Burma

Much reporting on Burma reflects the mistaken impression that things have changed dramatically and for good.  Yet last Saturday, three activists were arrested in connection with a rally outside the Chinese embassy in Rangoon against a Chinese-sponsored copper mine.

In this footage from CNN, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appears to fall asleep during President Barack Obama's Burma speech:

President Obama’s trip to Southeast Asia will take him to Thailand, Cambodia, and Burma. Relations with Thailand and Cambodia are relatively static, thanks to the former’s historic alliance with the U.S. and despite the latter’s terrible human rights record. Burma, on the other hand, is in the midst of change, with the beginnings of a potential transition to democracy.

President Obama heads abroad Saturday for a four-day visit to Thailand, Burma, and Cambodia. One assumes the president was going to add on to this trip a visit U.S. troops in Afghanistan, which would certainly be the fitting and proper thing to do.

President Barack Obama will travel to Burma, as well as other countries in Asia, the White House announced. 

Secretary Clinton had nothing but glowing remarks for Malaysia’s leadership when she stopped there in November of last year.  “We already have a strong partnership based on common values like respect for cultural diversity, pluralism, religious tolerance… We know that Malaysia is a leader in this region…. [and is] increasingly being looked to as both a thought leader and a model globally,” Clinton said at the time.

In its Friday afternoon news dump before Labor Day weekend, the White House announced that President Obama had invited the ten leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to join him for a summit in New York on September 24.  This will be the second U.S.-ASEAN summit, and the first to be held in the U.S.

After the Obama administration announced a new policy of "engagement" with odious military regimes last year, Burma went back to relative obscurity. Engagement yielded the predictable result (nothing), and other issues -- namely various manifestations of uncouth behavior emanating from Beijing - took over as the spangliest thing on the Asian landscape in recent months.  But while attention was focused elsewhere, Burma's malignant generals have steadily worked to establish themselves as an ever greater threat to regional peace and stability, and an even heavier blight on the Burmese people.

After one year in office, the Obama administration's foreign policy has been defined by an odd role reversal. The rogues gallery of the world, from Burma to North Korea to Iran to Russia to China, have been largely embraced by the White House and State Department --while relations with key democratic allies, like Great Britain and the liberated Eastern Bloc, are increasingly strained.