The deep roots of Trump’s staying power.
For a brief moment in January 2021, it was possible to imagine that Donald Trump’s days at the apex of American politics were over.
After all, the marriage between Trump and the Republican Party had always been one of convenience. And by the winter of 2021, the latter no longer had much use for the former. Trump had just cost the GOP a winnable election, as his historic unpopularity overwhelmed the advantages of incumbency. He’d then proceeded to put the American republic — and, more relevantly, Republican elites — in mortal danger. By January 6, the GOP had already secured its side of Trump’s Faustian bargain: its promised tax cuts and Supreme Court seats. Now the party could comfortably kick its authoritarian interloper to the curb.
Shortly after the Capitol riot, Mitch McConnell attempted to do just that, declaring Trump personally responsible for an assault on “the rule of law” in the United States, saying from the Senate floor, “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.”
Since then, Trump helped cost Republicans multiple Senate races, got himself held civilly liable for sexual assault and indicted four times, facing 91 criminal charges — and became the GOP’s most likely 2024 presidential nominee. As of this writing, Trump leads his closest primary rival by nearly 50 points in national polls and by 34 points in Iowa.
That an aspiring authoritarian is also the standard-bearer of a major political party is obviously an unfortunate turn of events for democracy. But it’s also a strategic setback for the GOP: Despite her low name recognition, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley polls better against Joe Biden than Trump does. Given the Democratic president’s dismal approval rating and advanced age, a minimally normal-seeming Republican nominee might well win November’s election in a landslide. Trump’s singular toxicity is Biden’s lifeline. Or so the president’s campaign seems to believe.
Nevertheless, judging by the polls, Trump is in a stronger position to win the presidency in November than he was at this time in 2016. And a Trump presidency has never been a more alarming prospect than it is today. In the immediate aftermath of the Capitol riot, Trump disavowed the mob that had violently interrupted Congress’s tally of Electoral College votes. Now, he lionizes the January 6 insurrectionists as “political prisoners.”
Trump entered office in 2017 as a political neophyte with scant understanding of the executive branch. Today, he boasts a comprehensive plan for bending the administrative state to his will. In recent years, right-wing think tanks have recruited a cadre of MAGA loyalists ready to staff a Trumpified civil service and developed blueprints for consolidating his power over federal law enforcement. In court, meanwhile, Trump’s lawyers recently argued that the US president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution unless impeached and convicted by Congress. When asked by a judge whether this meant that a president could order the assassination of a political rival and face no criminal repercussions — so long as he persuaded his allies in Congress to block an impeachment — Trump’s attorneys affirmed that this is indeed their understanding of the law.
The GOP’s failure to break free from Trump constitutes a dereliction of its core duties as a political party. Parties exist, among other things, to organize political conflict in a manner conducive to both their own electoral interests and the maintenance of democratic rule. By most accounts, the Republican old guard has no great fondness for the man who executed a hostile takeover of their party, saddled them with daily political headaches during his time in office, and then instigated an insurrection that nearly got some GOP leaders pummeled, if not killed. Yet McConnell and his allies have proven incapable of steering their party in another direction.
You could attribute this failure to various contingent factors. Perhaps things would have been different if the GOP’s anti-Trump wing hadn’t invested so many resources into Florida’s exceptionally uncharismatic governor, or if Biden’s weak poll numbers hadn’t undermined critiques of Trump’s “electability,” or if Nikki Haley hadn’t stumbled into doing apologetics for the confederacy.
But such contingencies are inadequate to explain the scale of Trump’s polling advantage or, by extension, the depths of the GOP primary electorate’s tolerance for the former president’s authoritarian criminality.
Rather, the Republicans’ inability to oust Trump is a symptom of deep, structural pathologies in American political life — specifically, the decades-long decay of our nation’s political parties and the radicalization of the GOP base.
Over the past half-century, changes in American society have shifted power away from formal party structures and toward donors, political action committees (PACs), issue advocacy groups, and the media. And as the parties have grown institutionally disempowered, they’ve also lost much of their social standing. Today, highly partisan voters are motivated less by affection for their party than by fear and loathing for the other. All this has made it more difficult for party leaders to choose optimal candidates, dictate legislative priorities, and set boundaries on members’ conduct.
