The linchpin of Asia

NEW DELHI—Isolated and impoverished by decades of international sanctions, Burma (Myanmar) has emerged in recent months as both a beacon of hope and a potential new Asian flashpoint. With Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi freed from two decades of house arrest to campaign vigorously for a seat in parliament in the special election to be held today, Burma’s commitment to rejoining the international community appears to be genuine. But this opening has other consequences, most importantly setting the stage for a new “great game” of strategic competition.

No one should be surprised that Burma is a locus of interest for great powers. After all, it is larger than France and with a similar population size. In his recent book “Monsoon,” Robert Kaplan notes that in the Middle Ages three kingdoms lay between Thailand (then called Siam) and India. One was Myanmar, which means “that which is central.” Centuries later, Burma remains central, not only in matters of Asian security, but also for its vast and still mostly untapped natural wealth.

Burma’s strategic importance reflects, first and foremost, its geographic location between India, China, Thailand, and Southeast Asia. Ringed in the north by the southern ridges of the Himalayas, to the east by foothills of dense teak forests, and to the west and south by the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean, Burma’s geography has always shaped its history and politics.

In 1885, during an earlier era of great power competition in Asia, Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill’s father, impulsively annexed Burma to the British Raj in India following the Third Anglo-Burmese War. Thant Myint-U, a leading historian of contemporary Burma (and the son of former United Nations Secretary General U Thant), likened Churchill’s move to “throwing Burma off a cliff.”

Only in 1937, by a decree of the British viceroy, was Burma finally separated from British India. But the Japanese invasion five years later subjugated Burma and its people to colonial rule once again, with the conquering sweep of the Imperial Japanese Army checked only at Imphal, in India’s Manipur state.

The end of the British Empire in 1947 gave Burma its freedom, but did not end its travails. The assassination of Aung San (Suu Kyi’s father and the leader of Burma’s independence movement) destabilized the country, paving the way for the army to take over. Under its long-serving military junta, Burma shut itself off from the world, internalized its problems, and stagnated as the rest of Asia boomed. The world reciprocated, isolating Burma economically and diplomatically.

It was to this Burma that I journeyed from Imphal some 10 years ago, the first Indian foreign minister to travel overland to its neighbor since independence. India’s Border Roads Organization had recently completed the first all-weather road connecting the two countries since World War II. Journeying on this “road to fabled Mandalay,” I recorded in my diary, was a highlight of “one of the most memorable, satisfying, and happy foreign visits in my experience as foreign minister.”

China, too, has endeavored for centuries to bind Burma to itself, mostly in search of a southern route to India and the Indian Ocean. In recent decades, China took advantage of the international community’s shunning of Burma to secure its own strategic interests, building highways, railways, ports, and pipelines that connect southern and western China to the Indian Ocean.

But trade has not been China’s only motivation for investing so heavily in Burma. China also views Burma as vital to its quest for security, as well as to the regional expansion of Chinese power.

Reflecting its fears about the potential for Chinese encirclement, democratic India, after early hiccups of doubt, set aside its scruples about Burma’s military regime. India’s cultural, economical, social, and sometimes military ties with Burma—indeed, with the entire region—are older than China’s. So, for reasons of realpolitik, India expanded its activities and investments in Burma throughout the last two decades of the junta’s rule.

Sometimes the competition with China is direct. At the Shwe gas fields along the Burmese coast, estimated to be among the largest reserves in the world, two pipelines are to be constructed: one to China from the nearby port of Kyauk Phru, and the other to India from the port of Sittwe.

For Thant, this strategic competition is worrying. The “crossroads through Burma,” he argues, cannot “be a simple joining up of countries,” because the regions of “China and India that are being drawn together over Burma are among the most far-flung parts of the two giant states, regions of unparalleled ethnic and linguistic diversity … isolated upland societies that were, until recently, beyond the control of Delhi or Beijing.”

While China seeks strategic depth in Burma, India’s interests there are now reanimated by the international community’s opening to a country that appears to yearn for the same democratic freedoms that Indians possess. And, in Aung San Suu Kyi, who studied in New Delhi (as did her mother, Daw Khin Kyi, who was ambassador to India and Nepal in 1960), Burma possesses a charismatic moral leader who reminds Indians of their country’s own founders.

As a result, realpolitik and economic interest alone will no longer shape the great game playing out in Burma. Ideals and the quest for freedom will also play a critical role. Project Syndicate

Jaswant Singh, a former Indian finance minister, foreign minister, and defense minister, is the author of “Jinnah: India—Partition—Independence.”