By Atul Aneja
TOP scholars and thinkers drawn from Russia, India, China, Italy, Japan, Thailand, and Myanmar are set to brainstorm a roadmap for Myanmar that will allow it to confront serious challenges and avail exciting opportunities beyond 2025.
The high-level meeting of minds will take place in Nay Pyi Taw in the presence of Myanmar’s top leaders, officials, intellectuals, diplomats, and prominent members of the civil society on 21 March. (State Administrative Council Chairman Senior General Min Aung Hlaing is expected to address the conference.)
The prestigious conclave, hosted by the freshly minted think tank Myanmar Narrative and Myanmar’s Ministry of Information is taking place amid major power shifts in the global system. Consequently, the conference has been aptly titled – Forum on Myanmar Beyond 2025: Challenges and Opportunities in the Multipolar World.
In the past few months, the global system has evolved rapidly, opening fresh challenges but also revealing brand new opportunities that Myanmar can avail to mark a positive transition beyond 2025.
The shift from a unipolar world to a multipolar world has markedly sharpened; in fact, the phenomena of multipolarity have become significantly energized in recent years and months. Civilizational states such as India, China, and Russia along with Europe and the United States are now set to pillar a new world order. Multilateral organizations such as the BRICS-plus, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, ASEAN, and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are set to play a significantly bigger role in shaping the global landscape.
In other words, the unipolar era that began after the collapse of the Soviet Union has ended. Power has now been defused and new players and organizations are on the horizon, demanding a seat on the high table. As the Ukraine conflict shows signs of winding down, mainly because the United States and Russia are now inclined to work together, it appears that the Atlantic Alliance is showing deep internal cracks.
As the old order frays, there is now a justified demand for a Yalta 2.0 – a conversation between the big players of the multipolar world and others from the Global South to define a new world order. This would replace the old world order anchored by Yalta 1.0, the conference before the end of World War 2 in the famous city of Crimea, which resulted first in the post-war bipolar and then unipolar world order, after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.
The arrival of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States has been a complete game changer, arguably opening significant new opportunities for Myanmar.
Russian thinker and philosopher Alexander Dugin, author of the Fourth Political Theory, who will address the conference, is of the view that Trump has started a much larger conservative revolution, with the intent of spreading it beyond the United States, with Europe, right now, as the focus.
Trump’s war on “globalism” – an ideology to establish a single super-state by pursuing a policy of “regime change” when sovereign states resist, is likely to be discussed during the conference. The US president, right from the start has also rightly targeted the cultural dimensions of globalism — Woke culture, cancel culture, LGBTQ movement as well as an attack on religion, tradition, and family.
The forum is likely to brainstorm how Myanmar is likely to benefit from the sudden fall from grace under Trump of institutions such as USAID, the agency that had been reportedly assigned to implement the notorious BURMA Act – a transparent attempt to engineer regime change in Myanmar.
In financial terms, the BURMA Act provided $75 million for the so-called refugee assistance programmes, especially for those camping in Thailand. Significantly, it has earmarked $25 million for the NUG and PDF, its armed wing, wrongfully calling it “non-lethal assistance”.
The assembled experts will examine whether the changing global situation will offer fresh opportunities for internal reconciliation, paving the way for an amicable transition after 2025.
Delegates at the conference are also likely to debate whether in the chaotic global transition, will Myanmar have a fresh opportunity to reconstruct its geopolitical architecture where engagement with four key players – India, China, Russia, and the US along with two multilateral organizations, ASEAN and BRICS+, would be key. Perhaps for the first time since World War II, Myanmar will be able to simultaneously and deeply engage without contradiction, its four key partners – India, China, Russia, and the US along with ASEAN, especially Thailand, without fundamentally antagonizing any of them.
Many other themes will be on the forum’s radar. In the future, will Myanmar be able to fully leverage its prized geographical location to foster prosperity? For instance, if peace descends, Myanmar can advance the development of the trilateral Asian highway project, which involved India, Myanmar, and Thailand, with the intent of extending it further to Vietnam. Simultaneously, Myanmar can consider extending the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC) to India, though this may require a deeper conversation between India and China, two countries which have begun a normalization process following the Kazan BRICS summit in October 2024.
In the maritime domain, Myanmar has developed two major deep-water ports – Sittway and Kyaukphyu, which can attract a sizeable chunk of commercial ships on account of their advantageous location along the sea lanes in the Bay of Bengal. Besides, with the Vladivostok to Chennai shipping route opening up between Russia and India, Myanmar can explore the possibility of leveraging its ports as trans-shipment hubs in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR).
Finally, post-2025, Myanmar can exponentially develop its geo-cultural heft by bringing its world-famous historical sites, including Bagan, onto the international tourism map. Myanmar can also become a major destination in an expanding Buddhist circuit, which has a footprint across Asia and Eurasia.
To sum up a galaxy of keynote speakers including Professor Dugin, Professor Zhang Weiwei from China’s Fudan University, Brigadier (Retd.) Vinod Anand, Senior Fellow at India’s prestigious Vivekanand International Foundation (VIF), Mr Madhav Nepal, former Prime Minister of Nepal and Mr Sihasak Phuangketkeow, former Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs of Thailand, and several other top scholars and international relations experts are, for the first time, opening a public debate on how Myanmar, weaving into a new multipolar global order, can have another historic chance to usher in peace, prosperity and an unprecedented opportunity for cultural advancement.
