Strategizing about Burma

Via Eddie, a Ralph Peters essay I can finally agree with:

China regards Myanmar as a satellite. Beijing wishes it could just grab the country the way it seized Tibet, but believes the geostrategic cost would be too high. So it supports the junta as the next-best option and develops Myanmar as an economic colony.

Why does China see Myanmar as absolutely critical to its future? After all, it's a bitterly poor country of 55 million, where time didn't just stand still for the last half-century - it actually went backward. And neither the ethnic Burmans (half the population) nor the up-country tribes like the Chinese one bit.

The answers are straightforward:

* Myanmar offers 1,200 miles of coastline on the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea, bordering the Indian Ocean. And those waters are a strategic lifeline for China, carrying trade westward and bringing back desperately needed oil from the Middle East and Africa.

China knows that we own the Pacific militarily, but hopes that - in the event of a Sino-U.S. crisis - it could face us down in the Indian Ocean, its backdoor to the world. When I was in Myanmar 11 years ago, the Chinese were already modernizing docks and eyeing the development of new harbors.

* Myanmar offers the promise of its own oil and gas deposits, while its magnificent hardwood forests are being clear-cut to feed China's industrial appetites. (The ecological devastation is stunning.) And Beijing sets the terms of trade.

* The advent of a pro-Western government in Myanmar would mean that, in wartime, China would have no direct access to the Greater Indian Ocean. The equivalent would be for the United States to lose access to the Caribbean - or worse.

China wants to minimize the ugly headlines from Myanmar, but it's not going to pull its support for the junta just to keep the U.S. water-polo team in the Olympics.

One can see China eventually acting to clamp down on its patron if the security threats from Burmese drug production, refugees, and Burma's unstable border grow too severe. But in the short term, action from any of the regime's enablers in Beijing (and to a lesser extent, Moscow, New Delhi, and Bangkok) seems unlikely. Yet China has to understand that if it hopes to be taken seriously as a responsible great power, it cannot keep propping up genocidal dictators--either in Burma or Sudan. Perhaps, if China's basic military and economic interests are assured by both internal pro-democracy forces and Western powers (as well as the credit for a peaceful Burmese transformation), there might be a chance of them grudgingly moving to pressure SLORC. As to what would compel them to do so, I'd confess that East Asian security specialists like Eddie and Robot Economist (before State Dept ordered him to ice his blog) would know better than I do.

What I do know is that in the last ten years, China, Russia, and developing nations in Asia and Africa have formed an effective deterrent to UN intervention in human rights. Part of it is counter-balancing against American power, which has become linked in the public eye with humanitarian intervention. There's also the long memory of colonial era violation of national sovereignty. But it's mainly self-serving cover for domestic human rights violations. Finding a way to convince them to stand aside is the great challenge for human rights activists of the future.