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Man walks past a board with logos of 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing.
What We’re Watching: US Olympic boycott threat, Myanmar junta delays vote, US resumes aid to Palestinians
Will the US skip the 2022 Olympics? The Biden administration and its allies are reportedly discussing the possibility of a coordinated boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Although the State Department almost immediately tried to walk back its own previous statement, the move would be an act of protest over allegations of China's vast human rights abuses in Xinjiang province. Skipping the games is a big deal, symbolically at least. The last time the US did so was in 1980, when America boycotted the Summer Olympics in Moscow in response to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan a year before. But practically speaking, do boycotts have a real effect on anyone besides the athletes who miss a shot at gold? That's a thornier question. Regardless, there are many ways to define "boycott" — the US could — and likely would — do as little as simply keeping its top diplomats from attending. China, for its part, has threatened a "robust response" to any efforts to snub the Beijing games.
Myanmar junta digs in its heels: As widely feared by pro-democracy activists, Myanmar's ruling generals on Wednesday announced they may delay new elections until at least 2023. The extension of the post-coup state of emergency confirms that the regime is indeed content with killing protesters and stifling the opposition until it deems citizens are scared enough that a military-backed party will "win" when eventually it's time to go to the polls. So, what's the way forward for Myanmar? The generals have so far held steady in the face of mounting street protests, international sanctions, and even a potential rift with China over attacks on Chinese-owned businesses. Rumblings of an impending civil war are getting louder, but it's hard to imagine a ragtag army of dissidents and ethnic minority groups posing a serious threat to the well-armed and battle-hardened military. As long as the junta is willing to watch the country burn if necessary to stay in power, the generals are likely to keep — literally — calling the shots for a long time.
US resumes aid to Palestinians: In the latest reversal of the Trump administration's Middle East policy, President Biden is restarting US funding to the Palestinians. The Biden administration will dole out $235 million, the lion's share of which will go to UNRWA, which provides financial and humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Biden has also signaled his intention to give even more money to Palestinian leadership, and possibly reopen the Palestinian diplomatic mission shuttered during the Trump presidency. The current US administration aims to foster goodwill amongst the Palestinians, who felt shunned by President Trump's Mideast peace proposal, broadly seen as dismissing their interests and favoring Israel. Washington also hopes to restart peace negotiations between the two sides in the medium term, yet any engagement will need to wait until the dust settles on Israel's political stalemate and the Palestinians vote in their own polls in May and July. The situation is very much in flux.With its interests in flames, what will China do in Myanmar?
Over the weekend, protesters demanding the return of democracy in Myanmar burned down and looted Chinese-owned businesses in Yangon, the country's main city. China's embassy then asked the junta to restore order. In a few hours, the generals obliged: soldiers killed scores of demonstrators, and martial law was declared.
The anti-China riots add a fresh international dimension to Myanmar's political crisis. The protesters are angry not only at the military rulers, but increasingly at China's thinly veiled support for the junta. This backlash is a big test for Beijing. As a rising global power and regional heavyweight, is China going to simply look the other way as its interests in Myanmar literally go up in flames?
China's stakes in Myanmar. China has always been upfront on what it wants from its southern neighbor: a piece of its natural resources and waterways. Beijing wants the generals to restart long-shelved plans for a controversial hydropower dam to generate electricity for China, which locals fear will damage the environment and force thousands to relocate. Beijing is likewise hungry for Myanmar's rare earth metals (production has dropped significantly since the coup, which probably influenced Beijing's recent threat to stop exporting rare earths to the US.)
China also needs Myanmar to continue building a natural gas pipeline linking China's Yunnan province to the Kyaukpyu deepwater port in Myanmar's Rakhine state to gain access to the Indian Ocean, where China is competing for maritime supremacy with India.
Beijing in the hot seat. Since the February 1 coup, Chinese interests have come under fire in Myanmar. A lot of the buzz is on social media, which has been rife with rumors that China — the new regime's most prominent international ally — helped the military seize power. Pro-democracy activists also suspect Chinese cybersecurity experts are helping the junta develop internet censorship technology similar to China's own Great Firewall.
Despite its long history of shady activity in the country, China has dismissed such claims as fake news, and pushed back against protesters' calls to boycott Chinese products and sabotage the Kyaukpyu pipeline. But Beijing, as always, is worried about instability on its border, and frustrated with the generals' failure to end the post-coup unrest.
What will China do? China is in a bind on how to respond. On the one hand, it could just wait for the protests — and attacks on Chinese-owned businesses — to subside following a sustained bloody crackdown by the junta. That's precisely what China did following the 2014 and 2019 pro-democracy rallies in Hong Kong, where Beijing now rules with an iron fist.
On the other hand, if the rising anti-China sentiment turns more violent, China could feel compelled to do something a bit more radical. Direct military intervention, however, would be anathema to China's longstanding policy of non-interference in domestic political affairs.
