This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
This year, looking back four years ago to the coup in 2021, we can see that Myanmar has come a long way, a troubled path of instability and violence. But at the end of the day, the people of Myanmar continue to resist, protest, and fight against the military junta.
Fundamentally, the military in Myanmar wrested control from a transition towards democracy that the vast majority of people in Myanmar wanted and hoped for…to this day. Today, what we're looking at is a fundamentally changed situation. The military controls less than half of the country. Mostly, the cities and the areas in the center of the country. While rebel groups control much of the periphery and contest the trade routes. They make life very difficult for the Junta and its officials. And they reject its rule across the entire country. At the same time, it's a complicated situation. Are we in the end game? It's hard to say right now. Every year, the resistance gains territory. They inflict losses on the junta. But the junta still has some advantages. And one serious hand left to play. And that's China.
Beijing has a variety of deep interest in Myanmar. For one, it's a bordering country. There are concerns about instability in Myanmar stemming over into China. Indeed, that is, triggered some of their interventions in the past, most recently in 2023. China was very upset about a pandemic of cyber scams originating from Myanmar that were targeting Chinese citizens and seizing billions of dollars, via fraudulent means. It's famously called pig butchering. But more deeply, China has billions of dollars of investments through the Belt and Road into Myanmar because it's a strategically located country in the Indo-Pacific. And thus, you know, China has a deep interest in making sure that its interests are protected. And right now, Beijing sees backing the junta as the way to go.
Myanmar is too often relegated to the back pages of the newspaper, but it shouldn't be so, especially as the United States looks to move towards the Indo-Pacific and counter China. Myanmar's a strategic country located in the center of geographically between South and Southeast Asia. It connects China to the Bay of Bengal. And it's a very large country, over 50 million people. It's somewhere where there's a lot of interest for the United States, somewhere that if the US wants to compete effectively in Southeast Asia, in the region, it's somewhere it should be paying more attention. looking ahead, the international community would do well to see the struggle in Myanmar on the similar terms as the struggle in Ukraine. This is a fight for democracy. This is a fight against the tyranny of the military government.
