The forgotten war that Trump has not touched

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But in Australia’s neighbourhood, there is a far longer and more deadly war raging, that neither Trump, Australia – nor anyone, really, outside the pleading United Nations and the ineffective engines of ASEAN – has wanted to touch. Myanmar. And the outlook for peace there is grim, perhaps more so than at any point in the past two years.

Since stealing power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in a February 2021 coup, the Myanmar military, known as the Tatmadaw, has been fighting an enlarged and disparate group of resistance forces, targeting civilians along the way.

Credible reports about the tactics used by Tatmadaw in its latest military atrocity sound disturbingly similar to those employed by terrorist group Hamas, which used paragliders in its October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

Last week, the Tatmadaw used at least one paraglider to bomb a candlelight vigil in the central Sagaing region, killing at least 20 people, including children.

In the past few days, exiled Myanmar media outlets – there is no free press under the reign of Senior General Min Aung Hlaing – have reported on three separate military attacks that have killed a total of eight children.

The dire situation has been largely invisible amid all the death in the Middle East and Ukraine. Getting reliable information from a nation denuded of services and closed off by a dictatorship is so difficult that even the most recent UN estimate of the civilian death toll – almost 7000, including more than 800 children – from Tatmadaw attacks since the 2021 coup is six months old.

In addition, according to the UN, the regime is holding more than 22,000 political prisoners. Among them, somewhere, is Suu Kyi.

When anti-junta forces made celebrated gains from October 27, 2023, there seemed to be a faint hope that the Tatmadaw, or at least Min Aung Hlaing, might fall.

But the military, backed by China and Russia, has reclaimed limited, though strategic, territory, while bolstering its fighting stocks through forced conscription and by luring impoverished young men, a cohort the junta has inadvertently enlarged through its own economic bumbling and recklessness.

The fighting is now at a fatiguing stalemate, says Morgan Michaels, from the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“There will still be changes in territory here or there. There could be major offensives by either side, and there’ll be ups and downs for either side. But the opposition is so fragmented at this point, and that’s getting worse,” he says.

He believes a political solution, which ASEAN has been incapable of engineering through its so-called Five-Point Consensus, is the only path to peace.

Can Trump play another peacemaker role?

“Possibly, to some extent,” Michaels says.

But probably not through tariff carrots, as used with the Thais and Cambodians. He says that “so long as the junta can buy the bombs and make the weapons that they need”, the economy has never mattered much.

Myanmar’s tariff rate of 40 per cent is among the highest in the world.

“I think that the US could provide support to a process for dialogue and de-escalation,” Michaels says. “They could provide technical support and funding to opposition groups.”

One of so many challenges is that not all opposition groups are the good guys. Some ethnic armed organisations have democratic aims. Others do not. Some have proven to be just as heinous as the Tatmadaw.

Still, the regime is so despised across Myanmar as to be loosely unifying, even if some groups are now “turning on each other”, Michaels says.

Trump has reason to have a closer look, and he may have already. Parts of northern Myanmar hold some of the world’s richest deposits of rare earths, which are required for building weaponry, smartphones, electric vehicles and just about every kind of technology that relies on microchips.

Much of Myanmar’s rare earths are processed in China, which is seeking to restrict supply to the United States.

Any Trump deal-making in northern Myanmar, however, would be fraught amid the geopolitics, warlords and decades of fighting that shape life and graft near the nation’s border with China.

The US State Department says its position on Myanmar has not changed. It “stands in solidarity” with the people of Myanmar and supports “efforts by pro-democracy groups and other stakeholders who seek to peacefully resolve” the conflict.

“We urge the military regime to cease its violence, release all unjustly detained prisoners, allow unhindered humanitarian access, and begin genuine dialogue with opposition groups,” a spokesperson says.

Myanmar has long been too hard. Too closed. Too obscure. For now, it remains that way.