Contemporary commentary on the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) is particularly viscous over its utter failure to solve the conflict in Myanmar. But as Scot Marciel reminds us in his important and engaging book, ASEAN is distinct from Southeast Asia. Marciel will be well known to many in Myanmar as the prominent and widely respected United States ambassador from 2016 to 2020, but also in several positions in the State Department involved in Myanmar policy for nearly 20 years.
Imperfect Partners is a major addition to our understanding of the complicated relationship between the US and Southeast Asia over several decades. Part memoir and multiple parts deft analysis of the delicate art of diplomacy in a highly diverse region of 10 countries, 600 million people, the world’s fifth-largest economy, a key strategic region for global trade in China’s backyard, and a mix of fledgling democracies, backsliding democratic autocracies, a shimmering city-state, a medieval theocratic kingdom, and a stone-age dictatorship, this book’s scope makes it hard to fathom why there isn’t more interest in Southeast Asia in Washington D.C.
Marciel calls himself an ‘aficionado’ of the region, because the word “suggests great interest without achieving full understanding.” It becomes evident early on in this long but unfailingly engaging narrative that Marciel has a very deep understanding of multiple issues and an almost pathological pursuit of practical solutions or compromises. Having served as ambassador to ASEAN (the US’s first), Indonesia and Myanmar, as well as senior positions in the Bureau of East Asia and the Pacific (EAP), he is eminently qualified to opine on Southeast Asia.
A Southeast Asia hand
Those interested in Myanmar are advised not to skip to the relevant chapters later on and neglect Marciel’s insights on the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia. The vexed partnership with Manila, a former US colony and home to some of its largest overseas military bases, has been more volatile than most in Southeast Asia: the “Philippine whiplash” as Marciel calls it. In his first foreign posting, the young diplomat was witness to the end days of the brutal Marcos dictatorship in 1986. The strongman clung to power until US support ended following major corruption scandals and political assassinations, or “salvaging’ as they call it. As Marciel writes, “Marcos did not invent crony capitalism. He simply took it to new heights… It was the Manila elite – with public support – that ousted him.”
The country faces multiple challenges of terrorism and insurgency, natural disasters, extreme disparity of wealth and living standards, exacerbated by the feudal hacienda system, strongmen governors no better than warlords such as the mass-murdering Ampatuans, endemic corruption and weak institutions. The Philippines has been dogged by so much poor leadership, from the boorish ineptitude of Joseph Estrada to the psychopath Rodrigo Duterte and his killing spree unleashed against drug users. And of course, the growing influence of China has bedevilled the bilateral US relationship, although tensions in the South China Sea have compelled Manila to draw closer to Washington.
The bilateral relationship with Thailand is equally undulating but for many different reasons. Despite over 200 years of official relations, the halcyon days of the friendship were limited to the 1960s, when Cold War agendas coalesced and the military relationship grew. Thailand sent 11,000 soldiers to Vietnam, and the Kingdom hosted approximately 50,000 American service personnel and 600 aircraft used to bomb Indochina. This assisted the Thai economy and development of infrastructure, but without any formal agreement. However, as the war neared its end, the relationship changed and Thailand, with justification, felt somewhat used and abandoned. “The alliance continued, but arguably Americans looked at it more fondly than the Thai did.”
The tolerance of military coups (totaling 19) became untenable after the Cold War, and so the American response to the coups of 2006 and 2014 flummoxed elites in Thailand who couldn’t understand why the US was so critical. This was partly a result of legal triggers to suspend aid after coups, but Thai pride was also wounded by criticism of democratic and human rights backsliding which was seen as unfair. Bangkok had a point: the US didn’t impose similar measures after the military coup d’etat in Egypt in 2013. There has been bickering for over a decade, which is more than understandable given Thailand’s political upheaval and the repression of the Prayut period.
The Thailand chapter concludes with some sound proposals to reset the relationship based on contemporary realities, not nostalgia and misperception. There are multiple initiatives, around regional issues especially, that could reinvigorate relations while also accommodating Thailand’s connections with China. Marciel concludes that the close relationship of the 1960s was an anomaly, and that a healthier bilateralism would take into account the multiple relationships that Thailand needs to maintain.
My favorite chapter is the first of two on normalizing relations with Vietnam from 1990 onwards. Bilateral contact had been frosty since 1975, with good reason, and major impediments persisted on prisoner of war/missing in action (POW/MIA) issues. But by 1993, Marciel was the first foreign service officer posted to Hanoi in many years, hosting an increasing number of high-level entities seeking a genuine rapprochement: Senator John McCain, Veterans of Foreign Wars groups, and the commanding officer of US Pacific Command. When the American trade embargo was finally lifted in February 1994, Marciel was informed by the German ambassador, not via State Department cable, “because they did not want me to talk with the press. My response is not printable.”
