A prominent foreign policy initiative in the first year of the Obama administration was a first step to reshape bilateral relations with Myanmar. Long built on rejection of an authoritarian regime, US policy is now moving towards engagement. As the process unfolds, it is worth exploring striking parallels with a major shift launched 40 years ago when the Nixon administration sought to bring in China from the cold. Then, as now, a new president was confronted with bipartisan support for an isolationist stance. In 1969, Richard Nixon inherited a Red China policy that demonised Mao Zedong's Communist regime and allied the US with Chiang Kai-shek's Taiwan. In 2009, Barack Obama was heir to a Burma policy that denounced Senior General Than Shwe's junta and linked the US with Aung San Suu Kyi's democrats. Both presidents knew instinctively that US policy had strong emotional and ideological underpinnings. But both saw that it was not working. In the late 1960s, the result was major policy change. Nixon began to abandon prevalent Red China discourse and talked instead of the People's Republic. National security adviser Henry Kissinger established secret contacts with premier Zhou Enlai . Ping-pong diplomacy took American athletes inside China. A secret trip by Kissinger in July 1971 set up the diplomatic coup of February 1972: Nixon in China. Four decades later, Obama has travelled no more than a fraction of this distance with his Myanmar initiative. In February, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton acknowledged US policy failure and instituted a formal review. In September, state-to-state contacts were re-established in New York. In November, US officials completed an exploratory mission to Myanmar. In response, the ruling generals minimally expanded dialogue channels with Suu Kyi. At this early stage, what lessons Obama might take from Nixon? Clearly there are differences, marked by China's sheer size and influence. But with a population of 55 million and strategic location, Myanmar is not unimportant. Perhaps the one significant distinction in the Myanmar case is a general election promised for 2010, which has no Chinese equivalent. If this results not in confirmation of the junta, but in a bolstering of democratic forces and institutions, Nixonian stratagems will not be required. However if, as seems likely, a darker scenario unfolds and the core elements of an oppressive state remain defiantly in place, then the time will surely come for the US to bite the bullet of direct, high-level engagement aimed at hauling Myanmar into the modern world. The process is unlikely to be pretty. When Nixon and Kissinger dealt with China, they deceived Congress and the American people, discarded a central plank of US foreign policy, and reneged on statehood guarantees made to Taiwan. But the result was stunning. In his Nobel lecture, Obama signalled an openness to new foreign policy ideas. If change does not come from within Myanmar in 2010, Obama should look to the case of Nixon in China for inspiration. Professor Ian Holliday is dean of social sciences at the University of Hong Kong
