By David Nakamura
Washington Post
As Secretary of State Rex Tillerson welcomed officials
from 10 Southeast Asian nations this week, a Burmese representative handed him
a personalized letter.
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From Capitol Hill to
Rangoon, the question is whether the Trump administration will continue to
support de facto Burmese leader Aung Saan Suu Kyi and her country as the nation
transitions to democracy. (Maurizio Brambatti/European Pressphoto Agency)
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The author was Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize
winner and de facto leader of the nation’s civilian government, who wanted to
express her regret for being absent due to a scheduling conflict, U.S.
officials said.
The note represented rare direct communication between
Suu Kyi and the Trump administration. As President Trump has made a flurry of
calls to foreign leaders, he has yet to speak with Suu Kyi, who twice welcomed
Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, to her lakeside villa in Rangoon as a
powerful symbol of U.S. support for Burma’s slow, fitful transition from
authoritarian military rule to fledgling democracy.
The Burma project remains fraught — political reforms
have ebbed, and Suu Kyi has faced international criticism for failing to speak
out more forcefully against ethnic violence directed toward the Muslim
minority. And China continues to exert economic and political pressure on the
neighboring nation of 54 million, also known as Myanmar.
From Capitol Hill to Rangoon, the question is whether the
Trump administration will continue to nurture Burma’s transition or turn its
back at a crucial juncture.
“The country wants it. It gives them a sense of
confidence,” Derek Mitchell, who served as U.S. ambassador to Burma from 2012
to 2016, said of political support from Washington. “But the focus on things we
care about, such as values and democracy and human rights, they don’t feel that
with Trump. There’s a cost in losing all of that.”
Behind the scenes, Burma’s ambassador to Washington has
been pressing the White House for more attention from high-level officials, a
sign of Suu Kyi’s uncertainty about Trump’s public silence.
Trump aides emphasized that the president’s failure to
contact her is not intended as a slight. On Friday, national security adviser
H.R. McMaster hosted the Southeast Asian officials, including Burma’s
representative, at the White House. Trump aides said the president, who was
away at his estate in Bedminster, N.J., would have stopped by had he been in
town.
The questions over Trump’s approach to Burma come as the
administration is starting to formulate its broader policy stance toward
Southeast Asia and what role the countries there may play in the U.S. effort to
further isolate North Korea diplomatically and economically. Administration
officials pointed to several signals in recent days that were intended to
reassure the region that the White House would maintain a focus there even as
it scrapped the Obama administration’s “Asia rebalance” policy aimed at
deepening U.S. security and trade ties.
In Indonesia last month, Vice President Pence announced
Trump would attend a trio of security and economic summits in Vietnam and the
Philippines this fall.
Tillerson emphasized to the Southeast Asian officials
that the administration would make a “sustained commitment” to the region, said
W. Patrick Murphy, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for
Southeast Asia.
In a conference call with reporters, Murphy added that
the administration’s relationship with Burma would be “enduring.”
In a separate interview, a senior White House official
was more emphatic, emphasizing that Trump views Southeast Asia as “the most
exciting component” in an emerging administration strategy for the broader Asia
region.
This official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to
describe the president’s thinking, pointed to the combined population of more
than 600 million among the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations and their fast-growing economies as key reasons for sustained U.S.
engagement.
The Trump aide jokingly referred to the countries as the
“swing states of Asia.”
“This is a region that is fairly firmly rooted in a
liberal order,” the aide said. “Some of those countries have — I wouldn’t call
it a Jeffersonian democracy, but they’re facing in that direction. Burma is an
amazing success story that we want to build on.”
Yet the administration’s failure to produce a coherent
foreign policy strategy has alarmed members of Congress who fear Burma will be
neglected or mishandled as the White House focuses on containing North Korea’s
mounting nuclear weapons threat.
In his first meeting with Tillerson, Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told him, “Don’t forget about Burma,” according
to people familiar with the conversation.
But McConnell, who helped shepherd the U.S. economic
sanctions that prodded Burma’s military regime toward reforms, has been left
trying to piece together where the administration is headed from scant public
or private signals.
A Senate Republican leadership aide said that as the
administration attempts to coax Beijing to do more to change North Korea’s
behavior, it is unclear where Burma, whose opening to the West was once viewed
as a hedge against China’s economic and military muscle, fits in.
“It’s a work in progress,” the Senate aide said. “It’s
going to be slow going.”
Experts said Southeast Asian capitals remain wary of
Trump’s motives, even as they were encouraged by his commitment to attending
the regional summits.
“There’s a lot of concern over the way they’ve been
engaged,” said Ernest Z. Bower, a Southeast Asia analyst and business
consultant affiliated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Officials in the region view Trump as “very
transactional,” Bower added, and they fear Trump is wooing them solely to build
international support for his administration’s push to further isolate North
Korea.
Murphy, the State Department official, said the Southeast
Asian representatives proactively raised the issue of North Korea in their
meeting with Tillerson.
“We have heard from countries that they are taking steps,
looking at the size of North Korea’s diplomatic presence and activities and
commercial transactions,” Murphy said. “North Korea’s provocations threaten the
peace and prosperity of the entire region. . . . We think more can be done.”
But some experts said the risk is that the Trump
administration would reduce the emphasis on free speech and human rights as it
pursues security cooperation. For example, Trump invited President Rodrigo
Duterte of the Philippines, whose administration has overseen a ruthless extrajudicial
campaign that has killed thousands of suspected drug dealers, to visit the
White House.
In Burma, the military, which retains 25 percent of the
seats in parliament under the constitution, has long had ties to North Korea,
including buying arms from Pyongyang.
Erin Murphy, a former State Department official who
accompanied then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on a historic visit to
Burma in 2011, said the Trump administration could seek to boost ties with the
Burmese military as leverage against Pyongyang, an effort that could set back
democratic reforms if not handled carefully.
“If you want to put the screws on North Korea — and the
Trump administration has declared that a policy priority — you’d look at countries
that are partners,” she said. “And if you look at that list, you would see
Myanmar.”