IT HAD BEEN four years since Myanmar’s military junta seized power in a violent coup executed on 1 February 2021. Yet the day marking the coup in 2025 passed with hardly a blip on the international news tickers. Instead, the news was dominated by the latest tariff proclamations coming out of Washington DC, targeting Canada, China and Mexico. Four years on, Myanmar has fallen off the global attention spectrum as dramatically as it had claimed it when the coup was first launched.
A decade earlier, too, Myanmar was especially in the global limelight. In November 2014, US president Barack Obama arrived in Myanmar to talk democracy. To many in the country, then in the early years of an attempted transition to democracy, it seemed the final break from decades of brutal military rule. “Today, I say to you – and I say to everybody that can hear my voice – that the United States of America is with you, including those who have been forgotten, those who are dispossessed, those who are ostracized, those who are poor,” Obama pledged at the University of Yangon.
“Yangon, that day when Obama visited first, was like it was getting ready for an epoch-making event,” a Myanmar national who had daily interactions with the US mission during the Obama visit said. In 2014, US assistance to Myanmar reached USD 150 million. The Myanmar national said it had felt like the United States had matched the verbal bravado with action and was invested in Myanmar’s future. He, like so many in Myanmar, trusted the United States’s word. That turned out to be a mistake.
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