Unpacking the Myanmar crisis

Recording: Welcome to the World of Intelligence, a podcast for you to discover the latest analysis of global military and security trends within the open source defense intelligence community. Now onto the episode.

Sean Corbett: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the latest edition of Janes World of Intelligence podcast. I'm Sean Corbett, and I'll be hosting the podcast today, with my Inquisitor- in- Chief, Kate Cox. For those who regularly listen to this, Kate won't be a stranger, but for those who may be new to the series, Kate is the director of strategic programs within Janes' analysis division. And she will act, as I said, as the Inquisitor- in- Chief for today's episode. Hello again, Kate.

Kate Cox: Hi, Sean. Thanks for having me.

Sean Corbett: So today we're going to cover a part of the world that tends not to receive a great deal of attention, at least not in the west, anyway, and that's Myanmar. Thrust into the news on the 28th of March this year due to a fairly sizable earthquake that caused about, well, at least 3, 500 deaths. But the country's been in turmoil since at least 2021, when there was a military coup. And to take us through this particularly challenging open source intelligence problem set, we have Tony Davis. Based in Bangkok, Tony is a freelance senior Asian security analyst, who's conducted field research in various countries across the Asian region, including Myanmar, where he spent a significant amount of time with the various ethnic insurgent groups. Welcome, Tony.

Tony: It's good to be with you guys.

Sean Corbett: Excellent. So without further ado, I'll hand over to Kate, who will steer us through this episode's conversation.

Kate Cox: Thanks, Sean. So the Myanmar conflict is one that's often been overlooked by the international community, with Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, and others, commanding more global attention. But today we'll talk to Tony and Sean about why this conflict matters, the role that China and other actors have to play here, and what the future holds. So to set the scene, Tony, why should we care about the conflict in Myanmar? Why is it important for international security?

Tony: I think essentially there are two answers to that question. One is geostrategic or geopolitical, and it relates to the fact that, on the map, Myanmar is very squarely placed between the two regional superpowers. People's Republic of China, to its north, and to its west, India. So ongoing conflict in Myanmar raises, what I believe, is an increasing risk of tension over what happens in Myanmar, between these two regional powers. So that, if you like, is the geostrategic backdrop. And then on top of that, what we've already seen very clearly in, now over four years of conflict, is the likelihood of state collapse, essentially. A situation in which the central government, the military regime, is failing to hold the country together. It's already beginning to fragment, and that's having two very broad results. One is massive displacement of population. So we've already got over, I think figure now is 3. 2 million people displaced from their homes, growing poverty. A third of the population, according to UN statistics, needs humanitarian aid, and most of them are not getting it. And population outflows. So that is particularly impacting Thailand, where I live. And there are now probably somewhere in the region of 5 million Myanmar citizens in Thailand. Arguably, only half of them in any way registered, and an increasing number. So if you look at the construction industry, it's mainly young Myanmar men. If you look at restaurants, pubs, anything like that, you can walk into a pub in Bangkok, and the chances are you're going to be served by a young English- speaking woman from Myanmar. So this is already impacting Thailand in a way that is only going to get worse. So that's the result, if you like, of state fragmentation, state collapse. And the second factor is what inevitably flows from that, is a breakdown of central order, and transnational organized crime, essentially having a field day. Transnational organized crime in Myanmar was a problem, particularly in Shan state, up in the northeast, way before the 2021 coup, because of many of the same reasons, state fragmentation. But since the coup, and since the onset of, what is now, effectively, civil war, transnational crime has just gone through the roof. And we're talking guns coming into the country, at this point. But more importantly, we're also talking drugs, in very, very large quantities, flowing out, both by maritime routes, by land routes. And this has just increased exponentially over the last two years, in particular. And this is, again, it's only going to get worse, because as the grip of the central government, of the military regime, weakens, we're going to see more ungoverned space, and more reason for smaller groups, and indeed some bigger groups, to lean into criminal activities to finance their own resistance. So for those two reasons, geostrategic, and the potential of state collapse, and what that leads to, I would suggest that certainly in the Asian region, Myanmar is a country that needs to be watched very carefully.

Kate Cox: We'll come back to the question of external influence and interest in the conflicts. And yeah, it's clear that there are national and international impacts from the internal stability, that we'll dig into too. Looking at the current picture, how would you describe the state of the conflict? What does the balance of territorial control look like? And how did we get to this point?

