Ty Tan — September 7, 2026
One capital at a time. That’s the strategy Burmese President, Min Aung Hlaing, has been using to speak with leaders across Southeast Asia. President Hlaing’s recent three-day state visit to Vietnam has been part of his broader strategy to consolidate regional ties and normalize relations with ASEAN. Despite his best efforts, Myanmar remains barred from ASEAN’s high-level summits, as the path to diplomatic reconciliation has been slow.
In February 2021, a coup occurred in Myanmar, ousting the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi and triggering today’s ongoing civil war. With its numerous, long-running insurgencies, this event was no surprise to regional analysts. In response to this, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) delivered its Five-Point Consensus to Myanmar to do the following: stop violence, start dialogue between concerned parties, deliver humanitarian aid, appoint an ASEAN special envoy, and allow for a visit by the Special Envoy to Myanmar. Myanmar, as expected, was reluctant to agree, leading ASEAN to take the unusual response of barring the junta (coup-government) from attending ASEAN summits. By doing this, Myanmar was effectively a regional pariah, unable to properly interact with the regional organization that governs the region.
For four years, relations remained shallow until the junta’s election in December 2025. The election is widely interpreted as an attempt to legitimize military rule through sham elections. Nonetheless, ASEAN nations were not so quick to dismiss the results. Indeed, while ASEAN declined to send an official observer mission, the nations of Laos and Cambodia pledged and sent their own observers, demonstrating a clear division in ASEAN. Because ASEAN is slow, its passive “ASEAN Way” limited the bloc and hurt its reputation for centrality. As a result, President Hlaing’s recent actions appear to be taking advantage of this very fact.
President Hlaing’s visit to Vietnam marks the seventh country he’s visited since his presidency began, among others like Russia and Thailand. By taking an active foreign travel campaign, President Hlaing is looking to further legitimize himself as an “elected” leader by building trust in Southeast Asia. In his meetings in Vietnam, he met with President To Lam, the third major Southeast Asian leader to meet with President Hliang in a matter of months. While Myanmar’s return to ASEAN meetings still appears far off, taking bilateral meetings is a valuable step for Myanmar, as it allows them to deepen ties with ASEAN nations despite their obvious exclusion for summits. This, of course, has created backlash, where various rights groups have called nations that host President Hlaing as “complicit” in the junta’s atrocities.
Five years on, where does that leave the state of Myanmar and peace? On July 12th, ASEAN foreign ministers met their Burmese junta counterparts at an “informal meeting” in Bangkok, the first in-person Foreign Minister-level meeting since Myanmar was barred in 2021. The meeting failed to yield any actionable results, and is a further sign that simple diplomacy won’t be enough. A persistent policy of non-interfence has actually forced ASEAN to pull back its own expectations. Unlike its prior Five-Point Consensus, all ASEAN wants now is some progress on a permanent cessation of violence, the release of all political detainees—including Aung San Suu Kyi—and unrestricted humanitarian access. Still, the junta remains hostile. President Hlaing has called out ASEAN member states for “discriminating” against Myanmar, and has called for the Five-Point Consensus to be reviewed. Inevitably, the result is that Myanmar can’t reach a consensus with ASEAN despite lowered expectations.
As Myanmar moves toward continued oppression and violence, ASEAN’s lowered expectations and non-interference model have failed in the face of a leader who wishes to re-establish Myanmar’s regional authority. Until either Myanmar yields or develops its own peace plan, the world can expect shaky relations between Myanmar and its regional neighbors.
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