The fall of the Assad regime in Syria in late 2024 has excited the imaginations of the Myanmar resistance and its supporters. Could the criminal regime of Min Aung Hlaing suffer a similar rapid collapse? What would that collapse look like?
First of all, it is important first to define “fall.” Does it apply to the apparatus of the State Administration Council or the military as a whole? If the military remains in place, the fall of one junta would probably just result in another junta. Observers have speculated for some time that any replacement regime, possibly under the psychopathic Deputy Prime Minister Soe Win, could be even more ruthless.
So what will be the future role of the Myanmar military? Will it continue to exert dominance at the national level? How much of its order of battle can be maintained? Will it cordon off territory where it has been almost defeated, such as Rakhine State, Kachin, Northern Shan State, and many parts of the southeast, and concentrate on securing the country’s center? What would happen if large-scale mutinies and defections to the resistance occur? What if—and this is a nightmare scenario—the military splits into two or more factions that turn their weaponry on each other? An already beleaguered population could face even greater hardship and danger.
Any comparison to Syria is useful only in the sense that the key factors that appear to have been instrumental in Assad’s flight do not seem to apply to Myanmar. The geostrategic element for one is very different. The dynamics of the conflict are fundamentally different, and so is the political and military culture. That said, the generals do keep a bleary eye on international developments and may have been discomfited by Assad’s rapid ouster.
In 2015, ahead of nationwide elections, the then-ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) released a campaign ad that contrasted the chaos that followed the Arab Spring with the largely peaceful transition led by President Thein Sein, so the generals do follow global events to some extent. Min Aung Hlaing obviously disregarded that TV ad, sparking a Myanmar version of domestic chaos just five years later with his coup d’etat.
But the Syria comparison persists. The National Unity Government’s (NUG) acting President Duwa Lashi La said in a recent interview, “We aim to reach a tipping point in 2025, a similar situation to Syria when al-Assad fled the country. We have to strike a final blow against the SAC. However, international intervention is essential in this transitional period. With simultaneous and collaborative attempts between the international community and resistance forces against the SAC, we believe the SAC would be destroyed at once.” More important than this bluster is the real joint strategy of various ethnic armed organization (EAO) leaders who do not publicize what they are planning.
What Lashi La fails to mention is where international interventions and collaborative attempts would be sourced. China has so far played the most prominent role in Myanmar, in a mostly negative form. The West made it clear, very soon after the coup, that no assistance of the military kind would ever emerge. Why does the NUG still delude itself and its supporters and donors that this is even feasible? Why are there still calls for anti-aircraft capacity to be supplied when there has been a firm no all this time, and EAOs simply fundraise and buy the guns themselves? All these “tipping points” that have been hailed over the last three years—most of them battlefield victories that the NUG had at best a minor role in—have been all point and no tip.
Many of Myanmar’s political leaders have been criticized for being too optimistic and underplaying the real challenges of governance and cooperation after any victory. The scholar Nyi Nyi Kyaw recently wrote forcefully of the “leadership deficit” in the Spring Revolution. This deficiency will not be reversed the day after any triumph against the military. In fact, it could be exacerbated as bickering NUG officials jostle for position and the inevitable bitter debates about who stayed inside the country and who lived it up in the West further divide the elites. In other words, the key question here must be: are the NUG and other political and military forces ready to take over state control in case of a rapid regime collapse?
Fears of internecine conflict following regime collapse are very real. Myanmar has a long history of inter-group conflict. The EAOs that operate in many parts of the country have been largely disciplined in restraining an escalation of fratricide, especially in such complex battlescapes as Northern Shan State. But looking at dynamics in Chin State and the central region, there is growing violence among many revolutionary forces. So much of the violence in Sagaing, for example, is between “revolutionary villages” and pro-junta communities, a cycle that has degenerated into personal feuds fueled by retribution over reciprocal atrocities, arson, and contentious political loyalties. Competition over identity, resources, checkpoints, and population control will not evaporate if the junta collapses. The notion that there will be a “Burma Brigadoon” the day after regime collapse is dangerously fanciful.
What is happening inside the military?
There has always been a tendency to peer inside the opaque military elites and locate a “moderate” general. This has been a waste of time. A lesser war criminal is still a war criminal. Any movement of moderate senior officers, or a grassroots mobilization of foot soldiers who want an end to the conflict, exists for now in the realm of speculation. Most people, especially Western activists, simply do not understand the inner dynamics of the military.
The motivation of many resistance forces and their support bases is the total removal of the military from political life. Justice and accountability are also an ardent desire, as are straight-up revenge and retribution. That partly accounts for the military’s determination to hold out. Simply replacing Min Aung Hlaing with another general will not assuage many armed revolutionaries. And if it came at a time when a domestic civilian movement was sufficiently placed to generate a process of negotiation, it could potentially split the already divided opposition. Already, contentious debates over the “Ngwe Saung Statement” from a clandestine meeting of political actors based inside Myanmar have further riven the NUG and National Unity Consultative Committee (NUCC). And lurking in the shadows will be the inevitable Western peace peddlers plotting to scupper everything.
Some EAOs with their own long-term revolutionary agendas could seek some modus vivendi with any new regime that could emerge after a fall. This needs to be planned for. It does not necessarily mean that armed groups seeking their own accommodation with the central state would completely abandon existing support in training, logistics, and weapons. As the Arakan Army has shown since 2020, it can be a viable strategy to pause fighting, consolidate forces, and plan for the next stage of military operations. Other EAOs have similar experience.
Many communities, already exhausted by four years of destructive conflict, might welcome a respite. But others could equally be motivated by revenge and seek the complete extirpation of the military. There are so many different expectations of what a process of regime collapse would lead to. More violence to completely overthrow the military? Or a gradual process of placing the military under civilian control? But that leads to the question of who? The NUG? Or an alliance of EAOs? There is a lamentable lack of thinking about these scenarios and the possibility of even greater violence in the future.
