In view of the recently forged Moscow-Washington Axis—and given the junta’s cordial relationship with Russia—the independent media and many democracy activists fear that there will be fundamental changes to the United States’ Myanmar policy. Until Donald Trump assumed power and moved into the White House in January, the United States was an outspoken critic of the junta, the State Administration Council (SAC), as well as a major supporter of Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement. Now, the Trump administration has terminated all such support, and that has caused a major crisis among the media outlets which depended on support from the United States. It has also had deadly consequences for refugees on the Thai border who are no longer getting the aid they once depended on.
The question is whether Trump will go a step further and begin “engaging” the SAC? The argument could be that isolating and condemning the SAC will only push the Myanmar military further into the clutches of China—which was a commonly heard point of view among some US policy makers during the rule of the previous juntas, the State Law and Order Restoration Council and its successor, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). Trump is also trying to promote himself as a “dealmaker” and did previously, although unsuccessfully, attempt to “engage” North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un, an international pariah like the SAC’s Min Aung Hlaing. And his “deal-making” with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s autocratic ruler, has not produced any result other than to embolden him to intensify his war against Ukraine.
What will happen next is pure speculation at this stage, but Myanmar’s pro-democracy advocates, independent journalists, and civil society workers must be prepared for what may come. Terminating support to them may be only the first step towards a new Myanmar policy based on strategic appeasement in return for the SAC’s distancing itself from China — and perhaps also economic advantages such as access to oil and gas. Promoting democracy and human rights have never been on Trump’s political agenda, which can be clearly seen in his sycophantic praise of Putin, and the total lack of respect he and his closest colleagues, time and again, have shown Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is fighting for the survival of his country.
In the early 2000s, the then junta, the SPDC, established close military relations with Russia and became a major buyer of Russian military hardware, a step that was originally taken to lessen the dependence on China. Since then, and especially since the 2021 coup in Naypyitaw, relations between the Myanmar military and Russia have grown even closer. The SAC has on several occasions expressed its support for Russia’s war against Ukraine, and on junta boss Min Aung Hlaing’s most recent visit to Moscow at the beginning of March, he met Putin and signed an agreement on construction of a small-scale nuclear plant in Myanmar. Reuters reported on March 5 that “Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear power corporation, said the plant would have a capacity of 100 megawatts with the possibility of trebling that capacity.” Putin noted, also according to Reuters, that “bilateral trade rose 40 per cent last year.”
Before that, in February, Myanmar and Russia signed a memorandum on investment cooperation in a special economic zone in Dawei, including construction of a port and an oil refinery. Russian diplomats and military representatives have attended the junta’s annual Armed Forces Day celebrations in Naypyitaw, which fall on March 27, and, in August 2022, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited Myanmar to discuss what the official news agency Tass called “security and economic issues.”
It is evident that Russia’s involvement in Myanmar cannot be explained solely in the context of making money. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the beginning of Boris Yeltsin’s chaotic rule in Russia, which then became a separate country, Moscow’s influence in Asia dwindled as India, a former close partner, began to diversify its defense relations and former Russian allies in the region, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, sought other foreign friends. Yeltsin’s successor, Putin, has endeavored to restore some of the old glory of the Soviet era, when it was a global superpower. He wants to “make Russia great again”—and Myanmar’s military has become Moscow’s closest and most trusted Asian ally. Seen in that context, it seems highly unlikely that Trump would support forces which want to see the end of military rule in Myanmar.
As for Trump, his relations with Russia are solid and go back to 1984 when, according to American investigative journalist and best-selling author Craig Unger, “a man named David Bogatin went into the newly opened Trump Tower and put down $6 million in cash. He met with Donald Trump and purchased five condos. According to FBI files, Bogatin was associated with the Russian mafia. As the owner of these condos, Bogatin was positioned to launder money through their sale.”