Tony: I think it's important here to set the scene, and I'll try and do it briefly. If you look at Myanmar on the map, basically you're looking at, I won't say two countries, but a very clear bifurcation of one country. And what I mean by that is, that around the periphery of Myanmar, whether it's in the east, whether it's in the northeast, the north or the west, it's generally mountainous. Those mountainous regions are inhabited by national minorities. And there's a whole laundry list of various national minorities, which we can go into, if you feel it's worth it. But let's just say small and some big national minorities. That's around the periphery. Then you have the center of the country, which are the central plains and the central river valleys, in particular, the Irrawaddy River Valley, the Sittang River Valley. These are flatter areas, inhabited basically by the majority population, which is Burman, or Bamar, in the local language. And that majority population makes up around 65% of the 54 million people are living in the country. So it's a significant majority. Okay, so you have this bifurcation of the country into these two very broad zones. Different in many ways, around the edge, but essentially upland and lowland. What's happened since the coup is that the upland periphery, where there has been revolt against central military rule, going back to essentially the independence of Burma in 1948, those minority armies have essentially expanded their power. What happened with the coup was, broadly speaking, a national uprising in the center of the country. And that provided an opportunity for these national minority groups, so- called ethnic armed organizations, or ethnic revolutionary organizations, who are based in the periphery, to expand their control, to the point where today, the regime in the center, the military regime in Naypyidaw, is in the process of losing control over all the peripheries. It was never great before, but since 2021, they've essentially lost almost all of it. So that's what's happening in the periphery. And then in the center, it's a much more mixed picture, where, as I said, the coup sparked, effectively, a revolutionary uprising, very much youth driven. Young people in urban areas, and in rural areas, for that matter, who rose up against yet another military coup, and formed, so- called, People's Defense Forces, or PDFs. And those PDFs exist in pretty much every township in central Myanmar, to a greater or lesser degree. And what we've seen in the center of the country... And there is interaction between these PDFs, in the center, essentially ethnic majority Bamar, and their allies around the periphery, who also would like to see the end of this regime. What we've seen in the center, against that sort of loose alliance, is a situation in which the military regime controls urban areas, but its grip on a lot of the hinterland, in the center of the country, has slipped. In some cases, dramatically, in other cases less so. It's a very mixed picture. And if you look at a simple statistic, and you can see these statistics thrown around a lot, as in the resistance or the opposition controls 45% of the country and the military controls 55%, or turn it around, it could be vice versa, whatever. Those statistics are a little bit misleading, because in the center of the country you are dealing with a very complex situation, where towns are held by the regime, in some cases very easily, without any military pressure at all, in some cases less so. But it's a mixed picture, and to try and summarize it in a percentage of who controls what, is arguably more misleading than it is instructive. So yeah, those are the two sort of important takeaways, I think, in terms of where the situation is today. You're dealing with uplands, and you're dealing with what's happening in the center of the country.

Kate Cox: Thinking about that pretty complex landscape of actors involved in the conflict then, how much cohesion, would you say, or coordination, is there between the anti- military forces operating in Myanmar?

Tony: Not as much as they would all like, that's for sure. And that is essentially the dilemma of what they have come to call, the Spring Revolution. As I said earlier, what happened after the coup was very much a revolutionary upsurge of mainly young people, but not entirely. But the mass of the population, both majority Burma, but also a lot of people in ethnic areas who'd been resisting the regime for decades, everybody came together, and essentially said, " Enough is enough. This is one coup too many, and we're going to bring this regime down." So at the beginning there was a lot of interaction between these two parts of the revolution, if you like. So a lot of young people fled the cities, went to ethnic minority army controlled areas, and benefited there from training, were given weapons, et cetera, et cetera. So that degree of interaction is ongoing, but it hasn't translated into anything approaching unity against a very united military regime. So the dilemma, if you like, of what a lot of young Burmese would call the Spring Revolution, is it's a revolution without one revolutionary party. And that is a huge problem. Because if you're going to have a revolution, you really need a revolutionary party. Ideally, you also need a charismatic leader, and they don't have anybody in that capacity either. So they're basically struggling to hold it together against a military, which as I said, is extremely united and extremely... It's cohesive, operationally, and it's united, politically. There's been talk since the coup, of, could there be a coup within the coup? Could anybody try and take down senior General Min Aung Hlaing, who is basically running the military? And in my opinion, I've been following the Burmese military for several decades now, this is wishful thinking. This is a military that's going to hold together. It's an institution which quintessentially believes that the destiny of the country is in its hands. You probably heard the quip, which came originally from Pakistan, " Most countries have an army, some armies have a country." Right? And that started in Pakistan, with the Pakistan army. But what the Myanmar military has done, is put that quip on steroids. This is a military which feels, at a very visceral level, that the destiny of Myanmar is in its hands. It must hold the country together, because of all these centrifugal forces that I've been talking about. And that gives it a ruthlessness and it gives it a sense of mission, which is both impressive and extremely dangerous. And that's why we're seeing a lot of the level of violence, and indeed the unwillingness to compromise, that has been only escalating since the coup in 2021.