Such erosion in party authority helps explain why Republican leaders have struggled to oust a billionaire interloper whom they largely revile. It does not tell us, however, why Republican primary voters are at once so attracted to Trump and so unconcerned by his authoritarian tendencies or legal woes.
To understand the resilience of Trump’s appeal, one must look to the conservative movement’s decades-long cultivation of paranoid outrage, social distrust, and contempt for the give-and-take of democratic politics.
Together, the weakening of America’s political parties and the maniacal recklessness of the conservative movement have brought Trump to the brink of renomination and the United States to the verge of a democratic crisis.
How America’s parties grew hollow
In their new book, The Hollow Parties, political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld chart the decline of America’s major parties and the rise of the modern conservative movement. Schlozman and Rosenfeld persuasively argue that these two trends are deeply intertwined, and that the GOP’s lurch toward authoritarianism is inextricable from both.
For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, US political parties were relatively strong institutions. The Democrats and Republicans were less ideologically coherent and disciplined than their peers in Western Europe, but the two parties exercised considerable autonomy over their internal affairs and boasted strong bonds of affection and loyalty from many of their constituencies. Democratic and Republican leaders could compel a degree of party discipline through their power to dispense patronage and campaign funds, while party officials largely controlled the candidate selection process. Meanwhile, through their urban machines, local chapters, and allied trade unions and civic organizations, the parties were a positive presence in many constituents’ daily lives.
Under these conditions, no one could become a party’s presidential candidate without winning over much of its officialdom, which boasted both formal power and popular influence.
But beginning in the 1970s, the parties’ autonomy and social standing steadily eroded. The upheavals of the ’60s increased tensions between activists and leaders in both parties, as progressives mobilized against Lyndon B. Johnson’s war in Vietnam and conservatives raged at the GOP’s (relatively) liberal northeastern wing. In the face of such internal schisms, both parties struggled to defend the prerogatives of party officials in internal governance and eventually gave rank-and-file voters more sovereignty over candidate selection through state primaries.
In practice, this development weakened state and local party organizations, which no longer had direct authority over nominating contests. It also greatly enhanced the mass media’s influence over politics, since news coverage decisions and advertisements hold more sway in primary elections than they do in smoke-filled rooms.
Around the same time, popular participation in local political parties and other civic groups collapsed. Such institutions had helped tether parties to ordinary constituents. But mass-membership organizations were increasingly displaced by issue-oriented advocacy groups run by educated professionals and accountable only to a narrow donor base.
As television advertisements and polling operations became increasingly central to electoral politics, the cost of campaigns skyrocketed. Congress successfully imposed limits on the amount of money individuals could contribute to political parties, but the Supreme Court barred restrictions on independent political spending. Taken together, these developments transferred funding (and therefore power) away from parties and toward PACs and outside groups that did not answer to party officials.
In Schlozman and Rosenfeld’s view, these developments, among others, have turned the Democrats and Republicans into “hollow parties”: “hard shells … unrooted in communities and unfelt in ordinary people’s day-to-day lives.” In the hollow era of American politics, networks of “unattached paraparty groups, devoid of popular accountability, overshadow formal party organizations at all levels,” while activists and ordinary voters alike harbor less pride or affection for their party than contempt for its rival.
Trump’s initial conquest of the GOP in 2016 and his resilient grip on red America’s loyalties in 2024 are inextricable from the formal parties’ decline. The Republican Party did not choose to give Trump a prominent place in conservative politics. No GOP operative looked at the serially bankrupt, libertine reality star and said, “We should make this guy into a leading spokesperson for the Republican point of view.” Rather, Fox News made that decision because Trump’s “birther” conspiracy theorizing was good for ratings. And once conservative media anointed Trump a tribune of enraged Republicans, the GOP had little capacity to veto his bid for its presidential nomination. The Republican old guard’s attempts to break with Trump after January 6 were halfhearted. But even if McConnell and company had made a more robust effort to oust him, they likely still would have lacked the formal powers and popular legitimacy to break with their voters’ favorite insurrectionist.
And yet, as a glance across the aisle makes clear, the hollowing out of American parties is not sufficient to explain the Trump phenomenon or the GOP’s broader pathologies. In the Democratic Party, hollowness has manifested in frustrated legislative ambitions, declining working-class support, poor message discipline, difficulty setting policy priorities, and an inability to replace Biden with a younger, more popular 2024 standard-bearer. (Democratic elites generally recognize that Biden’s advanced age and poll numbers render him a suboptimal nominee. But since the president can only be replaced through a divisive primary, rather than through a quick negotiation between party officials, Democrats have decided that staying the course is their best bad option.)