The ensuing chapter outlines in much detail the development of a more productive relationship based on trade and regional security issues, addressing the Agent Orange cleanup and Explosive Remnants of War (ERW), but with obvious and almost irreconcilable differences on human rights and religious freedoms. That the US and Vietnam have managed to build a new relationship over the past 30 years should encourage future Myanmar foreign policy leaders that rebuilding bilateral ties for the future, not the past, is never impossible. The chapter on Cambodia is equally instructive, although it remains a more vexatious partnership and one which may not improve even with the retirement of dictator Hun Sen, as Cambodia more than most countries in the region welcomes China’s embrace.
Indonesia, where Marciel served as ambassador from 2010 to 2013, is perhaps one of the most dramatic examples of regional regime change and democratic reform – although the recent election of the war criminal Prabowo Subianto as president is alarming. Indonesia has continued a general trajectory of reformism, certainly under outgoing President Jokowi, but with a bumpy ride. Yet the bilateral relationship has gradually improved, with the (third time lucky) visit of former president Barack Obama, US military assistance to Indonesian counterterrorism unit Detachment 88 (but not fully embracing the army), trade and the ubiquitous soft power of education opportunities for Indonesian students in the US and through the massive American Center in Jakarta, @america.
In his 30-plus year career, Marciel has seen, and been at the center of, momentous change.
The Myanmar miasma
Despite its relative strategic irrelevance to American interests, Myanmar has exercised an outsized importance in American foreign policy formulation: although fueled predominantly by raw emotion rather than insight. These two chapters are bleak reading, albeit with a hopeful middle part. Marciel’s initial impressions of the National League for Democracy (NLD) grandees on his first visit to Myanmar in 2005 were prescient: “The ‘Uncles’, as the NLD patrons were known, were courageous, but offered little hope and even less vision for what a future democratic Myanmar might look like.” The first Aung San Suu Kyi administration a decade later was little better.
Chapter Nine takes the reader through the long and vexed bilateral relationship, from the days of Myanmar as a cause célèbre in Washington DC without much substantial understanding. Debates on policy and sanctions often degenerated into raw emotion over reason. Having found myself on the opposing side of Marciel and the State Department in some of these discussions (while working for Human Rights Watch), it was a turbulent period before 2010. Unfortunately, many activists working on Myanmar have never let facts get in the way of a good story, and thus the State Department was often cast, unhelpfully, as an obstacle. While I am an unwavering proponent of kick-the-door-down human rights advocacy, it remains crucial to anchor these efforts within formal diplomatic approaches and ideally complimentary, not unhelpfully combative, coordination.
The former ambassador is refreshingly sanguine about the long history of crossed wires between the American political system and the Myanmar military establishment during this period: “One has to assume that the SPDC – not understanding Washington any more than we understood Nay Pyi Taw – saw it as a positive.” This didn’t improve much during the Thein Sein administration, but Marciel makes clear that US policymaking didn’t rush headlong lemming-like into an embrace of the Myanmar military, which had not yet emerged as the “across-the-board spoiler we would see in 2017-20.” Despite irrefutable evidence of the military continuing to perpetrate atrocities in conflict areas and renege on commitments to the peace process, the leadership under Senior General Min Aung Hlaing pursued a double-faced strategy in energetic international engagement, but the US embassy over the decade pursued a more cautious approach.
Marciel mercifully gives short shrift to sanctions on Myanmar. I fully agree with his assessment that the policy generated bitter debate with diminished returns. It also drained energy that could have been better expended on a deeper understanding of Myanmar: the society, the military, political culture, and demographic change. The US provided much-needed assistance and moral solidarity from the American Center in Yangon to civil society and human rights support and humanitarian assistance over many years. But the Washington debates on sanctions targeting and effectiveness were a distraction, and even fundamental information about Myanmar was in limited supply. In one meeting at the National Security Council (NSC) before 2010, a senior staffer admitted he’d prepared by taking his wife to see Rambo 4 the previous night: that might actually be more germane now than 15 years ago.
Chapter Ten is one of the most difficult dimensions of the book, as it deals with the mass atrocity against the Rohingya in 2016 and 2017. Marciel’s explanation of the complicated history and combative narratives is one of the most sensible summaries I’ve read. Almost as if he had to calmly outline the highly charged dynamics of Rakhine State to equally highly charged Washington mandarins and congressional masters repeatedly over the years, careful not to further excite incendiary emotions on the issue. American anger at Aung San Suu Kyi personally, the NLD and Myanmar collectively, and by association the US embassy, was at fever pitch. “Some Washington visitors, from both the (Trump) administration and Capitol Hill, castigated us for our apparently dispassionate analysis of the situation, which reflected both my failure to appreciate the need to show our anger and upset, and their difficulty in balancing emotion with a clear-eyed analysis of what actions might be most effective.”
I can empathize with Marciel and his colleagues. Based in Yangon during this time, I witnessed a never-ending stream of imperious visitors who had all the answers in just three short days in-country, with the obligatory one-hour atrocity tourism drive through an IDP camp outside of Sittwe, fueled by the latest overblown New York Times column by Nicholas Kristoff, and already prepping their ‘report from the field’ to impress colleagues in DC. There was little acknowledgment that all of this restless energy from the infuriated Western conscience made no difference to the Rohingya, or anyone else in Myanmar for that matter.