Kate Cox: Going back to the geostrategic dimensions of the conflict that you mentioned earlier. So China is often talked about as one of the biggest external players. What would you say are China's interest in the conflict? And what is its level of involvement?

Tony: Well, you're quite right, Kate. China is absolutely, and almost by default... Well, not entirely by default. So if you look at the potential external players, you're looking at ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which is very much divided on Myanmar, can't come up with any particular strategy. And if it could, would find it very difficult to implement because it's 10 different nations, et cetera, et cetera. Then you're looking at Bangladesh and India, which have pretty much recognized the military government, gone along with the military government, but if you like, without much enthusiasm. And the Bangladeshis, in particular, are, as you can imagine, very much focused on the Rohingya issue on their border, which is a small border. So basically if you take ASEAN/ Thailand, India, Bangladesh, out of the equation, you're left with China. And as you've suggested, China does have huge stakes in Myanmar. It has issues of border security, which are always very much to the fore. And I often remind friends that you should never forget that it was not that long ago, it was in the 1950s, in particular, which in the Chinese scope of time is not long, that the CIA was funding and arming nationalist groups in northeastern Myanmar to destabilize Yunnan province in China. People tend to forget that sort of history. So the Chinese are, perennially, concerned with border security, but Myanmar, to them, has become much, much more than that. It's become a real focus of cross- border trade, which runs to billions of dollars a year. Assuming it is running, which, right now it's not. And that's a problem. So we're talking trade, we're talking investment in the Myanmar economy. And not least, we're talking connectivity from southwestern China, from Yunnan province, to the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean region. And that connectivity is best summed up in the term China- Myanmar Economic Corridor, or CMEC, which is a, essentially, imagined corridor. It hasn't come to fruition yet, except for the fact that there are oil and gas pipelines which run the length of that corridor, from Yunnan all the way down to Rakhine State, on the Bay of Bengal, and to a particular port in Rakhine State, called Kyaukpyu. For China, this belt and road connectivity with the Indian Ocean region, is massively important. And as people are inclined to point out, the potential for a Chinese port, such as Kyaukpyu, or Chinese run port, they have a special economic zone there, which they're trying to build, in a context of war, which is not easy, but they are looking at Kyaukpyu as the Indian Ocean, or the Bay of Bengal, end of this corridor. And in that context, of course, it's quite easy to see the potential for not only tankers to be arriving at Kyaukpyu and for oil to be flowing north to Yunnan, that's happening now, but also potentially military naval port facilities. Let's put it like that. So Kyaukpyu, as part of the so- called string of pearls, Cambodia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and then Gwadar, in Pakistan, at the other end of this Indian Ocean potential network of Chinese naval bases. So yeah, as I've said, for China, the implications of what's happened in Myanmar are hugely important. And I throw in something else here, which I think is worth mentioning. What happened when the Myanmar military decided to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, and stage their coup, this was not something which was greeted with any enthusiasm by the Chinese. They'd been doing pretty good business, particularly on the whole question of CMEC and the economic corridor, to the Bay of Bengal. They'd been doing good business with Aung San Suu Kyi's civilian government, and things were looking relatively rosy. Progress was being made. Xi Jinping made a state visit in 2020. Things were moving. And then, bless their souls, the Myanmar military blew it all up by seizing back the power that they feared they would lose under another even more electorally successful government, run by Aung San Suu Kyi. The Chinese have been looking at the Myanmar military with inaudible. These guys have not made life any easier, for all their numerous projects in and through Myanmar. And that's very much the case today. However, that situation broadly changed at the end of 2023, in the beginning of 2024, when a fairly impressive military offensive by three of these ethnic armed groups, and I won't bore you with the details of their names, but two of them based in the northeast, one of them based in the west, these three groups staged a military offensive, which, broadly speaking, reached the gates of Mandalay, over a period of months. So they came out of the hills and down into the center of the country, down onto the plains. And at that point, the survivability of the military regime, for the first time, was really being called into question. Not just by the people of Myanmar, but by international observers, not least, the Chinese. And at that point, the Chinese realized that they need to step up. And if they were to avoid a situation in which Myanmar totally fragments, and in their view, becomes a complete dog's breakfast, in which none of their projects are going to work, they needed to step up to the plate, and to increase support for the regime. Which is exactly what we've seen happen since, basically, foreign minister Wang Yi made a visit to NAPIDOR in August 2024. And since then, support has increased, across the board, both in terms of military hardware, and also in terms of diplomatic face, of allowing Min Aung Hlaing, who laid, for the first two, three years, held at arms distance, allowing him to visit China. And recently he had a meeting in Moscow earlier this month with Xi Jinping. So this is big face for the little man, and it matters a lot. So the Chinese, now, have basically thrown their weight behind this regime. And how that works out is going to be hugely important, because it's not a guarantee that this regime is going to survive. And if it doesn't survive, the Chinese run the risk, not only of losing all their assets, but of losing whatever popularity they might've had in Myanmar, before this mess.

