Author: pstaniland

Amusing little paragraph from a summary of the September 22, 1960 meeting between Eisenhower, Nepali PM BP Koirala, and the Nepali ambassador to the US:

“The Prime Minister said that Nepal was an interesting country and he hoped it would be possible for the President to visit Nepal someday. The President replied that so far as hunting was concerned, he did not like to kill anything larger than birds. The Nepalese Ambassador intervened at this point to say: “But we have birds, too!” The Prime Minister implied that there was more than hunting to be done in Nepal.”

I somehow missed it, but in late April, Alex Thurston (of Cincinnati and Sahelblog) wrote a very thoughtful, careful review of Ordering Violence in e-IR. I thought it was excellent and am grateful for his engagement. Thurston got what I was trying to do, while also dissecting areas where the book falls short (primary sources, for instance – the project got so spread out and wildly sprawling that I ended up relying heavily on secondary accounts to try to even thinly cover the terrain). I am also always fascinated by how to think about political violence in sub-Saharan Africa; there are quite wildly divergent approaches to studying the region, some of which seem quite familiar, and others quite alien to my area of focus and worldview. Check it out.

This is a very valuable overview of Gwadar’s development as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Some excerpts:

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Gwadar processes almost no cargo that could generate income for Pakistan — or, for that matter, for the Chinese operating company. And it’s no wonder: Gwadar is operating at very limited capacity. The port’s three berths, where loading and unloading takes place, can handle 137,000 standard 20-foot shipping containers per year. In contrast, Karachi and its 33 berths can handle the equivalent of 4.2 million 20-foot containers per year.

While ports like Kribi or Lekki are comparatively small, they outshine Gwadar, the supposed new centerpiece of trade for South and Central Asia. . . .

Mardell and Khalid said that behind the scenes, both Pakistan and China have become disillusioned with the project.

“Jobs promises were not met. Industrial promises were not met. The business opportunities for Pakistanis were not met,” said Khalid. “They [China] promised nine special economic zones. Not one is fully functional to date.” . . ..

Still, countries like Pakistan are now stuck paying back large amounts of debt to Chinese lenders. “Pakistan has to pay billions of dollars back in loans, because of reckless investments in the name of CPEC,” said Khalid.”

For readers interested in Indian foreign policy, there is a growing array of valuable books. I recently read former Indian foreign secretary (and current IR professor!) Shivshankar Menon’s book India and Asian Geopolitics: Past, Present. I thought it was fantastic – really embeds India’s experience in the broader politics of Asia, presents an Indian perspective but does so in a very balanced way rather than cheerleading, and covers a remarkably wide range of topics and regions.

It’s also what I consider the best second-book-to-read on Indian FP. It assumes a certain amount of knowledge of Indian history, from the Emergency in the 1970s to balance of payments crises and the details of various wars and crises. Read something like Alyssa Ayres’ Our Time Has Come, Sumit Ganguly’s Indian Foreign Policy, or, for a broader overview, Ram Guha’s India After Gandhi first to get some basics down, and read Menon’s book next. And from there you can pursue more specialized books on a vast, ever-growing number of topics.

I have a new article out in Foreign Affairs on US strategy for competing over Asia’s “swing states” that draws on my current book project. (caveat: I didn’t choose the headline or sub-headings, which are a bit different than the actual argument, so please read the piece!). Some extracts below:

“Although China is undoubtedly more influential than it was three decades ago, the bulk of Asia’s states are not at risk of falling under China’s sway. Asian countries now boast complex and autonomous domestic politics that do not align neatly with either Chinese or U.S. priorities. At times, these countries are indeed gripped by internal debates about whether to align with China or the U.S. and its partners. But just as often, that debate is secondary or even irrelevant compared with these countries’ more pressing internal challenges and foreign policy goals. . . .

Asian countries’ politics and interests also do not map seamlessly onto the Biden administration’s autocracy-versus-democracy framing. Neither the Marxist-Leninist party-state model nor liberal democracy is clearly on the march in the region. Indeed, many regional states believe they can successfully balance ties with both sides as they forge their own forms of domestic politics. . . .

Washington will be most effective when it approaches Asia’s swing states as they are: complicated and autonomous countries, not pieces on a chessboard maneuvered by Beijing and Washington.”

