The extraordinary arc of failure of Myanmar’s military has gone from coup and crack-down to the brink of regime crack-up.
When seizing power in February 2021, the military expected to consolidate power and crush resistance. Instead, the junta’s violence pushed popular opposition to become revolution and civil war. The military’s hold on Myanmar shrinks as it suffers a ‘succession of humiliating defeats’.
The spreading authority of rebel groups mean Myanmar’s government no longer controls most of the country’s international borders. The military dictatorship holds less than 50 percent of the country.
As the centre’s grasp on the country weakens, one possibility is that the centre collapses. The implosion prospect is about more than battlefield defeats but goes to the junta’s internal cohesion and vanishing legitimacy.
The junta head, Min Aung Hlaing, will be keeping a Caesar-like ‘et tu’ eye on his fellow generals. The daggers may not be plunged into his toga, but defeat makes any strongman disposable. This is not the coup Min promised. The shock and awe effects are on the military.
Southeast Asia has shifted from apprehension about what Myanmar’s junta would do to astonishment at its ebbing control.
In her new role as the United Nations special envoy to Myanmar, the former Australian foreign minister Julie Bishop must deal with a loathsome regime that is losing. And a weak government can be as dangerous, in different ways, as a government confident in its power.
The experience of the envoys that have gone before her shows Bishop has little immediate chance to get the military to reduce violence or to get a serious dialogue, as the veteran diplomat Scot Marciel observes:
The Myanmar military, in addition to being xenophobic, misogynistic, dishonest, and brutal, is by nature uncompromising and absolutely committed to maintaining political power. This is true even in the face of significant resistance gains, a worsening economy, and a severe humanitarian crisis. For its part, the broad resistance—and arguably the population at large—is dead-set on removing the military from power and unlikely to accept anything short of that.
Bishop shares with countries of the Association of South East Asian Nations an excruciating dilemma of diplomacy: does Myanmar’s regime still have the capacity to act as a normal government, to negotiate in good faith, to change policy if needed and even offer concessions to strong opponents? A failing government battered by military defeats is so focussed on the struggle it has little capacity for much else. The military’s draft of men between the ages of 23 and 31 is the action of a scrambling government—more grim desperation than resolute determination.
To maintain lines to the junta, Bishop and ASEAN must be relatively polite. For a blunt call on what the region sees unfolding, turn to ASEAN’s ‘in principle’ 11th member, Timor-Leste. Its president, Jose Ramos-Horta, no stranger to popular resistance and military struggle, judges: ‘This is the first time in the history of Myanmar when the military are not winning and will not win. They are losing.’
Ramos-Horta says a junta facing collapse must crawl to the negotiating table:
Efforts have to be intensified to mediate this conflict. Otherwise, it gets out of control. It spirals out of control. And then it will be far more difficult to bring back law and order and a solution. Thus, because the military is very, very weak, on the point of implosion, there is an incentive for them to talk. Someone has to bring all the parties together. No preconditions.
Ramos-Horta’s ‘implosion’ call is more description than prediction. The centre has already lost much. Balkanisation is no longer a possibility; it’s what has happened to Myanmar. The Oxford dictionary of politics describes balkanisation as ‘the division of a state into smaller territorial units. The term tends to imply a policy of “divide and rule”, whereby the strength of a united country is diluted by the creation of internal division.’ Myanmar’s balkanisation sees lots of divide and limited rule.
Even the junta is talking about the country being ‘split into various parts’. Myanmar’s reality today is revolution and balkanisation. The military cannot win; its task is not to lose. The dark forecast is for more years of war. The Crisis Group’s Richard Horsey sees a fragmented Myanmar becoming a confederation of autonomous ethnic zones:
Even in some Burman-majority regions, the idea of de facto self-rule is gaining momentum, and local communities, organizations, and armed resistance groups are starting to put the administrative building blocks in place. All this threatens to leave Myanmar as a collection of statelets, with a rump state at the centre.
Deep into the wars they willed, Myanmar’s junta and Russia’s Vladimir Putin vie for the dreadful honour of committing the worst strategic blunder of this decade. Both were revisionist efforts at resurrection: seeking to remake the Soviet empire or recover the military’s traditional control of Burmese life. Putin’s delusional megalomania and the junta’s delusional desperation were back-to-the future gambles that turned to war. Reaching for the old historical role instead turns into historic blunder.
The bloody prize of the greatest strategic disaster of the decade is the only achievement in sight for Myanmar’s military. Putin’s war does not yet threaten his hold on Russia. Myanmar’s junta has smashed the country as the regime staggers towards its own ruin.
