Regime's Renewed Lobbying Drive Tests Shifting US Policy Under Trump

The Irrawaddy

Predicting US foreign policy has become increasingly difficult under President Donald Trump, who frequently shifts his positions and introduces unexpected perspectives—and that is precisely why anything can happen when it comes to Washington’s engagement with various actors on the Myanmar scene. What is clear, so far, is that the United States is moving away from defending human rights and being the primary donor to Myanmar, funding independent media, local civil society, agricultural projects, and health initiatives. It is uncertain what the new priorities are, but two factors stand out in the public debate in the United States.

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The first is on-the-ground realpolitik. It is believed by certain influential lobbyists in Washington that excessive pressure on the still-ruling Myanmar  military will only drive Naypyitaw deeper into China’s strategic embrace. The other is based on strategic as well as economic considerations. Myanmar remains one of the world’s largest producers of rare earth minerals—which the United States needs for its high-tech industries—with most of it currently exported to China. Reuters reported on July 29, 2025: “The Trump administration has heard competing proposals that would significantly alter longstanding US policy toward Myanmar, with the aim of diverting its vast supplies of rare earth minerals away from strategic rival China.”

In mid-2025, Myanmar’s Ministry of Information signed a US$3-million, one-year contract with the DCI Group, a powerful Washington-based public affairs and lobbying firm with deep ties to the Republican establishment. More recently, long-time  political strategist and conservative firebrand Roger Stone, a close ally of Trump, was brought on as a consultant to the DCI Group. The Guardian reported on May 8 that Stone is being paid $50,000 a month to assist in efforts to “rebuild relations between Washington and Myanmar’s military-backed government.” The focus will be on “trade, natural resources and humanitarian relief.”

This is hardly the first time the Myanmar military has turned to a PR firm in an attempt to repair its relationship with Washington. But, because previous efforts were largely unsuccessful, the military has become more experienced and may have learned from its past mistakes. It all began when the then junta, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), signed a contract with Van Kloberg and Associates in August 1991—three years after the bloody suppression of the 1988 pro-democracy uprising and at a time when the Myanmar military had become an international pariah.

How the connection with Van Kloberg was established remains unverified, but it happened to be one of Washington’s most notorious PR companies. It specialized in defending despotic regimes and, over the years, Van Kloberg represented Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Liberian coup maker Samuel Doe, Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu, and Mobutu Sese Seko, then dictator of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). In 1996, he represented apparel manufacturers in Honduras who were accused of sexual abuse and using child labor. But, hardly surprisingly, none of the firm’s efforts yielded positive results for its clients. Sick and broke, the founder, Edward von Kloberg III (he used the Dutch “Van” instead of “von” in the name of his company to sound less German, which he was) committed suicide in 2005 by jumping from the walls of Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome.

Next in turn was Jefferson Waterman, then headed by Ann Wrobleski, the main architect of the much-lampooned Reagan-era “Just Say No” campaign against narcotics in the US. Ironically, she served as assistant secretary of state from 1986 to 1989 when Ronald Reagan was the president and, at that time, was instrumental in denying Myanmar US anti-narcotics aid following the 1988 massacres. She had then argued that Myanmar was unlikely to make progress in fighting narcotics until there is “a government enjoying greater credibility and support among the Burmese people than the current military regime in Rangoon.”

Yet, in February 1998, Jefferson Waterman undertook to improve SLORC’s image for a fee of $400,000 a year. Wrobleski now considered Myanmar “a beautiful and exotic country” and parroted the generals’ claim that the US was engaging in terrorism by supporting pro-democracy groups outside the country. But such a sudden change of mind did not help the SLORC’s reputation, nor did attempts by Khin Shwe, the CEO of the Zaykabar Construction Company, which hired another US firm, Bain and Associates, with the aim of promoting a more favorable image of the Myanmar regime. Founded by former television reporter Jackson Bain, the outfit brought then Foreign Minister Ohn Gyaw to New York for a rare meeting with Western reporters in a hotel in Manhattan. But none of the assembled journalists seemed to believe his account of the supposedly booming Myanmar economy.