Kate Cox: Indeed. Sean, was there anything you wanted to add on the geostrategic dimensions of the conflicts, or the balance of power internally?

Sean Corbett: Yeah, that's fascinating stuff. And I think you can almost look at this, from a strategic perspective, as a version of the new great game if you like. So there's two elements, for me anyway, from a Chinese perspective. The one is actually internal stability and security. So it's often missed out that China has its own internal issues. It's got lots of borders with lots of people, and the last thing it wants is for any disruption to actually spill over. So the contagion word, that I quite often use. It's in their interests to have stable neighbors and stable partners. So that's that side of things, I think. And then the external one is, it's all about regional dominance for China. Always has been, and that continues. And of course, they're not the only players, though. I noticed that the Russians are, as always, trying to engage in diplomacy. India's already been mentioned as well. So these things are never as simple as they appear to be, but it's all about, both internal stability, but the Chinese ambition to have regional, and indeed, global dominance.

Tony: Yeah, if I may add something to that, Sean? I think you put your finger on the two key elements. One is internal stability, which comes down to, if you like, border stability, or cross border blowback from conflict in Myanmar. But the other thing is, and I think it's very topical in terms of what's been happening recently, and it's very much worth underscoring in this conversation, and that is the capacity of Myanmar to suck in China much further than it really would be wise for it to go. And recently, and you wouldn't know this unless you are following Myanmar fairly closely, but recently the Chinese, essentially, twisted the arm, in a pretty blatant manner, of one of these ethnic resistance groups, which was very much behind the offensive of late 2023 and 2024, that I mentioned earlier, to vacate a very important city in northern Shan State, called Lashio. Now Lashio, they captured in July, last year, in a month of very bitter fighting against the military regime, in which they would've lost hundreds of men, dead. Maybe more than that, maybe 1, 000, but eventually they captured it. What's happened recently, over the course of this year, but it came to fruition last month, is that the Chinese have told this faction that, " You will surrender the city, that you spent a month and hundreds of lives capturing, back to the military. And if you don't, we are going to squeeze your, what's coming across the border." And this is a group based on the border, that have communities on the border. " If you don't essentially do what we're telling you, things are going to get very bad for you." So what happened last month, was that this particular group pulled out of Lassio and turned it back to the military, who marched back in without firing a shot. Now, this has never happened before. This represents the potential, what I'm looking at is, a potential for really dangerous Chinese overreach. They can get sucked into this quagmire a lot further than they might have originally intended to go. And at the same time as what I've described, you've also got the Chinese setting up private military companies to look after their assets down in Kyaukpyu, on the Bay of Bengal coast. Where, as conflict increases, what starts off as a private military company, naturally manned by former PLA guys, could end up as something much more than that. Not because they necessarily want to take over chunks of Rakhine State, but because they are supposedly looking after Chinese assets, which are coming under pressure. So yeah, the potential for China to get sucked in further than it needs to be, is real. And it's something I personally keep a very close eye on.

Kate Cox: So looking to the future then, where do you think the conflict is going? And what sort of influence do you think actors like China will have? Are we likely to see a resolution anytime soon, and what would it take to break the stalemate in Myanmar?

