---

USAID suspension announces America’s withdrawal from Myanmar, giving China free hand to manipulate nation’s conflict to its advantage

US President Donald Trump’s move to freeze American foreign aid programs will impact civil war-wracked Myanmar, where multi-million-dollar USAID programs have supported health, rights, democracy, governance and independent media programs along the Thai-Myanmar border.

While the funding halt is part and parcel of the broad Trumpian assault on USAID, it has exposed the earlier limitations and now possible full end of US support for Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement and by association broad resistance to the now four-year-old coup-installed military regime.

To be sure, Washington’s commitment to Myanmar’s struggle against the junta that deposed a resoundingly elected government de facto led by Aung San Suu Kyi was in doubt before Donald Trump, with many in the resistance feeling the US could and should have done more in such an overt fight pitting democratic versus autocratic forces.    

With Trump’s apparent decisive withdrawal from the conflict, China will loom ever larger over Myanmar’s future. Indeed, China is the only outside power with the means, capacity and motivation to credibly intervene in Myanmar’s various armed conflicts and manipulate them to its strategic advantage.

Others have tried and failed. The ten-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), of which Myanmar is a member, made a feeble and ineffectual attempt to negotiate a truce in the civil wars under its so-called “five-point consensus”, which includes recommendations for talks between the junta and opposition.

ASEAN has, as ever, been hamstrung by its two cardinal principles—non-interference and consensus—which means the bloc has never solved a bilateral dispute between its members, let mediates an end to an armed conflict inside a member state, in its 58-year history.

Even so, Australia and the European Union have mainly outsourced handling Myanmar’s war to the dysfunctional and ineffectual regional bloc. New efforts to mediate the conflict under Malaysia’s 2025 rotational leadership, with particular help from Thailand, are likewise likely destined to go nowhere.

It all leaves an open field for China and its long-term designs for Myanmar. Despite the war, trade is still brisk across the two sides’ 2,185-kilometer border and will be brisker if multi-billion-dollar plans to upgrade Myanmar’s roads, railways and a major port under the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor, an offshoot of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, are finally realized.

Yet China plays a complicated double game in Myanmar. On the one hand, it provides arms to the officially neutral United Wa State Army (UWSA), the successor of the Communist Party of Burma that Beijing backed during the Cold War and now the nation’s largest armed militia that passes on Chinese arms to various anti-military armed groups.

At the same time, China has backed Myanmar’s often isolated and persistently abusive military regimes, not least after soldiers crushed a pro-democracy uprising in August-September 1988, an episode that still haunts the inflamed nation.

After a brief dalliance with the US and West in the 2010s, underwritten by a period of political openness and limited democratization, Myanmar’s generals have turned back to China since the 2021 coup that overthrew Suu Kyi and ushered in a new era of US and EU condemnation and sanctions.  

To be sure, China has no interest in the emergence of a strong, peaceful, democratic and federal Myanmar—the aim of most resistance armies.

As long as Myanmar is at war and weak, China can play its traditional carrot-and-stick approach, dangling trade and investment on the one hand and plausibly deniable indirect support for ethnic armies via the UWSA on the other.

That said, China does not want Myanmar’s conflict to spiral out of control, as serious instability in frontier areas could drive floods of refugees across its border and disrupt lucrative cross-border trade that provides a key outlet for China’s landlocked hinterlands.

Nor does China appreciate the Chinese-run scam centers that prey on Chinese nationals that have proliferated in Myanmar’s lawless border areas.

That explains why China recently showed its manipulative hand in northern Shan state by reining in the insurgent Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) and its ally, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), both of which halted their advances on junta-controlled territory at Beijing’s behest.

In early December, the MNDAA declared a truce with the Myanmar junta after ethnic Kokang chieftain Peng Daren traveled to China for what reports said was “medical treatment.” A resolution to the conflict would be sought “under Chinese government arbitration,” the MNDAA said on December 3.

The TNLA made a similarly-worded announcement in late November, saying that it would “always cooperate with China’s mediation efforts and continue to cooperate [to achieve] good results.”

The Arakan Army (AA), the third member of the so-called Brotherhood Alliance that has overrun and seized most of Rakhine state, announced on December 29 that it, like its allies in the north, is ready to negotiate with the military regime – though hostilities have continued apace since then. In fact, AA is seemingly on the verge of total victory in its home Rakhine state.

The AA listens to Beijing but is more independent than certain other armed groups. That’s because the AA was established and trained in 2009 under the tutelage of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), a largely Christian fighting force based in northern Kachin state that has well-hedged foreign relations, including with church groups in the US and ethnic Kachins in India, to balance out its reliance on China.

Most AA leaders are still based at the KIA’s Laiza headquarters, making it less dependent on China than its MNDAA and TNLA allies. Yet much of AA’s weaponry comes indirectly from the UWSA and its leaders must pass through Chinese territory when they travel from Laiza to the Wa headquarters at Panghsang, which they reportedly do regularly.

It is thus not surprising that the AA has so far refrained from fighting anywhere near Kyaukphyu in Rakhine state, where the Chinese have major interests in a deep sea port and oil and gas pipelines that run all the way to China’s southern Yunnan province.

While somewhat vulnerable to the instability of war, those interests also arguably give China a strategic advantage, as it is the only foreign power that could possibly mediate between the AA and the junta in Naypyitaw.

India isn’t as exposed as China to Myanmar’s instability but likewise has a keen interest in the conflict’s trajectory and outcomes.

One of India’s main interests is to deny ethnic Assamese, Manipuri and Naga rebels of cross-border sanctuaries in remote and mountainous northwestern Myanmar, from where they often launch raids into India and smuggle arms into its volatile northeastern region.

Recent unrest in Myanmar’s Sagaing region and Chin state, relatively sedate areas until the 2021 coup spawned angry new resistance groups, has recently spilled over into Manipur in northeastern India. 

Economically, India has sought to import oil, gas and hydropower from Myanmar to fuel its fast-growing economy – plans that have been complicated or put on hold by the war’s instability.

India also seeks, via its long-held “Act East” policy, to link with Southeast Asia’s vibrant markets via a preferably stable Myanmar. Yet even with these economic interests and security concerns, India is hardly in a position to challenge China’s pervasive influence over Myanmar.

There is now widespread, if not quixotic, speculation that Myanmar’s collective though disunited resistance forces could soon topple the junta regime after seizing unprecedented territory from its troops. Some have gone as far as to predict a sudden collapse scenario, as recently seen in Syria.  

But as China’s recent interventions in and control over Myanmar’s wars show, that won’t happen unless Beijing wants it to – and it’s not at all clear that it does.

And with the US now in full Trumpian retreat from the conflict, Myanmar’s various resistance forces fighting for the restoration of a democracy stolen by military forces will do so without America’s real or even symbolic support.

Bertil Lintner is a Thailand-based journalist, author and security analyst. 

This article was originally published on Asia Times.
Views in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect CGS policy.