A Global Sword of Damocles
By: Selim Kim
A woman—Han Lay of Myanmar—takes center stage at the Miss Grand International beauty pageant on March 27, 2021. "It is very hard for me to be able to stand on stage tonight," she begins. “Today in my country...while I am on this stage, there are so many people dying: more than 100 people died today...please help Myanmar. We need your urgent international help right now. Let's create a better world where individual responsibility for the new generations. May the world be at peace with Myanmar.” The audience roars in applause.
What’s striking about this scene isn’t just the fact that a beauty pageant contestant brought up politics in a setting normally associated with evaluating physical aesthetics, but also the fact that they were compelled enough to risk their career and possibly life just to bring attention to the human cost of a coup that started this past February. Since then, numerous countries, including the U.S., U.K., and countries of the E.U., have condemned the military attacks and issued sanctions on military officials, but have lacked any concrete, significant form of action. But what are words if no action is taken to back them up?
Although the coup and eventual military crackdown in Myanmar has persisted for many months (with the Myanmar shadow government, consisting of opposers of the military junta, even calling for an uprising just two weeks ago), the United Nations has yet to take any action, leading one to wonder if they ever will. In fact, reading through the monthly programmes of work for the UN Security Council for February 2021 to present (September 2021) yields only five mentions of Myanmar and is instead predominantly focused on the Middle East. This runs counter to popular understanding of the UN’s purpose—to mediate and resolve issues of international consequence, whether it be nuclear nonproliferation or geopolitical conflict. As evident with the UN’s inaction, it almost seems as if the harrowing events that are currently ongoing in Myanmar have dropped from the radar of most global powers. If this is currently the case, who then has the power to help Myanmar?
The U.S.’ constitutional values of freedom and equality have been the face of what the U.S. stands for. To elaborate further, when we reflect on world history, the U.S. seems to have taken part in resolving conflicts that violate human rights. However, when it came to the crisis of Ukraine’s war with Russia, U.S. involvement was next to absent. Since the conflict’s start in 2014, Ukraine has called for increased Western involvement to rebuff Russia’s Crimean annexation attempts. But, the U.S. has solely imposed economic sanctions, leaving behind a stalemate that has displaced at least 7% of Ukraine’s population.
Myanmar may fear a similar fate, given that it has much of the same preliminary ingredients. Currently, the coup by the military junta has spurred protest from Myanmar’s citizens and has resulted in Burmese individuals such as Han Lay, to urge countries to help over social media. Yet, despite the violent attacks occurring against the Myanmar people, U.S. involvement was again next to absent. The U.S. has only enacted sanctions against industries that have little effect on Myanmar’s main source of revenue and exports, and has also only imposed meager amounts of humanitarian aid. This sounds familiar to what Ukraine experienced: both countries undergo conflicts that violently harm its people, they call for help, but are void of any concrete action from the countries that have the capabilities to do so. Yet, why exactly should the U.S. have an obligation to interfere in the first place?
Those who oppose U.S. intervention in conflicts such as Myanmar and Ukraine may say that each country has their own sovereignty, which broadly stated is a right for a country to self-determine its own political, social, and cultural policies. Some may cite the failed Bay of Pigs intervention in 1961 Cuba as the U.S.’ attempt to maintain its democratic sphere of influence in the Western hemisphere amidst the Cold War whilst violating Cuba’s sovereignty. However, certain factors exist which can necessitate foreign intervention in a country’s national conflict. One of them is when a country’s own citizens’ lives are taken hostage over a power struggle, as has been witnessed in Egypt’s Arab Spring revolution. While initially the government was democratically elected in 2011, it was later taken over by military coup at the cost of much Egyptian blood, and has since stayed as a destabilized provisional government on account of zero foreign intervention. Regrettably, Myanmar has clearly already paid a similar blood price and is headed towards the same outcome.
If human life is not sufficient motivation for the US to intervene, perhaps a different argument can be made. Currently, the entire world’s political balance is predicated on the U.S.’ standing as the most powerful country in the world, though runner-up China is rapidly challenging it economically. What then, if this power dynamic were somehow switched, and now China is number 1? Given China’s own track record of blatantly ignoring human rights, as recently evidenced by the Uyghur Muslims being put into concentration camps, I personally am not so certain that a future with human rights will exist.
It’s also possible that the U.S. is wary of intervening in China’s geographical sphere of influence as well, just as the U.S. was wary of communism’s entry into their own in the 1960s. However, there is also a rather selfish argument to help Myanmar cultivate a potential ally to keep China in check. As Myanmar borders China, U.S. intervention and aid to the Burmese people can be a way to create a strategic geographical ally that can discourage potential Chinese incursions into neighboring territories, such as the South China Sea. This is reminiscent of the way the US utilizes allies within the Middle East. By allying with countries like Azerbaijan, Turkey and India, the US created a geographical buffer to restrain rival nations like Iran, Russia and (now more recently as of late August 2021) Afghanistan, from rash military actions. Thus, in a time of shifting rankings on who stays number one, intervening in conflicts and establishing allies is a strategic move for the U.S. to maintain power and order.
Admittedly, navigating an unstable geopolitical arena is not just the United States’ sword of Damocles, but also its obligation. Although its past history has demonstrated the difficulty in providing the correct amount of international intervention with the proper timing and method of execution, this should not discourage the U.S. from exercising its responsibility as the world’s policeman. Therefore, naturally, the U.S. should also consider answering Han Lay’s pleas.