Fall scenarios
The defeats inflicted on the military since the start of Operation 1027 in October 2023 and on several other battlefields have been unprecedented. But they have also revealed the military to be a functioning institution capable of withstanding setbacks that would have beaten many other armies by now. It has relied on heavy firepower, which has slowed but not stalled resistance advances. We have also seen a dramatic escalation in its use of air power, which illustrates its ability to adapt and innovate. It also shows that there is a “deep military state” of arms production, logistics, and above all the continued loyalty of many soldiers. Another factor is that the Myanmar military still enjoys considerable civilian support, an underexplored phenomenon.
As early as 2021, there were confident assertions that the military’s exsanguination was imminent. But it never happened. Necrometrics—counting casualties in the military—has misled many into thinking that nationwide defeat is imminent. In fact, most conflict data on the Myanmar civil war have been a distracting failure. There is no denying that multiple revolutionary forces have taken over nearly 90 towns by now, inflicting quite possibly tens of thousands of casualties since early 2021, routing hundreds of military institutions, and humiliating the military on a regular basis. But the military is undeniably holding on.
The NUG Ministry of Defense announced on Jan. 4 that the junta lost 14,093 personnel in action last year, with several thousand injured. This reverses the ratio of those killed and wounded in most other conflicts, where injuries outnumber deaths; and while the MOD did not outline its methodology, if the figures are even partly based on Khit Thit Media reporting, they should be subject to serious skepticism. Body counts alone simply do not determine military defeat, especially when the counting methodology is untrustworthy. The number of defections has also been overhyped, especially by Western commentators, and has clearly not been a crippling factor for the military.
Min Aung Hlaing’s political defeat would ideally entail his removal from power, either from resistance pressure, an assassination, overwhelming battlefield victory, an internal purge within the military, or an arranged transition to different generals. Yet he has avoided any of these potentialities for nearly four years. We should not discount his ability to hold onto power. It has been speculated since 2022 that the senior military leadership would turn on him over the loss of so much territory and personnel. But that has not happened: not after the fall of Lashio, the almost complete loss of Rakhine State, or the taking of most of Northern Shan State and Kachin. Much of the speculation of why his own institution has not turned on him is fogged in propaganda and wishful thinking.
International and domestic factors
Any fall will be precipitated by a multitude of elements, with a combination of long-term factors and short-term pressure points. These elements are likely to be contested and debated for many years. Any analytical ledger should have a majority domestic side, as military factors such as battlefield losses of territory and material, arms and ammunition production, defection, desertion, and capture of soldiers, as well as political pressure, internal regime dynamics, economic decline, and any potential for a resurgence of popular peaceful protests in urban areas could add pressure. It would be an exhaustive exercise to plot all the factors that could lead to regime collapse.
On the external side of the ledger, China’s role will be pivotal. It has alternated between covert assistance to resistance forces with support for the junta, all pursued to balance its own geostrategic and economic interests. The roles of Thailand, India, and Bangladesh will definitely be important too, but China will loom largest. The role of Western humanitarian assistance in helping people in need is also important, but Western diplomatic pressure has so far been negligible, and pro-ASEAN to boot, and therefore ineffectual. While sanctions have a role to play, they will almost certainly have a limited impact on any regime collapse or transformation. The junta maintains its war economy by manipulating the exchange rate, which has allowed it to ride through half-hearted Western measures.
International diplomatic pressure by traditional means, like UN Security Council Resolutions and statements, has applied scant pressure on the junta. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs may have taken umbrage at the stream of critical reports, mostly around human rights abuses, but the senior military leadership will barely have registered them. A plethora of international mediation efforts and potential transition plotting, from Finland, Switzerland, Norway, and the UN Special Envoy (and Lord knows who else) will invariably be judged a failure. So much effort, so many misdirected funds, and so little to show for it! And no accountability to the people of Myanmar, who deserve to be told what is being orchestrated behind their backs in their name.
International accountability measures are irrefutably important, but their practical efficacy in pressuring the regime will in all likelihood be negligible. Around the dramatic events unfolding in Syria there was also the announcement of the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) seeking an arrest warrant for Min Aung Hlaing. This is an important, if Pyrrhic, step, and like many international efforts a fleeting feelgood moment.
The NUG’s international diplomatic efforts have been largely symbolic and a failure by any realistic measure. They have not succeeded in galvanizing much international opinion, or in eliciting more practical support. The NUG exhausted too much capital on securing the credentials of formal sovereignty in the initial year or so after the coup, and then with a misguided campaign to prove that “revolutionary forces” control the majority of the country starting in 2022. It simply has not convinced many internationally and comes with flawed methodology, as analyst Han Ya convincingly argued in an article in 2024. Long overdue NUG reforms and redirection will likely have little impact on the ground. The exile community will be an important factor, given its pivotal role in fundraising, but where that funding works will need careful unpacking. For many EAOs, diaspora financing will likely be far less than their own domestic war economies.
Almost all the international oracles of imminent collapse have proved false. Any prediction of defeat or fall for the junta in 2025 should therefore be treated with caution. As in all conflicts, chance plays a major role. If the SAC does collapse, whether rapidly or gradually, it will likely come as a surprise to almost everyone. The crucial challenge for the anti-regime forces is to plan ahead for a range of potential eventualities, but with an approach firmly rooted in reality rather than jingoism. There is little evidence that much in the way of visioning any regime fall in 2025 is being pursued.
David Scott Mathieson is an independent analyst working on conflict, human rights, and humanitarian issues in Myanmar