Khin Shwe eventually found himself alienated from both sides of Myanmar’s political divide. In 2007, he was added along with around 100 junta-affiliated Myanmar businessmen to the US Special Designated Nationals list, his name removed only with the lifting of sanctions in October 2016. But then, in the aftermath of the 2021 coup, he too was arrested and sent to Insein Prison along with his son Zay Thiha, apparently following a conflict over a failed building development on military-owned land in Yangon. Khin Shwe was pardoned by the junta and released in September 2024, reportedly on health grounds.

In 2002, the DCI group made its first attempt at lobbying on behalf of Myanmar’s generals. It was paid $348,000 to serve as their consultants for a period of eight months, but the attempt flopped dramatically. In 2008, The Atlantic quoted DCI’s then CEO Doug Goodyear as saying, “It was clear that we couldn’t accomplish what we set out to accomplish. We were going to try to make relations between the two countries [Myanmar and the US] more normal. It was very clear that we couldn’t do what we wanted to do.” Just before the interview in The Atlantic was published, Newsweek had published an article about DCI’s past as an image consultant for the Myanmar junta, and together the revelations had become so embarrassing for Goodyear that he resigned as a volunteer for Republican Senator John McCain’s campaign for the 2008 presidential election.

For over two decades, no more efforts were made to convince the outside world that Myanmar’s  military rulers are actually humane and peace-loving philanthropists—until, in March 2021, the new junta, the State Administration Council (SAC), hired Dickens & Madson, a firm headed by Israeli-Canadian lobbyist Ari Ben-Menashe, to promote “the real situation in the country” and communicate with the United States and other nations that had “misunderstood them,” according to documents filed with the US Justice Department.

One of Ben-Menashe’s first efforts on behalf of the SAC was to arrange for a CNN camera team to visit Myanmar. It proved a disaster. CNN reporters traveled to Myanmar in April 2021 and managed to interview ordinary people, who condemned the coup and told the team about atrocities the military had committed. In July, Ben-Menashe cut his ties with the junta because US sanctions had made it impossible for him to get paid.

And now, the DCI Group is back, betting they will be more successful this time. And they just might be. Never before have lobbyists been so close to the establishment—including an unpredictable president who, time and again, has shown utter disdain for human and civil rights at home and abroad. He has even bullied traditional allies by threatening to take over Greenland, a sovereign member of the Nordic Council and an autonomous territory within a NATO member, the Kingdom of Denmark. Trump has also repeatedly asserted his intention to “reclaim” the Panama Canal, and he has, most astoundingly, suggested that Canada should become the 51st US state.

In March 1989, a few months after the Myanmar military crushed the pro-democracy uprising and killed thousands of people, Burton Levin, the then US ambassador to Burma, famously said to Keith Richburg of the Washington Post: “Since there are no US bases and very little strategic interest, Burma is one place where the United States has the luxury of living up to its principles.”

That has changed. China has leveraged its  political and economic influence over Myanmar to secure access to the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean while establishing control over the country’s natural resources—all of which means that the US now has, or should have, vital strategic interests in Myanmar as well. Myanmar may currently not be a priority for Trump; he has not even mentioned it as a country he would like to make a “deal” with. But when or if a “deal” is proposed, it will most likely be about rare earth minerals. And with effective lobbying in Washington, it is only a matter of time before that happens. A major part of DCI’s and Stone’s lobbying efforts involve framing Myanmar as an alternative source of critical supply chains for what has been described as “natural resources” to the US—and that the US should secure access to these “natural resources” to mitigate Myanmar’s heavy dependence on Beijing.

Myanmar’s pro-democracy forces, both domestic and in exile, must be prepared for this shift and recognize that a policy of relying on US support for democratic change and human rights belongs to the past. There is a new reality out there, and the US no longer has the “luxury” of being able to “live up to its principles”—assuming that those principles even have a chance to survive under the Trump administration.