The United States has held two rounds of talks with Myanmar's military-backed government since September 2024, led by State Department representative Michael Vance. Meetings took place in Naypyitaw and then in Tokyo earlier this month. Washington's agenda is transactional: shutting down online scam centers, securing the release of imprisoned American businessman Adam Castillo, and gaining access to Myanmar's rare-earth mineral deposits — a market currently dominated by China. The EU's position remains formally unchanged. Brussels continues to reject the legitimacy of the junta, maintains sanctions against 105 individuals and 22 entities connected to the military, and extended those measures for another 12 months in April. Bilateral goods trade, however, tells a different story: it reached approximately €4 billion ($4.46 billion) last year, up from €3.4 billion in 2019, partly because Brussels deliberately preserved Myanmar's preferential trade access to protect garment workers. The fracture is not just transatlantic. Southeast Asian governments are independently breaking ranks. Thailand's Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow welcomed Washington's renewed engagement and flagged substantive Myanmar discussions at next month's ASEAN summit in Manila. ASEAN's own unprecedented exclusion of Myanmar's military leaders from top-level meetings — once the sharpest rebuke in the bloc's history — is visibly eroding. Myanmar's junta is exploiting every opening. Min Aung Hlaing, who became president after the 2025/2026 election the EU refuses to recognize, has made official trips to India, China, and Russia. In September, he gave an interview to Time magazine — his first with a major Western publication since the coup. The regime's diplomats have sought contacts in London and Brussels, including with Czech MEP Ondrej Dostal, a member of the European Parliament's delegation for Southeast Asia, according to Intelligence Online. The strategic logic cutting against the EU's stance is straightforward but uncomfortable. Kristina Kironska of Palacky University Olomouc told DW that the US strategy "appears to be pursuing specific interests" like rare earth mining and cybercrime, and that the most important rare earth operations are now controlled not by the military but by rebel groups such as the Kachin Independence Organization in Kachin State. The EU has "little reason to follow Washington's apparent shift," she said, but conceded that "isolation has achieved relatively little." The civil war triggered by the 2021 coup has killed an estimated 100,000 people, displaced over 4 million internally, and left rebel groups controlling or contesting large swathes of territory. Any EU pivot toward engaging the junta risks alienating Myanmar's democratic opposition and ethnic resistance organizations — the very groups that hold territory Brussels might one day need as partners. Sabe Soe, director of Burma Centre Prague, suggested the EU could pursue economic engagement in areas administered by resistance forces, offering an alternative to Naypyitaw-centered diplomacy. For now, Brussels has no appetite for a fundamental rethink. But the isolation strategy's logic depended on collective Western pressure, and that collective is splintering. Each new engagement — Washington's, Bangkok's, London's hosting of Myanmar's charge d'affaires at an ASEAN gathering — erodes the EU's leverage without requiring Brussels to change a single line of policy. The blockade is being undermined not by a frontal assault but by defection.
