Isolate Myanmar

The world tolerates dictators when they wield economic or military power. Myanmar has neither - a tyranny we can punish. A job for Macron?

It is astonishingly rare that the international community truly puts its foot down.

Despite convocations, communiques and condemnations, diplomacy seldom acts with moral force. Tyrants are tolerated. Atrocities elicit “grave concern.” The reasons are many: lack of consensus, indifference, realpolitik, and the idea that some regimes are too strategic, resource-rich or dangerous to confront.

Take Azerbaijan, for instance. Since its 2020 victory in Nagorno-Karabakh, it has blockaded ethnic Armenians and conducted a massive ethnic cleansing, and now demands a “corridor” through southern Armenia under a barely disguised threat of invasion. Another regime might be put on notice, considering that it is among the most repressive on earth, but Baku’s is for now indulged. It has oil wealth.

But what happens when those excuses don’t apply? What if a regime is monstrous and also geopolitically useless? Would that not perhaps be an instance where moral clarity might drive action? There is a test case, and it is Myanmar.

The generals who rule this Asian country of 55 million are running a collapsing state that produces little but refugees, meth, and misery, and they have again imprisoned Aung San Suu Kyi (pronounced “Awng Sahn Soo Chee”), the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. It is a corrupt and clueless despotism.

Suu Kyi is the daughter of General Aung San, the man who led Burma to independence and remains its most revered national hero. She was seen for decades as the living embodiment of the democratic promise he never got to fulfill, assassinated just months before then-Burma gained freedom in 1948. That symbolic inheritance gave her unmatched stature in the eyes of the Burmese people — and made her a lasting threat to the little men with guns.

Her record during a brief stint in power a few years ago was disappointing, partly due to an apparent desire to placate them. She defended the military against genocide charges and under her leadership journalists were imprisoned. But after her party won a landslide election in 2020, the military staged a coup, arrested her, and sentenced her to 33 years in prison through a cascade of closed-door, politically rigged trials — on charges ranging from corruption to illegal walkie-talkie possession. She is held in near-total isolation (current location unclear) and denied access to her family and lawyers in a grotesque abuse.

Aren’t you itching to teach the generals a lesson? As a warning to “generals” everywhere? Wouldn’t it feel good and be right? This is precisely the kind of crisis where the world can intervene on behalf of decency. Because Myanmar offers nothing we can’t live without, and everything we should reject.

Let’s look at exactly what’s going on, and outline an AQL proposal.