into some kind of a spiritual discourse on promotion of democracy, Washington finds itself certainly constrained. There is a reasonable prospect that the Obama administration might miss the big political moment at hand in Myanmar, thanks to the internal squabbling in Washington.

An ambiguous outcome from Clinton’s visit, however, will have a big effect on Myanmar’s own internal political debate and complicate the balance between conservatives and reformers in Naypyidaw, the Myanmar capital.

The most difficult moment for an authoritarian system is when it begins to reform, when deep cleavages appear within the ruling elite on the pace and direction of change. The attempts to end international isolation by a closed system has a flip side. It is vulnerable to intervention and subversion by external forces.

A year after President Barack Obama criticised India’s Myanmar policy in his address to the Indian Parliament, Delhi has reason to be pleased with Washington’s new thinking. But India must brace itself for a messy situation next door as the American bull walks into Myanmar’s China shop.

Clinton’s visit to Myanmar fuses two seemingly different questions about the country’s internal political evolution and its relationship with great powers. As the United States reconnects to Myanmar after half-a-century, China will not simply retreat.

Although it has been surprised by the turn of events in Myanmar, Beijing must be expected to leverage all instruments, including its capacity for political intervention within Myanmar, to retain its hard won influence in a country that is of great strategic significance to China.

Barely 48 hours before Clinton landed in Myanmar, Beijing was hosting the chief of Myanmar’s armed forces, General Min Aung Hlaing, and reaffirming its commitment to expand the strategic partnership with Naypyidaw.

Until now, India had a relatively simple political situation in Myanmar to deal with. As its important eastern neighbour embarks on the road to reform and becomes a theatre for geopolitical competition between Beijing and Washington, India will need a more energetic policy towards Myanmar.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should announce his plans to visit Naypyidaw early next year as part of an effort to shape an independent, credible and sustainable strategic engagement with Myanmar and its people.

This post was originally published in the Indian Express.

1 December 2011