Tony: Well, as far as a resolution anytime soon goes, the answer is very simply, no, it's not going to happen. I'm looking basically at two very broad brush scenarios. One, is a scenario in which one of the main ethnic armed groups has the capacity and intention, essentially, to move into the center of the country. And the group I'm talking about is called the Arakan Army, which, over the course of 2024, essentially took control of the whole of Rakhine State, where it's from. The military drove them out, except for the capital city, Sittwe, and Kyaukpyu, the port city that I mentioned, which is still under regime control. So the AA, the Arakan Army, is sitting on a big chunk of turf, which they control. 30,000 troops, minimum. And if you look at the map, if you look at where Rakhine is, and its proximity to the Ayeyarwady Valley, which is the industrial heartland of Myanmar, and also to the Ayeyarwady Delta, which is the rice basket of Myanmar, this is a group which has the military clout, the geographical vantage, and the military cohesion, as a single group, not divided into different factions, or whatever, to make a real difference. So if the Arakan Army were to move, in a very strategic sense, into the Myanmar heartland, that could trigger a situation where other groups, both PDFs from the Burma majority, but also ethnic allies of the AA, all essentially weighed in, and given the vulnerabilities of the military, in terms of being overstretched badly, on demand, that could trigger something, which is difficult to see exactly what it might be, but it's not inconceivable that the regime could start to break up itself. So that's one broad scenario, which, I think if it were to come to pass, would need to come to pass this year, because the military, given its Russian and Chinese friends, is not anymore getting any weaker. So that's one scenario. The other scenario is that the resistance, essentially the opposition at large, be they ethnic minorities, be they Burma PDFs, be they the shadow national unity government, the whole grab bag, essentially fails to get their act together, to put it very crudely, and what we see is more of the same. Which is ongoing military activity pretty much everywhere, but never actually reaching a tipping point that would push the military back anywhere, that would create a crisis in Napidore. And what will be unfortunate about that scenario is that it could go on for a very long time, because none of these groups are going home tomorrow. They're all well armed, they're riled up. And as I suggested earlier, the Myanmar military is not of the mindset to engage in negotiations. So they're going to continue to fight, and they're going to crush people. And they have the air fire, which is basically their ace in the pack, which they've been using ruthlessly, as listeners may be aware, across the country, against civilians, to make resistance- held areas ungovernable. This sort of descent into chaos, over the coming two, three years, is entirely possible. And were that to take place, then what we started off talking about, in terms of transnational crime, more movement of population out of Burma, the impact in the region, those factors would only gather pace. So in neither case, are we looking at anything approaching a swift resolution of this. We're looking at at least two more years. Best case scenario, two more years' conflict.

Kate Cox: Yep.

Sean Corbett: Just looking at the belligerence, I totally agree with that. I think without getting too doctrinal, a lot of these fairly low intensity conflicts continue for a number of reasons. And a lot of it's about sustainability. It's about how long they can keep themselves going, economically. It's about the ability to rearm and arm themselves, logistics, and of course, it's the manpower as we're seeing in other theaters as well. But then you take those, and those are the tangible things, and it's then into the will to fight. Of course, as you mentioned earlier, Tony, the belligerence, the opposition, is not necessarily united, but they're united against the military, et cetera, et cetera.

Tony: Exactly.

Sean Corbett: So their will to fight is huge, as is the military's. But no side, I don't think, are going to be able to commit decisive power, unless there's a third party comes in and actually supports them. So I totally agree with that.

Tony: Yeah, what you're saying, and it's an overused term these days, but if you're looking at the Burma majority actors here, which is the military on one side and the PDFs on the other, this is existential, right? One or other side is coming down. Either the PDFs get slowly crushed by the military or the PDFs, with the help of powerful ethnic allies, overthrow the military. It's pretty much that simple, in the long run.

Kate Cox: So taking a step back from conflict developments, and looking at your tradecrafts and the research environments, what would you say are the main open source challenges for analysts and reporters researching this conflict? And how do you make your assessment?

