On The Radar: Bangkok Breaks the Ice with Myanmar

Last weekend, Myanmar's foreign minister Tin Maung Swe sat down with his Southeast Asian counterparts in Bangkok for the first time in five years. Nothing was signed. Nothing was resolved. But for the ASEAN bloc that has spent nearly five years keeping the country's military-backed government at arm's length, the meeting itself was significant.

For New Zealand, a country with no direct stake in Myanmar's civil war but a long-standing interest in a functioning, rules-based ASEAN, the Bangkok meeting is worth watching closely - not because it resolves the conflict, but because of what it reveals about the limits of Southeast Asia's premier institution when confronted with a genuine crisis inside one of its own members.

A cautious reopening

Myanmar has been frozen out of ASEAN's top-level gatherings since late 2021, after the ruling military ignored the bloc's Five-Point Consensus, a peace roadmap agreed weeks after the February 2021 coup that ousted Aung San Suu Kyi's elected government. That plan called for an end to violence and inclusive dialogue with all parties to the conflict. Myanmar's military largely ignored it, choosing instead to pursue a military solution that has since killed an estimated 100,000 people and displaced 3.6 million, many to Bangladesh and Thailand.

Sunday's gathering - an informal session hosted by Thailand and backed by current ASEAN chair the Philippines, was the clearest sign yet that some in the bloc want to bring Myanmar back into the fold. It follows Min Aung Hlaing's sleight-of-hand in April from junta chief to president, via an election widely dismissed by Western governments as stage-managed and designed to preserve military rule behind a civilian face.

The Thai Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow, whose government brokered the meeting, described the approach as "calibrated engagement," insisting it did not represent a change in ASEAN's underlying position. Philippine Foreign Secretary Ma. Theresa Lazaro, ASEAN's special envoy on Myanmar, said Tin Maung Swe had briefed his counterparts on the military's peace efforts and on the welfare of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who remains under house arrest after being moved from prison earlier this year.

Naypyidaw has since rebuffed Lazaro's request to visit the 81-year-old Nobel laureate in person, fuelling speculation this week that she may have died. If that is in fact true, its one of the best-kept secrets in a country full of them. 

 Legitimacy without results

Analysts are largely sceptical that the ASEAN – Junta thaw amounts to genuine progress. Richard Horsey of the International Crisis Group has warned that it would be a mistake for ASEAN to welcome Myanmar back into the fold without securing anything meaningful in return. Joanne Lin of the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute has argued the softer stance is likely to shift things only "at the margins," while cautioning that high-level engagement risks reading as a step towards legitimising the authorities in Naypyidaw. Myanmar's opposition National Unity Government and human rights groups have gone further, accusing ASEAN of rewarding the junta's non-compliance rather than holding it to account.

Underlining just how far apart the two sides remain, Myanmar's military-dominated parliament passed a motion last week formally rejecting the Five-Point Consensus altogether, describing it as outside interference inconsistent with the country's "political reality". This is hardly the act of a government preparing to make concessions.

Why this matters beyond Myanmar's borders

A fresh analysis from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) analyst Morgan Michaels, sharpens the picture of what is really at stake, and offers some clues as to why New Zealand should care. Michaels points to Thailand as the one ASEAN member capable of genuinely shifting the dial, given its 2,400-kilometre border with Myanmar, its reliance on Myanmar gas, its deep military and political back-channels into the conflict, and its role as host to Chiang Mai's growing community of Myanmar researchers, journalists and opposition figures. Yet Thailand's own political churn, four governments in three years, plus a distracting border war with Cambodia - has left its Myanmar policy somewhat inconsistent.

The IISS analysis also points to the vacuum ASEAN's paralysis has created, the one China has been happy to fill. Beijing brokered two ceasefire deals in Myanmar last year, reportedly discouraging some ethnic armed groups from joining ASEAN-led talks in the process, entrenching a rival peace process that could make an eventual, more inclusive settlement harder to achieve.

There is also a more direct reason for New Zealanders to pay attention. Myanmar has become the world's largest producer of methamphetamine and the epicentre of Southeast Asia's booming cyber-scam industry, the work of criminal gangs located in  ungoverned border regions that cost the wider region up to US$37 billion in 2023 alone, according to UN estimates.   Many of the scam calls reaching New Zealand phones come from these very operations.

The IISS report's central recommendation - a semi-permanent ASEAN office in Bangkok, staffed by a special envoy with a mandate longer than the current one-year rotation - is a modest institutional fix for a much larger problem: whether ASEAN can act with any consistency when one of its own members is at war with itself.

For a New Zealand government that has consistently backed ASEAN centrality as the anchor of Indo-Pacific security, that question extends well beyond Myanmar. If the bloc cannot manage a crisis inside its own membership, its credibility as a regional convenor on everything from the South China Sea to economic integration comes under strain too.

Asia Media Centre