Yet the Democratic establishment has nevertheless retained some legitimacy in the eyes of its rank-and-file voters, as its success in marshaling support behind Biden in the 2020 primary demonstrated. More critically, the party has had little difficulty preventing random authoritarians from commandeering its ballot line, or performing Congress’s most basic duties, such as keeping the government funded (a task that seems to perennially confound today’s GOP).
Thus, the GOP’s hollowness explains why its leaders lack the tools to block the nomination of a would-be tyrant who commands more respect in red America than the party itself does. But the weakening of American parties doesn’t tell us why Republican voters have more respect for an authoritarian conman than for their party’s traditional leadership. Broad changes in civic organization, campaign finance rules, and media technology did not force the GOP to embrace a toxic brand of right-wing populism. The conservative movement did.
The conservative movement was born Trumpy
There are many ways to narrate the conservative movement’s decades-long drift toward authoritarianism. A comprehensive account of that phenomenon would require a lengthy book (if not a library aisle) and touch on the backlash to the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, the traumas of deindustrialization, and the post-1970s explosion in income inequality, among myriad other economic and social developments.
And yet, as Schlozman and Rosenfeld emphasize, the qualities that made the conservative movement amenable to Trumpism were present from its inception.
The modern right was born in opposition to the moderate Republicanism of the postwar years. Disenfranchised by a GOP leadership that had made peace with the existence of Social Security, labor unions, and the near-term existence of a communist bloc, the conservative movement’s founding generation harbored contempt for the Republican establishment and a cynical attitude toward political parties as such. After all, in their view, America’s parties had delivered the nation into the tyranny of New Deal liberalism, and much of Eurasia into that of Soviet totalitarianism. (Such conservatives tended to attribute their ideology’s every setback to establishment treachery, rather than to the inevitable give-and-take of democratic politics or limits of American power.)
The conservative movement’s reliance on the cultivation of outrage and apocalyptic paranoia also dates back to its infancy. Many in the movement genuinely believed that the State Department was brimming with communists and that Eisenhower was dragging America down the road to serfdom. But even (relatively) level-headed conservatives recognized the political utility of promoting hysteria. In the 1960s, the advent of direct-mail fundraising expanded the resources available to conservative organizations and issue campaigns. And the right quickly discovered that their prospective donors were far more likely to put a check in the mail once worked up into a frenzy of terror and indignation. As the conservative movement’s “funding father” Richard Viguerie told NPR’s Terry Gross, when it comes to political giving, “people are motivated by anger and fear much more so than positive emotions.”
The right’s contempt for mainstream politics and penchant for catastrophism informed its ruthless approach to political combat. For the movement’s leading functionaries, the headlong pursuit of power took precedence over honesty or social responsibility. Conservative operatives therefore cheered the displacement of formal party committees by unaccountable, dark money PACs that facilitated smear campaigns. As Terry Dolan, co-founder of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, said in 1980, “A group like ours could lie through its teeth and the candidate it helps stays clean.”
Combine these three tendencies — to perennially blame every ideological defeat on a traitorous GOP establishment, to stoke apocalyptic rage about the direction of the country, and to pursue power by any means necessary — and you aren’t far away from a recipe for Trumpism.
The politics of right-wing hysteria don’t age like fine wine
If the conservative movement undermined healthy partisan politics from its outset, the right’s most destructive tendencies grew more destabilizing over time. It was one thing for the right to rage against a genuinely moderate Republican establishment. It was another to slander and delegitimize an already extremely right-wing one. Yet the conservative movement did not forfeit its iconoclastic outlook after it conquered the GOP in the 1980s. Rather, the right carried on attributing every subsequent compromise with political reality and social change as a betrayal by its leaders and grounds for replacing them with more reactionary ones. Now, the leader of the House Republicans is a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus — and, according to some of his colleagues, still a treacherous sellout to the powers that be.
