ASEAN Beat | Diplomacy | Southeast Asia

Myanmar’s Military-backed President Ticks Cambodia Off His Diplomatic Bucket List

Min Aung Hlaing leaves Phnom Penh after a two-day visit aimed at shoring up his regime’s regional legitimacy.

Myanmar’s President Min Aung Hlaing (left) shakes hands with Cambodian Senate President Hun Sen during a meeting at the Cambodian Senate in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Sep. 11, 2026.

For decades, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) has put forward a face of civility, a unified approach to regional politics made up of countries that were rapidly advancing, educated, and deserved a say in global politics.

It’s an image welcomed in the West and elsewhere by governments that prefer to negotiate with Southeast Asian countries through a multilateral framework with ASEAN as the central power, as opposed to bilaterally with each individual country.

As a trade bloc, ASEAN is a success story, and the better face of ASEAN still holds true for the maritime countries, where democracy has at times struggled, been compromised, but also thrived.

But the bloc’s moral backbone has consistently been tested by most mainland countries and the desires of their ruling elites for power and impunity, which has cemented Southeast Asia’s unsavory reputation as a land best suited for the powerful.

In recent years, this has been evident in the tens of thousands of pages dished up by civil society groups linking organized crime, scam compounds, and human traffickers to tycoons, politicians, and government officials from Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos.

But in recent months, Chinese- and Thai-backed efforts to find a podium for Min Aung Hlaing as the legitimate president of Myanmar and as one of 11 acceptable faces for ASEAN, from whose summits he is still barred, have provided mainland Southeast Asia with another political eyesore.

Since emerging as regime president from an election widely derided as rigged, Min Aung Hlaing has itemized a bucket list of friendly countries by touring Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam – its four neighbors in mainland Southeast Asia – as well as China, India, Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.

Min Aung Hlaing’s tour was made that bit easier by the Trump administration, given its senseless decision late last year to ignore the realities of a brutal civil war and declare Burma a safe country to return to while terminating Temporary Protected Status for 4,000 people living in the United States.

But before rolling out the red carpet these countries could have thought for themselves and demanded further proof of life or preferably the release of jailed elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who Min Aung Hlaing ousted in the 2021 coup that tipped their country into conflict.

They could have........

© The Diplomat