Non-interference vs Wolf Warrior. Right now, the Hong Kong scenario is more likely. One reason is that China is deeply concerned about its own reputation as a powerful yet benevolent Asian superpower, the main raison d'être behind its COVID vaccine diplomacy. The other is that China has no fond memories of the last time it deployed combat forces abroad. (That was in 1978, when China lost a brief war with Vietnam.)
But if Chinese businesses continue being singled out, Beijing will be wary of looking weak in the face of rising anti-China sentiment on its border. Further unrest could force Beijing's hand and unleash the "Wolf Warrior" — a new, more aggressive brand of Chinese diplomacy that draws it name from a blockbuster film depicting an extreme version of China using military muscle to defend national interests in Africa.Protests against Myanmar's military coup in Yangon.
A game of chicken in Myanmar
Defying a threat by the ruling generals to use lethal force to disperse them, anti-coup protesters again turned up across Myanmar on Monday to demand a return to democracy. The country's political crisis remains in flux since the military siezed power three weeks ago: a nationwide strike has ground the economy to a halt, while hundreds of demonstrators have been arrested, and at least four have been shot dead. But — to the surprise of many observers — the junta has yet to crack down as hard as it did against unruly students in 1988 and rebellious Buddhist monks in 2007.
It's a chicken-and-egg scenario: as the military shows more (unprecedented) restraint, its opponents feel emboldened to flock to the streets. Why is this happening, and what does it mean? Part of the answer lies in how Myanmar itself has changed over the past decade.
The people got a taste of democracy. Unlike in previous crises, most protesters are not calling for an abrupt end to a decades-long military regime but rather want Myanmar to go back to the pre-coup status quo on January 31 — especially young people.
Myanmar has one of the youngest populations in Southeast Asia, with a median age of 28.2, and five million voted for the first time in the November election. For the youth, democracy is not a nice-to-have but the only possible system, as well as the only one they know.
Like their peers calling out the decaying military-royal stranglehold on power in neighboring Thailand, young people in Myanmar are unwilling to wait for the junta to deliver on its promise of holding a fresh election in a year. They are angry at the generals for taking away their basic freedoms, and are not as afraid as their parents of the junta's goons because most have only faint memories of iron-fisted military rule.
The junta can't party like it's 1988 (or 2007). When the military crushed the last two major uprisings, it did so under the cover of news blackouts. That's impossible in 2021 because of the World Wide Web, which pre-democratic Myanmar was barely connected to.
Short of taking the entire country offline, the generals have so far imposed a nighttime "internet curfew" and blocked access to social media. However, tech-savvy protesters have been able to circumvent these restrictions, allowing them to continue to mobilize on the streets and broadcast their actions. A brutal repression of the protests would likely be live-streamed on Facebook, a nightmare scenario for the junta.
The military's decision to block Facebook is arguably the most unpopular thing the junta has done since it seized power in a country where for about half the population, the platform "is the internet" and the preferred way to communicate with others. Facebook has responded by unfriending the generals, who risk even more public discontent if the ban continues much longer.
The economy loves freedom. When Myanmar started embracing democracy in the 2010s, it also opened up the economy to foreign investment and, more importantly, to the private sector. A nationwide strike would have been unheard of just ten years ago, when most businesses were directly or indirectly controlled by the state.
Now, private sector employees cannot be forced to go to work by the state, nor risk getting fired for attending an anti-government rally. If the protests continue, striking workers could do severe damage to an economy that was already struggling before the coup due to COVID.
Moreover, prolonged economic disruption will sooner or later hit the junta where it hurts the most — its pocket. In 2011, the military used an opaque privatization law to acquire hundreds of thousands of former state-run enterprises in key sectors like beer, tobacco, mining, tourism, real estate, and telecommunications. If the economy feels more pain, the generals will be imperiling their own business empire.
What happens next? Whether Myanmar's post-coup crisis will be resolved peacefully or not remains to be seen, but it's clear that the generals overplayed their hand. The country has changed — and they missed it.What We're Watching: Myanmar protests test the generals, Haiti's political chaos, Netanyahu in the dock
Myanmar protests test junta's patience: It didn't take long for the Myanmar military junta to get an earful from the streets. Since staging a coup last week, in which they detained civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, they have been met with a growing protest movement in the capital, Naypyidaw, and other cities across the country. Flying the flag of Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party and carrying images of Lord Buddha, the protesters say they are demanding an end to "dictatorship." The generals, for their part, have so far showed restraint, deploying water cannons against the protesters this time, rather than shooting them dead, as they ended up doing in 1988 and again in 2007. But the military has warned ominously that it won't tolerate actions that undermine "state stability, public safety, and the rule of law." With the world watching, will the generals change tack and crush the protests after all — in the end, who's to stop them?