In its early years, conservatives’ cultivation of paranoid rage was at least directed at galvanizing support for concrete policy goals. Viguerie’s direct-mail campaign to preserve US control of the Panama Canal might have histrionically overstated the importance of that objective, but it was genuinely aimed at preserving US sovereignty over the waterway. By contrast, in recent decades, the conservative movement’s most powerful institutions — Fox News and right-wing talk radio — have been principally motivated by the pursuit of high ratings, not policy change. Their promotion of fear and alienation has therefore been untempered by any practical political considerations.
Meanwhile, in the late 20th century, the right’s tactical ruthlessness manifested as a willingness to stoke racial grievances, spread lies, and interfere in Democratic primaries in pursuit of an electoral victory. Today, the right is not merely taking an unscrupulous approach to building majorities, but seeking to wield power in defiance of them.
From the era of Richard Nixon to that of George W. Bush, many white Christian conservatives understood themselves to be a silent (moral) majority whose will was frustrated by an overweening liberal elite. But demographic and cultural change gradually impeded on this self-conception. The election of an African American president, the increasingly unabashed social liberalism of corporate America, and the nation’s steadily declining religiosity have all deepened the conservative base’s sense of dispossession. In some parts of red America, economic decline compounded cultural alienation, as jobs and capital fled small industrial towns for major urban centers.
For the Republican Party, the declining demographic weight of white conservatives was happily mitigated by their coalition’s geographic efficiency. America’s state legislatures, House of Representatives, Electoral College battlegrounds, and Senate all tended to overrepresent white rural areas. And this overrepresentation could be enhanced through gerrymandering and (at least, theoretically) voter restrictions, such as voter ID laws and felon disenfranchisement. Add to this a conservative Supreme Court majority, and Republicans proved capable of exercising significant influence over public policy even as they lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections.
The need to publicly justify this anti-majoritarian power, however, increasingly led conservatives to explicitly critique democratic government — or, more commonly, to suggest that some voters were more equal than others. After a Democrat won the Wisconsin governorship in 2018, Republicans in the state’s heavily gerrymandered legislature voted to transfer various official powers away from the incoming governor and toward itself. The Republican State House speaker Robin Vos justified this power grab by saying, “If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority. We would have all five constitutional officers and we would probably have many more seats in the Legislature.”
The insinuation that real Americans should not have to share power with Democratic constituencies gained a more coherent ideological expression in the “great replacement” narrative, a conspiracy theory that holds that Democrats deliberately flooded the US with obedient foreigners so as to permanently disempower white Americans. As future Trump White House adviser Michael Anton put the point in his infamous 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election,” the “ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.” Tucker Carlson mainstreamed these sentiments, declaring on Fox News that the “worst attack on our democracy in 160 years” had been “the Immigration Act of 1965,” which had “completely changed the composition of America’s voter rolls, purely to benefit the Democratic Party.”
Put all of this together and you’re left with a conservative base that despises the Republican congressional leadership, believes that their most fundamental values and interests are under existential threat, trusts right-wing infotainers more than party officials, and views their nation’s majority party as illegitimate.
Conservatives have too little trust in liberal democracy to recoil from Trump’s attacks on it
In this context, McConnell and his allies had little prospect of persuading the Republican faithful that Trump had disqualified himself from high office by fomenting an insurrection on January 6. In fact, as the Washington Post’s Isaac Arnsdorf and Josh Dawsey report, pressure to whitewash the events of that day emerged organically from the party’s grassroots and was then amplified by conservative media.
In the first months after the insurrection, even Trump felt compelled to decry the siege of the Capitol as “terrible.” But friends and families of the rioters took a different view and promulgated it over their social networks. Carlson, still in his post at Fox News, rallied to their cause. Soon, GOP members of Congress found themselves confronted with constituent demands to defend the January 6 rioters. As Arnsdorf and Dawsey report:
“It came from the grass roots,” said a former senior House Republican leadership aide. The aide, who like several others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private interactions, said most Republicans who had been at the Capitol “knew exactly what happened, knew how wrong it was, and knew that Donald Trump was responsible” but shifted after hearing from constituents.
If the conservative base was too contemptuous of the political system to take an attempted insurrection seriously, there was little prospect of it abandoning Trump in the face of his legal woes. Indeed, to a voter who deems their nation’s institutions catastrophically corrupt, felony indictments can look like endorsements — the Justice Department’s way of vouching for Trump’s bonafides as a threat to the system.
