Ideas@TheCentre
America’s Burma thaw motivated by Southeast Asian strategy
In line with its strategic ‘pivot’ towards Southeast Asia, Washington is cautiously courting Burma’s repressive regime.
Once touted as a potential member of the ‘axis of evil,’ conflict-wracked and dirt poor Burma has spent much of the last 20 years carving a niche for itself as an international pariah. While it maintained a close friendship with China and cooperated with its Southeast Asian neighbours, the isolated country has long been shunned by Western countries horrified by its abysmal record on human rights.
Now Burma is showing promising – if tentative – signs of reform.
Washington’s guarded optimism about Burma’s recent progress is partly motivated by a genuine desire to see human rights in Burma improve. Obama is also keenly aware of the strategic need to increase America’s influence in what has effectively become a Chinese client state.
But his administration’s change in tack is also part of his strategy to re-embrace, and reassure, Southeast Asia.
In November 2011, Obama became the first American President to attend the East Asian Summit, a regional grouping hosted by Southeast Asian states and attended by other regional powers. America joined the forum at the invitation of several Southeast Asian leaders, who were increasingly becoming worried that China had become too powerful within the group.
Likewise US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been a vocal participant at several region-wide foreign ministers meetings, implicitly backing Southeast Asian states in their territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea.
America’s newfound enthusiasm for Southeast Asian talkshops – held in Indonesia in 2011 and Cambodia in 2012 – is designed to shore up Washington’s influence and reassure its allies that America remains the central power in the region.
Late last year Burma was anointed host of the meetings in 2014, leaving Washington with a conundrum: boycott and undo its good diplomatic work, or agree to work with the slowly changing Burmese regime.
By taking the latter route, America is sending a signal to Southeast Asia that its new commitment to multilateral forums will not wane.
In cautiously rebuilding relations with Burma, Washington is no doubt thinking about both China and human rights. But Obama also wants to reassure Southeast Asia that America takes seriously regional security dialogue, and will not relinquish its role as the region’s implicit security guarantor.
Jessica Brown is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