Defending State Counsellor Suu Kyi’s micromanaging leadership style, the ambassador thought this was an excusable trait, when there could have been more negative qualities to contend with. And there was certainly one major one. “Daw Suu’s disinterest in communications and messaging caught us more by surprise … she made almost no effort to use her considerable communications skills and popularity to go on national television and offer the country any kind of vision or even to explain what the government was trying to do. It was baffling … I was still trying to figure this out when I left Yangon four years later.” During the Rohingya crisis it was maddening, hampered by the nonsensical NLD dictum of requesting formal meetings two weeks ahead of time. By now, the sleep of reason in Suu Kyi’s inner circle had been well established, and the ambassador’s recollections of attempting to convince her and others in Naypyitaw of the immensity of the atrocities are painful to recall.
Marciel’s dealings with Senior General Min Aung Hlaing failed to develop into anything resembling constructive. As is obvious to all now, he is imbued with “Bamar chauvinism” and revealed an “ugly prejudice against the Rohingya.” Talks with Vice Senior General Soe Win met similar stonewalling from a man who refused to see that his privilege, expressed in violent militaristic nationalism, was an obvious obstacle to inclusive state-building. “I suggested that it was difficult for both of us – him as an ethnic Bamar man in Myanmar and me as a white male in America – to understand and appreciate the feelings of discrimination and prejudice that others in our country might have. I thought it was a good point. He absolutely did not get it.”
The author’s conclusions to the Myanmar sections are necessarily bleak, but consistent, calibrated by common sense and oiled by principle. “Generally … I have argued for dialogue and engagement even in the face of democratic backsliding. It is harder to make that argument in the case of the Myanmar military, partly because of their extreme brutality and tremendous unpopularity throughout the country, but also because they have shown little interest in dialogue.”
Living with ASEAN and China
The two concluding chapters survey the current state of ASEAN and China. While disputes over the South China Sea loom large, notably absent is a coherent approach to resolving them, particularly those concerning the four ASEAN claimant states against China. Marciel makes numerous prudent recommendations in these sections that could have some chance of resolving, or at the least fully engaging with, long-term regional issues. He acknowledges that ASEAN desperately needs stronger leadership, but must get the balance right. I agree with Ambassador Marcial that Surin Pitsuwan was undoubtedly the high point of the organization’s leadership, and his idea to convene a brain trust of retired state leaders and diplomats as roving problem-solvers is a sound answer to lackluster performances at conflict mitigation. As he astutely observes, looking at the groupings raft of treaties and values: “ASEAN has offered no ideas on how to turn these excellent principles into reality.”
But he is also unsparing about long-term American neglect of most states in Southeast Asia, especially during the Trump administration. The Biden presidency has been scarcely better, but this is undeniably a long-term, systematic trait on Washington’s part. The countries of Southeast Asia seethe at American neglect, and have done for decades. Washington simply doesn’t understand that turning up to ASEAN regional summits is a non-negotiable requirement for US senior leaders.
And to his credit, Marciel is too much the consummate professional to descend into unhelpful China-bashing. He is critical and principled at multiple points, as he should be, but his tone of balance is a healthy alternative to some shrill Sinophobia coming from the US.
Myanmar has always been that breezeblock tied around ASEAN’s ankle, from the 1990s up until the coup and beyond. It’s a wonder Myanmar hasn’t been expelled, given the 2007 violent crackdown on protests, the stonewalling after Cyclone Nargis, the maritime exodus of the Rohingya in 2015, to the mass ethnic cleansing two years later, and then a coup d’etat. There are also multiple salient lessons and suggestions in these final chapters for future Myanmar foreign policy formulation. More attention must be focused on a future free Myanmar engaging productively with its diverse regional neighbors, and this is a focus that the National Unity Government (NUG) and other actors should pursue immediately.
The book is immeasurably enlivened by the author’s multiple injections of lived adventures: eating pho in Hanoi in the early 1990s, drinking whiskey in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, a reckless excursion to the Malacañang Palace while it was being looted by thousands of Filipinos, and forcing the Indonesian defense minister to confirm that, yes, Marciel is a ‘terrible singer’ at karaoke, to the promise of US aid for agricultural development in southern Shan State that provided a hopeful counterpoint to the horrors of Rakhine, and relating the tenor of intense discussions in several countries over the years on various forms of engagement. Much diplomatic history can be dry, but Marciel’s approach is to bring foreign service and the endless charms of Southeast Asia to life, its positive and disappointing elements in balance. Imperfect Partners should be mandatory reading for Foreign Service trainees in the future: it would likely flood the assignments desk with requests for postings to Jakarta, Bangkok and other capitals.
Another quality illuminating the book is Marciel’s wicked, wry, and subversive sense of humor. Not just a wicked sense of humor ‘for a diplomat’; but a genuinely bemused approach to the world that only comes from dedicating yourself to finding practical ways to improve it. Lessons delivered cover not just the long and arduous relationships between Washington and the region, but also the value of persistence, innovation, and commitment to understanding, which should ideally be at the center of modern diplomacy, as it is at the heart of this valuable book.
David Scott Mathieson is an independent analyst working on conflict, humanitarian and human rights issues in Myanmar.