Trump’s staying power is, therefore, a byproduct of both the weakness of America’s political parties and extremism of the modern right. Various social forces hollowed out the GOP, and the conservative movement filled its remaining shell with a toxic form of reactionary populism.
Trump’s conquest of this broken party has thrown American democracy into an acute crisis. Yet even if Biden prevails in November, the fundamental challenge to democratic politics in the US will remain. So long as America’s parties remain hollow — and our right radicalized — something menacing will always be threatening to fill the void.
“Who wins” isn’t as simple as who comes in first. Here’s what Trump, DeSantis, and Haley each need.
The question of who will win the Iowa caucuses isn’t as simple as who comes in first place.
“Winning” Iowa doesn’t get you much except bragging rights and an insignificant number of delegates. The true importance of the contest is in how it can shape the perceptions of the political world — the media, donors, activists, politicians, and voters — of who can win.
So the candidates’ true goal is to exceed the expectations the political world has for their Iowa performance. Which means the results will need a bit of decoding.
For instance, if Donald Trump wins but his vote share or margin of victory is unexpectedly small, this will be covered as a shocking development that throws his seeming inevitability into question.
And a bad result in Iowa might not impact Nikki Haley’s campaign much, but such a result for Ron DeSantis would all but doom his hopes of defeating Trump. Here’s what each candidate needs.
Expectations for Trump are for a huge win
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Most political indicators currently suggest Trump will win the GOP nomination easily, and that the first step toward this will be a big win in Iowa.
Polls of Iowa Republicans show Trump getting about 50 percent support, more than 30 points ahead of any other competitor.
That’s where his expectations are set. If Trump ends up doing about that well, or even better, it will confirm the political world’s belief that he’s the overwhelming favorite.
The flipside is that if Trump underperforms polls — getting around 40 percent or lower, or having another contender come surprisingly close to him — he will be deemed a “loser” of Iowa even though he won because the results showed his support looking less rock-solid than expected. Much chatter would then ensue about whether he is more vulnerable than commonly believed.
An actual Trump loss in Iowa currently seems so unlikely that, if it happens, it would make the political cognoscenti question everything they think they know about this race.
Still, even a shocking Iowa defeat wouldn’t doom Trump’s campaign. He currently leads in every other state too. Iowa is understood to be kind of a quirky contest; weird things can happen there. And back during the 2016 nomination contest, Trump actually lost Iowa but went on to win anyway.
Expectations for Nikki Haley in Iowa are low
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Win McNamee/Getty Images
Haley, by contrast, has some upside in Iowa, but the consequences for a bad performance there may not be so awful to her.
That’s in part because Haley has been generally viewed as on the rise (even though her national poll performance remains quite weak). But it’s mainly because Haley has prioritized the next contest — New Hampshire’s primary on January 23 — over Iowa. She has been explicit about this, telling a New Hampshire town hall that their crowd would “correct” Iowa’s result.
Iowa’s conservative base and the heavy influence evangelical activists have there aren’t a great fit for Haley, who is running as more of a traditional establishment Republican. All last year, Haley was polling third in Iowa behind DeSantis, and most recent polls show her about tied with him (though one shows her jumping ahead to second).
In Iowa, Haley trails Trump by 35 points in polls. But in New Hampshire, she’s 14 points behind Trump, on average. The Granite State is clearly a more promising opportunity for her. And its voters are famous for thumbing their noses at Iowa’s picks, meaning they might not hold a bad Iowa performance against Haley.
The low expectations for Haley in Iowa even make it possible that, if she comes in a strong second place (ahead of DeSantis and closer than expected to Trump), she could be deemed the “real” winner by many in the political world. But either way, it’s New Hampshire that will determine whether Haley’s campaign is for real.
Ron DeSantis needs to do really well to show his campaign has a pulse
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Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Because DeSantis’s campaign is so widely viewed as doomed, he needs a dramatic success in Iowa to alter those perceptions and justify staying in the race.
After spending much of the past year declining in the polls and losing donors, DeSantis has bet everything on Iowa as his best shot for a comeback. He has the endorsement of the state’s governor and has spent years cultivating right-wing activists.
But he’s spent most of the past year a distant second to Trump in Iowa polls, and the most recent polls show him and Haley — who, again, hasn’t prioritized the state — neck-and-neck. And, unlike Haley, he doesn’t have a more promising opportunity coming up: DeSantis is polling at an awful 6.5 percent in New Hampshire.
