Adam Castillo, a former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Myanmar who had lobbied for sanctions relief in exchange for US, was released in recent days after spending over three months in detention.
In the same week, Time magazine’s Charlie Campbell sat down with Senior General Min Aung Hlaing in Naypyitaw. The coup leader, now calling himself president after December and January’s sham elections, said he had treated Aung San Suu Kyi “extremely leniently” and urged the United States and other Western countries to rethink sanctions.
It was his first face-to-face interview with a major Western outlet since the 2021 coup. To be fair to Time, the interview was no puff piece. It described the military dictatorship in plain, critical terms.
But the interview’s occurrence arguably mattered more than its content: a democracy-toppling soldier still struggling for legitimacy at home and abroad had appeared as “president” in one of America’s best-known news publications.
Time’s exclusive did not happen in a vacuum. Since July 2025, the junta has retained the Washington lobbying firm DCI Group on a US$3 million-a-year contract to boost the beleaguered regime’s profile.
This year, Foreign Agents Registration Act filings showed Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant, receiving $50,000 a month through that arrangement to help “rebuild” relations with Washington. It’s unclear how those lobbying funds have been used to coax and generate media coverage favorable to the generals in US news outlets.
But the release of an American citizen and Min Aung Hlaing’s interview are pieces of a wider Naypyitaw campaign to reopen closed doors in Washington.
Pressure without disengagement
Since the coup, Washington has taken meaningful measures to punish Myanmar’s military for toppling democracy. The BURMA Act passed with bipartisan support, and sanctions and assistance programs helping the anti-coup opposition expanded.
Yet the resistance still has not received some of the non-lethal technology it has repeatedly sought, including advanced early-warning systems against airstrikes and broader protective equipment.
Diplomatically, Washington lowered its in-country representation below ambassador level. Commercially, however, the relationship never disappeared. Some American brands remain visible, while trade continues even though government-to-government engagement under the Trade and Investment Framework Agreement is suspended. In 2025, US-Myanmar trade in goods and services still totaled $1.1 billion despite the sanctions.
The deeper issue is geography. Myanmar borders China, links Southeast Asia with South Asia and opens onto the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean – a location whose resources and trade routes matter to both Beijing and Washington. American policy, then, cannot be read through the lens of democracy and human rights alone.
That tension between strategic interest and democratic principle dates to the Cold War. In the early 1950s, the CIA backed Kuomintang remnants operating from Shan State against communist China, creating a sovereignty crisis for then civilian leader U Nu’s government and driving Burma to the United Nations.
Washington later pressed the KMT forces to leave, but the episode showed how quickly and easily Burma could become part of a larger strategic contest.
After Ne Win seized power in a 1962 coup, relations with the US cooled but did not disappear. President Lyndon Johnson received him at the White House in 1966. A declassified State Department memorandum described the visit as a “gesture of support” for Burma’s neutrality and independence, while noting that a small US military-assistance relationship had continued since 1958.
Then came the drug war. Under a 1974 narcotics-control agreement, Washington supplied six Bell 205 helicopters to Burma, officially for drug suppression. The program expanded over the following years and ended after the military’s bloody crackdown on democracy protesters in 1988.
The helicopters were not simply a symbol of cooperation: Accounts from the period say they were also used in military operations against ethnic armed groups fighting for autonomy against the military regime.
The pattern changed after the 8-8-88 crackdown. Washington imposed sanctions on the SLORC and later the SPDC, the successive military juntas, while the Drug Enforcement Administration kept a narrow channel of cooperation open.
A 1998 State Department report said the DEA shared intelligence and carried out joint investigations with Burmese counternarcotics authorities. The same report noted that the country’s drug-control apparatus was effectively under the Directorate of Defense Services Intelligence, then headed by spymaster chief Khin Nyunt.
There was no full normalization and no material aid or training at that stage, but operational cooperation endured. After political reforms began in 2012, those channels quickly widened. By 2015, the Obama administration had issued a national-interest waiver allowing counternarcotics assistance and direct engagement with Burmese police.
From armed struggle to reform
The 1990s also brought another kind of American influence. Gene Sharp, the scholar of non-violent resistance, worked with Burmese activists on the Thai border and wrote “From Dictatorship to Democracy” at the request of Burmese exiles. His ideas later traveled far beyond Myanmar.
By the 2000s, Western support had increasingly shifted toward civil society, humanitarian work, capacity building, and NGO-based politics rather than armed struggle.
Among many border-based activists, that shift changed the character of the opposition: it strengthened the non-violent political space but did not dislodge a military that remained strong on the battlefield and well positioned geopolitically.
Then, in what became known as the reform era, Washington shifted course. After the 2008 Constitution and the 2010 election, Washington moved from isolation toward what it called “pragmatic engagement.”
Aung San Suu Kyi and her battered and persecuted National League for Democracy (NLD) party entered the parliamentary process, sanctions eased gradually and the Obama administration cautiously opened military-to-military contact around human rights and civilian control.
The wager was that engagement could reinforce reform without surrendering leverage. In 2013, the State Department itself described the approach as “carefully calibrated military-to-military engagement,” aimed at exposing Burmese officers to civilian control, human rights and professional military norms. It was a cautious policy, not an embrace of the generals. But the 2021 coup showed how little institutional change had taken root inside the military.
New Trump terms
Today, Min Aung Hlaing is again testing how far Washington’s strategic interests can pull policy away from isolation. Rare earths, scam compounds, trade and China all give his government talking points suited to the Trump administration’s more transactional approach.
So far, the pressure architecture built to punish the 2021 coup remains largely intact. US sanctions still target the military, the Ministry of Defense and regime-controlled banks, while US persons are prohibited from providing certain financial services to the state-owned Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE).
Export controls on military and sensitive technology remain in place. More than $1 billion in Myanmar foreign reserves at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has also remained beyond the junta’s reach since the coup.
Min Aung Hlaing’s appeal for sanctions relief in his Time interview shows that US pressure still bites. It also suggests that the junta’s isolation carries a real cost, even as his coup regime searches for another route back to Washington.
The larger lesson is not that the United States has always backed Myanmar’s generals. It has not. The lesson is that American strategic interest in Myanmar has persistently survived periods of sanctions, estrangement and political ruptures like the 2021 coup.
For Myanmar’s democratic forces, that means US support cannot simply be assumed to follow automatically from shared democratic language – Washington has always had other interests too.
Min Aung Hlaing’s appearance in Time is, therefore, more than a media moment. Naypyitaw is once again knocking on doors that lead to Washington. In 2011, Washington’s re-engagement came with conditions and a democratic script. In 2026, Naypyitaw is testing whether Washington might reopen political engagement on more transactional terms.
So, are the Americans coming back to Myanmar? The answer is that they never completely left and yesterday’s terms for re-engagement are not today’s under Trump.
Nyein Chan Aye is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist writing on Myanmar, China, the U.S., and regional affairs.
