My conclusion is Myanmar will be searching for new equilibrium in foreign affairs. It will balance China, the US, ASEAN, EU, India, and Japan. It has done this very well. It will be not the old Neutralism of the past. Remember U Thant became secretary general United Nations in 1961 because Burma that time was the quaint central Neutralism country. That mutualism is not only in foreign affairs, it was not in east-west Neutralism, it was also a question of China-SU relations, it was Korean war and Vietnam war. There are lots of aspects that mutualism. Apart from that mutualism is internal as well. After all you have two underground communist parties, and aboveground communist party, affective communist party, and so the relations require both externally and internally political interests of the country at that time.

We’ve gone through a period of a series of myths and semi myths of what the public has considered as Myanmar relations. We heard people talk about the former isolation of Myanmar until the 1980s. It was isolation from the west but Japan kept that country going. Half of the funding of that country came from Japan.Japan had access. After all in 1969 the Burma’s government with the United States signed a program that let the team to investigate. So that wasn’t former isolation. The same way when the press talk about Myanmar being a client state of China from 1988 to 2010, which was false as well. And now people say that Myanmar is so close to the United States. I say that is false, too.

What I want to stress in foreign relations is this, the caldron element facing Myanmar in all its relations is the essence of Burma’s nationalism. This is absolutely critical. But if we do understand the strength of that nationalism, which is nationalism transformed into a national ideology. We all miss something. With that nationalism has come as ethnical nationalism as well. So we’ve seen the development of the west as well. And as Ben Anderson, one of the critical writers on south-east Asia, says the imagine communities. The communities that are held together by concept that are developed, not accurate but really critical to understanding how these are operated. This nationalism is critical to international relations. And the ethnical nationalism is also critical to nationality in international relations. Here’s a problem that I want to talk about. If you look at the ethnicity issue in Myanmar, and you look at the question of how the central question of the unity of the state which has been the military, primary objective for half a century, are titillated more frequently today. What have been the foreign relations related to that unity? Every country around Myanmar except Laos have supported decedents or rebels. And other countries not around Myanmar have too. Even some of the Muslins, India, Pakistan have supported and China supported the Burma communist party and also some of the Kachin and Narga People. The UK supported the XX and the US supported Guomindang. And even Obama administration supported decedents in Thailand. When the senator, the chair of subcommittee on Asia, on September 30th asked Kurt’s assistant secretary does United States support XX actions against Burma from Thailand? Kurt answered that we will discuss this in executive session. So this history is very important cuz It means that the Myanmar government does not trust foreigners and minority relations of any sort. This is got to be understood. And yet minority relations have become a critical element of policy formulation or not formulation at least in US. They were never expected to transform the country in a completely synchronous way, all fields and all times in the same page, which of course is impossible in any state. At the same time, it is a question of is other things faltering? And what can be done about it? Now for years the human rights groups have regarded the continuation of first military government as an inferno. They wanted to see the national league for democracy take over. Aung San Suu Kyi and the 1990 elections and policy the US through the Clinton administration and Bush administration has been regime change.

Because there have been so many reforms in the country, the one focus of criticism of these groups has been on the minority issues. And that has intensified the problem. I have argued that one of the problems is that the United State’s policy toward Myanmar from the very beginning. The real issue was not democracy; the real issue was majority minority issues. The military has made it worse. And now the government decided to do something. But there are some very very severe problems in this regard. And the ROHENJE issue is a very important issue in these issues. They are regarded themselves as the most polite people in Asia, which I think is probably true. They have been regarded as the victim and use this victimization for their own international purposes to present their case to the world. So here comes a very complex kind of story. But this loom is large and the question of the relationship between US and Myanmar into the future. Because the Kachin issue is one, but the ROHENJE issue is less serious in terms of Burma’s national munity. The Kachin issue is far more important because the Chinese border is more important than the Bangladesh border. We are caught in United State in a problem. This is a problem of partly a western thought and partly of America thought. The western thought is this: throughout our history, we have regarded everything in dualist terms, good and bad, heaven or hell, you are with us or against us…All of these factors simplify the complex relationships. So the Myanmar government under military was bad and Myanmar government under reform is good. The American problem is simply this. We have a very short attention span.And so we want instant success.

This is part of our policy formulation, complicated by the fact that in the fouryear presidency where people want things done very quickly but none of these things can happen quickly. These all issues created problems in trying to have this balance that equilibrium that Myanmar will attain on the paces of present issues they face. Now one of the issues that the US regarded is the China question.

The first time that I know that China was mentioned in US in the official Washington policy circles was on September 13th, 2009, when Kurt Campbell was asked about China and Myanmar. This is not without my efforts early. In February, 2001, I organized a conference in Washington on Burma. The purpose of this conference was to try to persuade the Bush administration which came at the end of January, 2001 that foreign policy towards Burma had to been more than just human rights. It had to be a whole complex of things.

Now 145 people came to this meeting, including former Chinese ambassador, a number of ambassadors from south Asia. As far as I can determine, I have no access to classify information and created no effect because of the 911. Nobody paid attention. But the idea was that we should look beyond the human right issues, not to eliminate them, just to focus on other things as well. The charge now on the part of China would be US change policy under the Obama administration was part of its containment policy against China. I doubt that very much. Before Kurt was the assistant secretary of the state for Asia, Pacific was nominated by the official government.