To revitalize his chances in the race, DeSantis really needs to over-perform in Iowa. A distant second place edging out Haley likely wouldn’t be good enough. Perhaps a strong second, much closer than expected to Trump, would do the trick. Anything short of that would likely mean curtains for him, since he’d lose his last remaining support from GOP donors.
Vivek Ramaswamy needs to prove he’s a real candidate
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Alex Wroblewski/Bloomberg via Getty Images
As for Vivek Ramaswamy, he’s more of a wild card. After a brief burst of attention several months ago, media and GOP voter attention have largely moved on from the former biotech CEO, who’s been stuck at single digits in polls nationally and in all the early states.
Polls do show Ramaswamy doing slightly better in Iowa (where he averages 6.5 percent) than in other early states (where he averages 3 to 5 percent). And he has been campaigning very intensely in Iowa, visiting each of the state’s 99 counties twice. If he has a hardcore base of intense supporters who are disproportionately likely to turn out, the low-turnout caucuses could be an opportunity to punch above his weight.
Conversely, an unimpressive performance in Iowa would likely suggest Ramaswamy won’t do too well anywhere else, either. Single digits are not enough anymore. Ramaswamy has tried to set an achievable expectation by saying he hopes to finish at least third in Iowa, but that would likely not be enough to make him a serious contender, given his lack of prospects in other early states.
Ramaswamy is largely self-funding his campaign and could theoretically stay in as long as he wants since donors won’t be able to force his hand by stopping payment of his staffers’ salaries. But anything other than an extraordinary overperformance in Iowa would result in him being written off by the political world.
Despite China’s attempts to negotiate a regional ceasefire, Myanmar’s civil war won’t end soon.
In Myanmar, a brief ceasefire between a powerful alliance of ethnic armed groups and the ruling military junta appears to have been broken just hours after it was negotiated at China’s urging.
The Three Brotherhood Alliance, one of the factions fighting in a coordinated armed struggle against the Tatmadaw (Myanmar’s military junta), agreed to the ceasefire Friday in the Chinese provincial capital of Kunming, about 250 miles from Myanmar’s northeast border with China. The ceasefire provision was seemingly limited to Shan state, which borders China, and aimed at protecting Chinese interests and civilians in the region.
But by Friday, the military had broken the agreement, according to a statement from the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), one of the ethnic armed groups, along with the Arakan Army and the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, in the Three Brotherhood Alliance. The junta attacked multiple positions in northern Shan State Friday and Saturday, the Irrawaddy and local Burmese outlets reported. Vox is unable to independently verify the claims.
The ceasefire came after multiple rounds of talks between the Tatmadaw and the Three Brotherhood Alliance. Both sides reportedly broke a previous ceasefire agreement negotiated last month, and some observers did not expect the current agreement to hold.
“The three parties, the three ethnic armed organizations up on the border actually had no intention in participating in these talks and did so really only because of very strong Chinese pressure,” Jason Tower, country director for the Burma program at the US Institute of Peace, told Vox. “And I think that the ceasefire was really doomed to fail from the outset, given that there was just no intention on the part of the different parties to seriously engage in any form of deeper dialogue about the situation.”
But the ceasefire, though it involves a critically important armed group, did not apply to other parts of Myanmar, where ethnic armed groups and People’s Defense Forces — or PDFs, armed groups that developed after the 2021 coup that returned the junta to power — are continuing Operation 1027, the offensive against the Tatmadaw that the Three Brotherhood Alliance began on October 27 of last year.
“I don’t really see this as the other groups seeing this as a sense of betrayal, but it’s triggering more frustration toward China, because they see China’s increasingly becoming an obstacle to them being able to advance their objectives of eradicating the military dictatorship and pushing the military out of the political space,” Tower said.
There’s no going back to the status quo
With few interruptions, Myanmar has been in a state of protracted civil war and military rule for most of its history as an independent nation. The country began instituting democratic reforms in the 2020s and held elections in 2015 and 2020, which the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) won. The military, which is also called the Sit-Tat or the State Administration Council (SAC), detained President Win Myint and democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi, as well as other members of the NLD, on the day the new Parliament was to meet for the first time following the election, in February 2021. Former military officer Myint Swe became acting president, declared a state of emergency, and handed over control of the country to the military.
