NOTE: I made an questionable statement regarding the legality of the military takeover in this article, and I have issued a minor correction.
The government wasn’t getting any of this money anyway. Certainly the military wasn’t. That all got cut in 2017, when Mike Pompeo accused the country of “genocide” of his sweet, sweet Islamic terrorists.
The Biden administration declared Tuesday that the Myanmar military’s overthrow of the country’s civilian leadership met the legal definition of a “coup.” The official designation is significant because it restricts U.S. aid to governments that have taken power by military means.
As a result, the United States will move to end the little direct financial aid it offers the country’s government, State Department officials said. They added that U.S. assistance that goes directly to Myanmar’s people, including civil society or persecuted Rohingya refugees, will continue, but that the U.S. will be undertaking a broader review of its aid to the country.
According to a government website on U.S. foreign aid, some $185 million was obligated for Myanmar in fiscal year 2020. State Department officials said little of the U.S. assistance goes directly to the government.
President Joe Biden has a range of economic options available: from imposing targeted sanctions on individual military leaders to broader sanctions that hit industrial sectors or companies where the military has control. Visa restrictions, too, are one way to pressure the generals because such sanctions can be applied to the families of the individuals being targeted — a blow to Myanmar’s military officials who, for example, may have children wanting to study in the United States.
Basically, following the claims of Mike Pompeo, the Biden Jews are claiming that this is a Chinese action against democracy, and are going to try to use this as a sticking point to build up pressure on the Chinese.
Pompeo talks about “our allies in the region,” and I don’t even know what that means. The only ally in the region is Vietnam. I guess Japan and South Korea are in the same region, but they’re pretty far away from Burma.
Vietnam is a “communist dictatorship,” according to their language, modeled after China. The rest of these countries are just going to back off further from the US if they try to starve the Burmese for running their own government as they wish.
But these countries will have to learn to understand: any attempt to restrict democracy is against freedom, it’s against podiums, it’s pure evil.
After all: democracy dies in darkness.
Khing Hnin Wai regularly films her aerobics videos on the empty roads of #Myanmar's capital #Naypyidaw. This week, her backdrop was a military coup.
Follow Khing Hnin Wai on Facebook: https://t.co/PYPWthuRAT pic.twitter.com/rmhirk2GtZ
— Mathias Peer (@mpeer) February 2, 2021