American/Ukrainians Caught Arming Militants in Myanmar and the US Dirty War on China

The arrest of foreign mercenaries on the India–Myanmar border has once again drawn attention to the hidden mechanisms of external interference and the role of proxy structures in modern conflicts.

Indian security services have also linked the suspects to “importing huge consignments of drones from Europe to Myanmar via India” for “ethnic armed groups,” matching the established pattern of US proxy war waged around the globe throughout the 21st century.

The military support provided by groups like VanDyke’s “Sons of Liberty” and other US-linked organizations like former US Special Forces operator David Eubank’s “Free Burma Rangers,” together with overt US government funding and support for political opposition groups the US seeks to install into power, have fueled decades of conflict inside Southeast Asia’s nation of Myanmar.

US-Backed Militants in Myanmar

VanDyke has gravitated toward US wars and proxy wars of aggression around the globe, including the US war on Libya in 2011, against Syria also in 2011, and in Ukraine from 2022 onward, according to Western sources like Newsweek.

VanDyke’s recent operation in Myanmar involved not only training militants but also equipping them with “huge consignments” of drones, indicating a significant source of funding. Because the funding is not disclosed by VanDyke’s “non-profit security contracting firm,”  it is very likely— as with all other aspects of Myanmar’s opposition — that it is funded by the US government and simply laundered through fronts like VanDyke’s.

Other similarly US-backed operations training and equipping militants in Myanmar include David Eubank’s “Free Burma Rangers” (FBR). US diplomatic cables made available by WikiLeaks revealed Eubank regularly reports to US government representatives at the US consulate in neighboring Thailand (here, here, here, here, and here).

While FBR poses as some sort of nongovernmental organization (NGO) that “assists ethnic resistance groups” with “humanitarian operations,” videos produced by Free Burma Rangers themselves and those by the militant groups they help train and equip depict the organization providing military training (including weapons training), as well as FBR members themselves carrying weapons on patrol with local militants.

The political opposition these armed groups seek to install into power, the so-called “National Unity Government” (NUG), is itself a documented whole-cloth creation of the US government.

In its earlier days it was referred to as the “National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma” (NCGUB) and was literally based in the US, just outside of Washington, D.C., in Rockville, Maryland. A 2013 “The World” article would admit the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was the “main supporter of the NCGUB.”

The NED’s website indicated an extensive list of politically invasive programs it was funding, interfering in virtually every aspect of Myanmar’s internal political affairs — everything from supposed “human rights”  to media, the development of “youth leaders,” resource management, “political participation,” legal aid funds, election monitoring, labor, and information space.

The 2020 NED disclosure for Myanmar — stillreferred to by the NED by its British colonial nomenclature of “Burma”— focused extensively on targeting the specific ethnic groups among which the armed militants VanDyke, his Ukrainian counterparts, and other organizations like FBR have provided military support to.

The most recent iteration of the “NCGUB” is the NUG and is made up of mostly US government NED funding recipients.

For example, the NUG’s so-called “Minister of Foreign Affairs,” Zin Mar Aung, whose official NUG biography openly admits, “In 2012, she was awarded the International Women of Courage award by the United States Secretary of State,” and that she was a “fellow in the Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow of the National Endowment for Democracy program.”

Her profile on the NED’s official website also noted sheт“co-founded the Yangon School of Political Science, an NED-funded institution.”

In other words, the US government has a long, documented history of both building up and attempting to maneuver into power the Myanmar political opposition throughout its various iterations up to and including the current “NUG,” which in turn openly presides over many of the armed groups fighting the central government.

While the US government doesn’t openly supply arms and other military support to the NUG’s militant wings, Americans and now Ukrainians fighting amid America’s multiple wars and proxy wars elsewhere, clearly serve as a vector through which the US government can do so covertly.

The violence these armed militants are carrying out also happens to specifically advance US geopolitical objectives in the region — not just in regard to undermining and attempting to topple Myanmar’s government, but in the encirclement, containment, and attempted toppling of China itself.

America’s Dirty War against Myanmar is a War Against China

Myanmar, which shares a border with both India and China, is a key partner of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). BRI infrastructure in Myanmar includes the Kyaukphyu deep-sea port in Myanmar’s Rakhine State along the Bay of Bengal and the Sino-Myanmar Oil and Gas Pipelines.

Together, these projects allow hydrocarbons imported from abroad to be off-loaded along Myanmar’s coasts and piped across the country toward China’s Yunnan province along the Myanmar-Chinese border, thus bypassing the Strait of Malacca.

Not only does the port and pipelines save up to 5-6 days versus transiting the Strait of Malacca toward China’s own shores, but it also hedges Chinese energy imports against the threat of a US-imposed maritime blockade either at the Strait of Malacca itself or anywhere beyond it in the Asia-Pacific, where tens of thousands of US forces are stationed specifically to encircle, contain, and, if possible, cut off China.

Beijing’s concerns are far from “paranoia.” They are a direct reaction to decades-spanning US policies describing the implementation of a global maritime oil blockade on China specifically at the Strait of Malacca. These policies have driven the deployment of the US military forces into the region to potentially impose it, as well as arms and force restructuring programs to better enable their ability to do so.

One such policy paper published by the US Naval War College Review in 2018 is literally titled “A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China.” It introduced the concept of a “distant blockade” designed to reduce the threat of Chinese anti-access area-denial (A2AD) systems by being imposed just beyond the range of most of China’s military capabilities, including “the Strait of Malacca and a handful of other passages that the US Navy could seal off effectively.”

The purpose of the “distant blockade” would be to impose crippling pressure on China to impede, arrest, or even reverse its economic development, in addition to other forms of military, technological, and economic pressure the US has already spent years applying.

The 2018 paper mentioned the Sino-Myanmar Pipeline by name, explaining, “a distant blockade also would need to interdict the Myanmar – China oil pipeline,” and that “the area could be declared an exclusion zone for the duration of a conflict, and if the Myanmar authorities failed to comply, the facility could be disabled via air strikes, aerial mining, or other kinetic action.”

While the 2018 paper proposed a maritime oil blockade as a measure applied during an active conflict, the US has since used the armed militants it has backed in war against Myanmar’s central government for decades to begin carrying out attacks-by-proxy on the pipelines instead.

This has resulted in years of attacks killing security personnel guarding the pipelines, damaging equipment used to operate them, and, at various periods of the ongoing conflict, US-backed militants taking over entire sections of the pipelines themselves, including just last year.

Taken together with the recent US invasion and seizure of Venezuela’s government, drone strikes the New York Times admits are directed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) deep inside Russia at its energy production, as well as the ongoing US war on Iran — all three nations counting China as their largest energy export partner — the US dirty war in Myanmar is just one of many fronts the US is waging a proxy war on China itself.

Not only is a “maritime oil blockade” being imposed on China, it is being imposed on China worldwide — from Latin America to the Middle East and Eurasia — much further beyond China’s military reach than a closure at the Malacca Strait would have been.

Myanmar’s military, supplied and supported by both Russia and China, has failed to restore peace and stability across the country specifically because of the hundreds of millions of dollars (or more) the US has spent over decades propping up proxy political forces and covertly arming their militant wings.

The recent arrest of American and Ukrainian citizens providing these militants with additional training and modern combat drone technology is not just a war against Myanmar’s central government and the peace and stability of the nation and people of Myanmar, but also a war against China and the peace and stability of the entire Asia-Pacific region — even the world.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer

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