Armed ethnic groups are nothing new in Myanmar — it’s a highly ethnically diverse nation, but the majority Bamar group has always enjoyed a privileged position in society, including in the military and the government. Meanwhile, smaller ethnic groups, such as the Shan, Karen, and Rakhine groups, have historically faced serious discrimination, both under British colonial rule and under military dictatorships. These Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs) have, in many cases, been fighting the government for years in order to gain more autonomy for their regions or ethnic groups.
Myanmar has been mired in a deadly civil war since the 2021 coup. The conflict started with peaceful protests against the military dictatorship, but the junta’s violent crackdown on protesters eventually led to the creation of the PDFs and armed rebellion. In return, the military used its significant firepower, including mortars, landmines, and missiles, against the armed groups and civilians. Over 6,000 civilians were killed in the fighting between February 2021 and September 2022, according to Peace Research Institute Oslo. Nearly 2 million people were internally displaced as of October 2, according to the UN; these numbers have only increased since the 1027 offensive.
Operation 1027 likely took months of planning and has shown impressive coordination between the alliance, other ethnic armed organizations, and PDFs. That’s a new dimension in the ongoing fight against military leadership, experts told Vox.
“This level of cooperation is not exactly unprecedented, but I think the scale of the operation and what they’ve managed to pull off … I’ve never really seen anything to this extent,” David Mathieson, an independent analyst based in Thailand, told Vox in November. “I think it shows a combination of long-term cooperation between the three main groups,” or the Three Brotherhood Alliance, which have been collaborating in some fashion since 2009, and more recent collaboration with other ethnic armed organizations such as the Bamar People’s Liberation Army, Mathieson said.
What’s China’s role in Myanmar’s civil war?
China has become increasingly concerned with the prevalence of so-called “pig butchering” schemes in its border areas, including northern Shan state. That illicit economy is run by Chinese criminal organizations and targets Chinese workers, who are lured to Southeast Asia with promises of jobs — only to be kidnapped and taken to remote areas in Myanmar, Cambodia, or Laos to be used as slaves. There, they are forced to lure people across the world into relationships, with the eventual goal of stealing money through cryptocurrency fraud. In recent months, China has pushed both EAOs and the junta to go after perpetrators and extradite them to China.
But Shan state is critical for the resistance movement to control because it relies on the border with China to access weapons, medical care, and currency, Tower said. Furthermore, as Thiha Wint Aung, an independent analyst from Myanmar, told Vox, “gaining control over the northern Shan State signifies an expansion of territories where they can operate unimpeded.” Lashio and Muse, key strategic points for trade with China, are still controlled by the military, Aung said, but are surrounded by resistance forces.
But Shan state — and Myanmar — are also strategically important for China, Tower said, and China has been working with the military for the past two decades to secure its interests there. “[China] has partnered closely with the Myanmar military to build out all of this infrastructure to build out a multibillion dollar pipeline, which is the only source of pipe natural gas to China’s southwestern provinces,” Tower told Vox. “And the Myanmar military has, until recently, been the key party providing security to that.”
China also relies on Myanmar for access to the Malacca Strait, a critical transit route for trade which connects China and other Asian countries to Africa, Europe, and the Middle East through the Indian Ocean. That’s particularly important when it comes to China’s energy supply, as Darshana Baruah, director of the Indian Ocean Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, explained in an April testimony before the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on the Indo-Pacific. “Nine of China’s top ten crude oil suppliers transit the Indian Ocean,” Baruah said in the testimony.
Though China has worked with both EAOs and the military, it is likely placing its hope in the Tatmadaw to protect its interests, despite its tenuous grip on power, economic incompetence, and engagement in criminal activities, Tower said. “I think [China’s] preference is ultimately for a weak military that is highly dependent on China, that will give China deals that it wouldn’t otherwise be able to secure, and which China can work with, along with several other [EAOs] that it [trusts] up in its border area, to secure its interests, and ultimately, to further advance its interests in the Indian Ocean area,” he told Vox.
Even if China negotiates future ceasefire agreements, they’re not likely to hold for long, and violence will continue in Myanmar for the foreseeable future, Aung said. “The Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs) are acutely aware that their gained territories will never be peaceful as long as the military regime remains in power in Naypyitaw,” Myanmar’s capital.