The Long Haggle

In 1999, Robert McMahon published The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia since World War II, which included a bibliographic essay on the literature concerned with the history of U.S. relations with Southeast Asia. Today, McMahon’s survey barely requires an update. Works about the Vietnam War remain, as McMahon’s essay observed, “dauntingly voluminous and tend to overwhelm virtually all other regional issues.” Consequently, studies of U.S.–Southeast Asia relations with a “broad, regional focus” are still as “surprisingly rare” as when McMahon penned his essay. Another result is the dearth of scholarship on the United States’ interactions with Southeast Asian states other than Vietnam. Indeed, McMahon judged the literature on U.S. relations with Burma, Malaysia, and Singapore to be “disappointingly slim.”¹ Though a few books on American relations with Singapore and Malaysia have appeared since McMahon’s essay, the U.S.-Burma relationship languished without historians’ attention almost forty years after John Cady’s The United States and Burma (1976).²

Kenton Clymer’s A Delicate Relationship: The United States and Burma/Myanmar since 1945 offers an important corrective. Burma is the largest country in mainland Southeast Asia and occupies an important geographical position between India and China. According to Clymer, U.S. policymakers of the early Cold War considered Burma “one of the two most threatened Southeast Asian countries (the other being Vietnam).” Yet as the book’s introduction rightly states, there is still “no comprehensive historical account of American relations with Burma.” Even Cady’s work remains more about Burma’s history than its interactions with the United States (pp. 1–2). In contrast, Clymer’s study draws on American, Australian, and British archives, as well as interviews he has conducted with American as well as Burmese diplomats, politicians, and activists.

The book devotes ten chapters to U.S. Cold War policy toward Burma, tracing a familiar theme in U.S. foreign relations history. The Burmese government was confronted with a communist insurgency from March 1948, two months after independence (pp. 44–45). Communist movements seemed to be gathering momentum in the wider region: in China under Mao’s leadership, and across Southeast Asia, in Indochina and Malaya, where the colonial powers struggled to re-impose their authority after 1945. American leaders who were fixated with defeating communism thus cast their lot with the Burman-dominated government in Yangon, trampling upon the nuances of local ethnic rivalries.

After Washington’s decision to support Yangon’s anticommunist campaign, both sides began to engage in a “long haggle” over the type, amount, and schedule of U.S. aid to Burma. This on-again, off-again trickle of experts, equipment, and monies from the United States turned on the ebb and flow of Yangon’s loathing for being dependent on another power (p. 195). The “haggle” persisted even though General Ne Win’s dictatorial regime increasingly isolated the country from world affairs from the 1960s (pp. 199, 204, 212, 232). While these testy negotiations often stalled, they usually restarted because the government in Washington had “accommodated” itself to Ne Win’s strict nonalignment policy and repressive rule, and it continued to believe that U.S. aid might deepen U.S.-Burma ties (p. 197). When Sino-U.S. rapprochement in the 1970s reduced Burma’s importance to American Cold War strategy, the “narcotics era” of the U.S.-Burma relationship began. As one corner of Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle of opium derivatives (with Thailand and Vietnam the other corners), Burma was significant to President Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs from 1971, reprising “the same pattern” of haggling over U.S. aid, this time for Yangon’s crackdown on opium farming (p. 239).

The United States’ “long haggle” with Burma parallels U.S. policies toward several Southeast Asian states, including the evolution toward U.S. support for authoritarian regimes in the region. Ne Win belongs with the likes of Ngo Dinh Diem...