Trump made his first visit to Moscow in 1987 and then began to attract serious attention from the then Soviet security services. According to sources such as Unger and The Guardian’s foreign correspondent Luke Harding, Trump was seen as a useful potential intelligence asset, and he became, willingly or not, even more closely involved with Russian interests. Michael Hirsh, a columnist for Foreign Policy, wrote in its December 21, 2018, issue: “By the early 1990s, he [Trump] had burned through his portion of his father Fred’s fortune with a series of reckless business decisions. Two of his businesses had declared bankruptcy, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel in New York, and the money pit that was the Trump Shuttle went out of business in 1992.”
When no American bank would touch Trump, Hirsh wrote, “foreign money played a large role in reviving his fortunes, in particular investment by wealthy people from Russia and the former Soviet republics.” Among them were “Tevfik Arif, a Kazakhstan-born former Soviet official who drew on seemingly bottomless sources of money from the former Soviet republic; and Felix Sater, a Russian-born businessman who had pleaded guilty in the 1990s to a huge stock-fraud scheme involving the Russian mafia.” Arif and Sater ran the Bayrock Group, which rented offices two floors down from Trump’s in Trump Tower, and according to Hirsh, “with Bayrock’s help, Trump began his broad transformation from a builder to a brander.”
The friendship with the Russian elite has endured, and, when Trump met the Russian leader in Helsinki in July 2018, he was asked if he believed his own intelligence agencies or Putin when it came to the allegations of meddling in the 2016 presidential elections, which he won and Hillary Clinton lost. His reply was astonishing: “President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Thus, he trusted Putin more than America’s own federal agencies. According to the BBC: “In a strongly-worded statement, then House Speaker Paul Ryan said Mr Trump ‘must appreciate that Russia is not our ally…There is no moral equivalence between the United States and Russia, which remains hostile to our most basic values and ideals,’ he said, adding that there was ‘no question’ Moscow had interfered in the 2016 election.” Now, there is a new, Trump-appointed head of the FBI.
On Feb. 21, Politico, a well-respected American digital newspaper company, cataloged 29 instances where the Trump’s administration has acted and said precisely what Putin would want to hear. Trump began by placing a phone call to Putin, saying: “I want to thank President Putin for his time and effort with respect to this call… We both reflected on the Great History of our Nations, and the fact that we fought so successfully together in World War II.” After that call, Trump conceded to Putin’s wish for no NATO mission in Ukraine, insulting President Zelenskyy, excluding not only Ukraine but also the European Union (EU) from peace talks, and, instead, holding unconditional meetings in Saudi Arabia with Russian representatives. Trump has also claimed that Ukraine started the war—not that Russia lunched a full-scale invasion—and ditched support for democracy NGOs all over the world. Putin could not be more pleased; he now has an ally and a trusted friend inside the White House.
Then came a bombshell. On March 7, Trump surprised everybody by saying that he was considering imposing sanctions and tariffs on Russia unless Putin reached a ceasefire and peace deal with Ukraine. But John Bolton, who served as Trump’s security adviser from 2018 to 2019 and is now an outspoken critic of his policies, in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper dismissed those threats as “hollow”. And they came, hardly by coincidence, at a time when more information has emerged about Trump’s Russian connections. A couple of hours after Trump made those threats, he told reporters he was “finding it more difficult to deal with Ukraine”, and repeated that he trusted Putin.
After the humiliating and highly undiplomatic reception Zelenskyy received in the White House while meeting Trump and his lapdog JD Vance on Feb. 28, EU foreign policy chief and former Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas declared publicly that “today, it became clear that the free world needs a new leader. It’s up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge.” That should be evident to everyone interested in democracy and human rights, but can the EU really fill the shoes the US has left behind? And those are big shoes, given the dedication and generosity that various US governmental entities were known and respected for until Trump’s recent intervention. The EU does not have the same resources as the US, and whatever support the Europeans give goes mainly to support Ukraine’s fight for survival, an issue that is of utmost importance for Europe as a whole. In these days of global uncertainty, it is, however, certain that Myanmar’s pro-democracy forces are in for a rough time.
