u/Good-Emu-1808

The generals want the Trump administration to see a deal: minerals, trade, and a way to pull Myanmar away from China. That is the oldest bait in their playbook. In 2021, the junta hired Israeli-Canadian lobbyist Ari Ben-Menashe to “explain” the coup and sell the fiction that the generals wanted to pivot toward the West and away from Beijing.

That story was implausible then and is even less credible now. Min Aung Hlaing relies heavily on Beijing for diplomatic cover, weapons, and political survival. Myanmar may sit in China’s backyard, but that does not mean the US should embrace a failing dictator to compete with Beijing. A weak, brutal, and internationally toxic regime is not a reliable partner. It does not control the country well enough or command sufficient legitimacy to end the conflict it unleashed.

If the US wants a stable partner in Southeast Asia, it must look beyond the capital. The real power brokers shaping Myanmar’s future are the resistance forces and ethnic armed groups that control key borderlands, resources, and local support and legitimacy.

For writers and journalists still inside the country, the danger today is not only that they may be arrested for speaking out. It is that they can be dragged away in the middle of the night, even after doing everything in their power to avoid speaking too directly.

There was an old joke from the dictatorship years: people had freedom of speech, but not freedom after speech. Under Min Aung Hlaing’s civilian puppet show, that joke has become state policy. When a regime goes to war with old books and an elderly writer, it is not marching toward democracy; it is retreating into the paranoid, absolute control of a North Korean-style dictatorship.