RUTHFULLY YOURS

Myanmar received extraordinary attention from the last administration, with visits from both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama. But the crucial Southeast Asian country turned out not to be the human-rights miracle many in both parties envisioned. And when events in Myanmar failed to follow the idealistic script written in Washington, the U.S. responded in ways that undermined the country’s reformers, empowered its military and strengthened China’s hand. The U.S. failed even to demonstrate a balanced approach to human rights the people of Myanmar might have respected.

In the early years of the Obama administration, many Americans fell in love with a fantasy: the idea that Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese political leader who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and endured 15 years of house arrest, was in the process of taking power from a defeated military junta. They misread the situation fundamentally.

In 2010 the military was frustrated. Decades of failed socialist planning had left the economy relatively backward, even as other Asian countries grew rich. Myanmar was largely dependent on Chinese investment, which made the generals nervous. They decided to begin to liberalize their domestic economy to promote faster growth and attract investment from Japan, the U.S. and Europe.

The easiest way to do that was to capitalize on Ms. Suu Kyi’s popularity in the West. To bring Western investment and goodwill, the military invited her and her movement to share power through elections. But despite Ms. Suu Kyi’s majority in parliament and her exalted title of state counselor, this was not a “democratic transition”—the power-sharing deal the generals hammered out was and still is heavily tilted in their favor.

But the need for heroes is strong, and many Western observers bought into the fairy tale, glowing over the resolute, peaceful woman whose courage and dignity, they imagined, had transformed Myanmar from a military dictatorship to a peaceful democracy. Accordingly, they were shocked when starting in August 2017—amid bloody ethnic conflict in which Myanmar’s security forces played a significant role—hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Myanmar’s Rakhine state fled or were driven into Bangladesh, where they languish today.

After overestimating Ms. Suu Kyi’s power, her old fans then blamed her for the disaster. Either she was behind the attacks on the Rohingya Muslims, or her failure to intervene showed moral cowardice. Those who once lionized her suddenly ostracized her. Human-rights groups such as Amnesty International stripped her of awards. Some U.S. and European banks and corporations, once eager to shine in Ms. Suu Kyi’s reflected glory by investing in Myanmar, backed hastily away. As Britain’s left-leaning Guardian newspaper put it last year, she had fallen from “peace icon” to “pariah.”

Decision-making in Myanmar is secretive, but among many people I met with, including opponents and supporters of the state counselor, a common view is that the military had used the Rohingya issue deliberately to divide Ms. Suu Kyi from her Western allies, and that the strategy had worked. Yet again, the Burmese military had played the Western human-rights community like a violin.

The flight of Western banks and investors from Myanmar is also working out well for the generals. While many German, British and American investors have pulled back, Japanese, Singaporean and South Korean companies are less squeamish. The absence of Western investors has reduced pressure to make the system more transparent. The generals now managed to reduce their economic dependence on China and boost Myanmar’s economic performance without losing control—more or less what they wanted all along.

Many in Myanmar believe the West has applied its human-rights standards inconsistently. Last month India issued a new citizenship list that left almost two million mostly-Muslim residents of the state of Assam in danger of becoming stateless. Western governments said little and did less. Neither Chinese behavior toward Muslims in Xinjiang nor Indian actions in Kashmir have had much effect on the behavior of Western governments or investors. Western fecklessness has made China look to Myanmar like a more stable and reliable partner.

Nonetheless, Myanmar, like Vietnam, has a long history of defending its independence against Chinese pressure. The U.S. may need to find a way to work with a less-than-democratic Myanmar so long as, like Vietnam and Thailand, it holds China at arm’s length. This should not mean abandoning hope of promoting democratic values in the region. But it does require a more disciplined, intellectually rigorous and historically informed approach to Southeast Asia than America’s foreign-policy community has thus far managed to embrace.