Myanmar’s military is increasingly losing control of key areas of its borders with Thailand, China, and India while continuing to face ongoing insurgency in “heartland” areas of the country: “the regime has lost its position as the dominant military and political actor in Myanmar. A more multipolar landscape is emerging.” IISS has a valuable map of the shifting, overall escalating violence. We may – or may not – be seeing a defining cascade against the regime, from Operation 1027 to the Arakan Army’s remarkable advances in Rakhine to the fall of Myawaddy to the KNU/PDF to KIA attacks in the north to CNF presence along the Indian border to the endurance of People’s Defense Force units across the country.

I want to use this post to sketch out some possible scenarios for where things go from here using examples from other civil wars, to help identify what policy questions people in and out of Myanmar should be thinking about.

1. Regime renewal. This seems quite unlikely to me given the overall balance of forces and trends, but in the late 1940s/early 1950s in Burma and the mid-2010s in Syria, central governments looked to be hugely embattled. But eventually they were able to largely push their opponents back to the periphery and reestablish political control over most of the country. In Syria, this was accomplished with extraordinary bloodshed and Russian and Iranian external backing; in 1950s Burma, a mix of fighting, deal-making, and insurgent fragmentation was used to prevent regime collapse.
2. Stalemate- disjointed. The insurgents consolidate control in various areas, and make some further inroads, but the regime remains cohesive, the military does not crack, and armed groups struggle to launch decisive offensives. We see enduring liberated zones that cannot be conquered by the regime, though conflict carries on, and that carry on de facto foreign policy with neighboring states. They are not well-connected to each other politically, and instead very regionalized. This bears some resemblances to Burma’s 1960s-1980s, before the wave of ceasefires and military advances of the 1990s, periods of 1980s and 1990s Afghanistan, and Syria in the mid-2010s.
3. Stalemate – consolidated. In this variant, the areas of insurgent control become increasingly politically connected under an umbrella organization that can actually exert some degree of central control. The NUG would be the obvious potential central power here, though many crucial questions remain about when and how armed actors would actually relinquish control to an overarching power. At a stalemate stage, however, deep integration would not be necessary to coordinate across fronts – this is more about cooperation than about full organizational/political merger. This is a fairly rare outcome in 3+-party civil wars because of how difficult it is to integrate on the fly, but maybe the FMLN in El Salvador or some of the Ethiopian conflicts’ coalitions.
4. Incremental regime contraction. This is a world that takes the last 7 or so months and continues to extrapolate it forward. The central government does not splinter, but local units are overrun, local defections occur, and the regime’s radius of control increasingly contracts. A new equilibrium may be reached along stable battle lines that represent a more insurgent-favorable version of the stalemate outcomes above, tilting the status quo against NPT. This would be like Laos and Cambodia in the early-1970s, etc – things not going well and territorial losses mounting, but a kind of fighting retreat in hopes of external intervention, rebel factionalization, or some other dramatic form of salvation.
5. Bottom-up regime collapse. However, this process of contraction could spiral into a Cambodia 1975/Afghanistan 2021 type of outcome, with cascading local losses and side-switching aggregating into a dramatic shift in the balance of power and regime collapse as local units and mid-level commanders simply stop fighting. The nature of these wars can involve long periods of seeming-stalemate or incremental losses that then suddenly turn into dramatic and rapid collapse. I don’t have any confidence in my personal ability to predict when outcomes 2 and 3 would turn into 4, or when 4 would turn into 5, but we shouldn’t discount any of these possibilities: things can fall apart quickly when tides begin to turn. Given the nature of Myanmar’s war compared to simpler two-party wars, this could turn into a kind of highly decentralized landscape of different governing authorities – possibly turning into conflict or competition among them – if the opposition movement does not have some threshold level of political coordination and unity. The range here varies from “cohesive replacement of the regime and transition into a new political system” to “early/mid-1990s Afghanistan.”
6. Top-down regime collapse. A final trajectory occurs via splits and ruptures within the military elite. This could simply shuffle the desk chairs of the military command, but it could also lead to fragmentation or conflict that opens space for the insurgents to make massive gains. In some cases like this, part of the elite cuts a deal with the insurgency to negotiate a transition, which would generate a fascinating and unpredictable bargaining process over a regime-change pact. This elite conflict could instead lead to spiraling state failure as waves of defection and desertion unfurl across the security apparatus, rather than laying the basis for a pacted transition.

If I had to bet money on this in the short-term (i.e. 2024), I think trajectory 4 is currently the most likely (regime continues to lose territory but without dramatic collapses), followed closely by trajectories 2 and 3 in that order. But that’s a very low confidence, short time horizon bet – outcomes 5 and 6 could certainly happen, possibly with surprising speed, and so could, though in my opinion with a very low probability, a return to regime dominance.