Tony: The challenges are multi- fold. One of them obviously is the linguistic, right? Because a lot of the good... There's a lot of reporting coming out of Myanmar, by courageous Myanmar journalists, who continue to work under really difficult circumstances. It's not Gaza, but it's certainly not easy. But very, very, very few analysts or journalists from outside, foreign journalists, speak Burmese. And I don't speak Burmese, so I basically need to rely on what I can get translated, and what is in the English language. Which, there's a considerable amount of reporting coming out of Myanmar, in English. So I rely, to a large degree, on, more than I'm actually comfortable with, on monitoring. So sitting behind a computer like the rest of the world, and sort of monitoring this stuff from a distance, but also getting up to the border, occasionally across the border, and talking to people who are involved in the fight. And also, we have Chiang Mai, which is, as listeners are doubtless aware, a big city in northern Thailand, which, for the conflict in Burma, has become, what I can remember Peshawar used to be for the conflict in Afghanistan, right? Peshawar, in Pakistan, it's where all the groups and all the intelligence operatives mix and exchange opinions. So Chiang Mai is a good place to visit, reasonably regularly, the border at Mae Sot, occasionally across the border, but not far across the border. So yeah, and of course, I have contacts inside that I can talk to on WhatsApp and signal and other things. So yeah, it's a mix.

Kate Cox: Great. Thanks, Sean.

Sean Corbett: Yeah, I was just going to say actually, Tony, that your degree of detail and understanding and knowledge about this is to be commended. Absolutely. And that brings a few of the tradecraft issues into effect for me. Firstly, it requires expertise that understands the culture, the history, the background, before you can make proper assessments. So this is not the sort of subject you can go in, start reading yourself, and go, " Oh yeah, I know what's going on." So there's that bit. And it's a very challenging intelligence target for me, and that's partly because of the lack of access. Going back to the military times, this inaudible is going to be really hard because of the lack of access. Imagery, intelligence, commercial satellite imagery, is going to be useful up to a point, particularly when you're doing things like battle damage assessment, as I would know it. But equally, with the terrain and the relatively low level nature of the conflict, means it's quite hard to actually follow that tactically, certainly tactically, and even strategically, to a point. And SOCMINT, all our social media intelligence, yes, you've got your sources, absolutely brilliant, but I suspect, and I don't know, but I suspect the internet connectivity, and even the phone connectivity, in Myanmar is patchy. Now as to what that tends to do is, mean that you're going to get certain blobs of sentiment analysis, and all the rest of it, in certain areas, but not others. And there's a danger with that, unless you've got the background that you do, of sort of skewing the intelligence in some way. So really, what we're talking about is human, an effective human, with all the pros and cons that comes with. Now obviously you wouldn't call it humans, but it's basically dealing with people, and there are pros and cons to both of those. So the pros really are, dealing with people, you can really reveal the intent, as well as just the capability, and get into some of that granularity that you've been talking about, in terms of local culture and context, sentiment analysis, all that sort of stuff. Now, the downside, of course, with all humans, is that you have to validate who it is you're speaking to, what their motivation for speaking to you is. Is it money, is it cultural, is it political, ideological, et cetera, et cetera? And so you've got to weigh all that, and validate what it is that you hear, and do all the normal tradecraft stuff that, Kate, you and I do on a daily basis, in terms of weighing particular intelligence, coming up with the inaudible, et cetera, et cetera. So this makes it a really fascinating and difficult target for me.

Kate Cox: So we're almost up on time here, but as always, we'll wrap up with a key takeaway from you both from the discussion today. So Sean, I'll come to you first.

Sean Corbett: I'll just reiterate what I just said, actually, that despite the fact that you may have a nation that is very hard to access, from intelligence perspective, open source intelligence, in its various forms, can be used to come up with quite a detailed understanding and analysis of what is going on. So that's my takeaway.

Kate Cox: Great. Thanks, Sean. How about you, Tony?

Tony: Yeah, I'll sort of follow on from what Sean said. I find one of the biggest challenges I have... Or put it this way, my job is essentially to try and extract an overall strategic picture of where this might be going from a mass of itsy bitsy little pieces of information, which come in from a very complex conflict, which covers a very wide area. So that's my personal sort of challenge. A takeaway is, and I hate to end on a less than positive note, but we're four years into this, and I have a feeling that we haven't seen anything yet. So, yeah, I fear this is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.

Kate Cox: Thank you. I think my takeaway goes back to one of your observations from the beginning of the episode, Tony, on the wider significance of the conflict. So the impacts going beyond Myanmar and focusing on transnational organized crime, poverty, displacement, and their geostrategic elements as well. Thank you very much for sharing your insights and expertise with us today. Thank you both. Thank you, as always, to our listeners, and see you next time.

Tony: My pleasure, Kate. Good to see you, Sean. And all the best.

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