Haiti's term limit turmoil: Haiti's embattled President Jovenel Moïse said Sunday that his government had arrested more than 20 people whom he accused of plotting to overthrow his government. For months, Haiti has been wracked by deepening political turmoil and violence over what should be a simple question: when does the president's term end? Moïse's opponents say that his five-year term was due to expire on Sunday, and they've called for a two-year transition government. But the president argues that because an interim government ran the country during the first year of his term, he actually has until February 2022 to lead. Top justices in Haiti as well as human rights advocates have sided with the opposition, but the Biden administration, as well as the Organization for American States and the United Nations, are all in Moïse's corner, for now. With no obvious way out of the deadlock at the moment, Haiti — the Western Hemisphere's poorest country — is on the brink of a potentially disastrous explosion of political violence.
Israel's Netanyahu in the dock: Just six weeks out from Israel's fourth general elections in the past two years, Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu is back in court facing a host of corruption charges. Bibi, Israel's longest serving PM, has pleaded not-guilty to charges that he directed favorable government policy towards prominent media and business figures in exchange for gifts and positive media coverage. Bibi says the whole thing is a political "witch hunt," but if convicted, the forever-leader could face several years behind bars. A verdict is not expected to be handed down for months — or even years (Netanyahu's camp has already called for further delays to the proceedings until after the March 23 election) -- but the political impact of the case so close to the polls is worth watching. The March vote will largely be a referendum on Bibi, but will negative fallout from the trial really hurt him? Or is it the case that, as some observers say, most Israelis decided long ago whether they are "for or against Bibi"?
Protest against the coup in Myanmar in front of the country's embassy in Bangkok, Thailand.
Myanmar generals turn back the clock
After weeks of saber-rattling, Myanmar's military took power on Monday. Aung San Suu Kyi and the entire leadership of her incumbent National League for Democracy party are now under arrest. The coup ends a five-year democratic experiment in a country where generals are used to calling the shots.
How did we get here, why was democracy so short-lived, and what happens next?
Myanmar has a long history of military rule since it became independent from the UK in 1948. The most recent previous coup was in 1990, when the NLD won a landslide election victory but the generals refused to accept the results and placed Suu Kyi under long-term house arrest. Suu Kyi's peaceful struggle for democracy won her the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, and cast a global spotlight on this otherwise obscure Southeast Asian country until she was freed in 2010.
With its popularity in a death spiral thanks to an economic collapse stemming from half a century of international isolation, the junta (grudgingly) agreed to hold democratic elections in 2015. But there was a catch: the constitution barred Suu Kyi from being president or prime minister, and the military would retain a quarter of all seats in parliament and top security portfolios in the cabinet with no civilian oversight.
After the NLD swept the polls in 2015, Myanmar welcomed a surge of international development aid and investment. This massive influx of foreign cash helped Suu Kyi, as the de facto leader of the nation, navigate an often-testy relationship with the military, which rejected all attempts to curb its power by reforming the constitution.
Four years later, Suu Kyi shocked Western donors by defending the generals, indicted for genocide by the International Criminal Court over their brutal 2017 military campaign against the Muslim Rohingya people. In what was described by the UN as "textbook ethnic cleansing," the army — egged on by radical Buddhist monks on Facebook — burned entire villages and forced more than 700,000 Rohingya to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. In response, foreign investment evaporated, and Suu Kyi's international reputation was forever tarnished.
But as Suu Kyi's star faded in the West, it became brighter at home, where a majority of the population has long viewed the Rohingya as invaders. Riding on her popularity, the NLD won big in last November's election, intensifying tensions between the civilian government and the army.
When the results showed a military-backed opposition party won a dismal 7 percent of the vote, the generals cried election fraud, threatening to suspend the constitution if their claims were not investigated. More importantly, their showing was so poor that the military feared it was losing its grip on power — especially the man on top.
The coup reverses the generals' declining influence in one fell swoop. Myanmar's new leader, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, was set to retire this year — now he's guaranteed to remain in charge at least until 2022, and perhaps (much) longer.
The junta has promised elections in one year, but will likely find some reason to delay. Even if the vote goes forward, the military will not accept an outcome short of victory for its allies. Meanwhile, the economy will be crippled by fresh international sanctions, and Myanmar itself will again become the pariah it was just over a decade ago.
Of Myanmar's few friends, China is the most important as its only reliable ally and top trading partner. While the new regime is widely expected to favor closer ties with Beijing, China is happy to oblige as long as Naypidaw follows through on the construction of a billion-dollar oil and gas pipeline for China to gain access to the Indian Ocean via a new port... located in Rakhine state, where most Rohingya live.
But it'll be a tough balancing act for the generals, who need China's cash and diplomatic support to offset Western sanctions but are wary of Myanmar (again) becoming a Chinese client state.