Beyond the Mekong

Scott Johnson is an Australian lawyer, journalist, and human rights advocate with more than 25 years experience, focusing on indigenous groups and geopolitical issues in Southeast Asia. He also runs Tribal Action Group and its popular YouTube channel.His work began in the 1990s with human rights campaigns and lobbying on behalf of the Montagnard Foundation, representing the interests of the indigenous Montagnard hill tribe groups of Vietnam in the corridors of power around the world.In recent years that focus has shifted to Myanmar where Johnson has conducted some 30 excursions, including more than 70 jungle border crossings, to report on the various resistance forces – the Karen, Kachin, Chin, and Rakhine – opposing military dictatorship.Despite recent territorial gains by the military and a far from united opposition made up of about 20 ethnic armed organizations, Johnson says the civil war remains unwinnable for the junta.Johnson spoke to The Diplomat’s Luke Hunt about his recent trip into Karen State where he met with the Kawthoolei Army and its leader Gen. Nerdah Bo Mya who has declared an independent Republic of Kawthoolei.Opinions about the declaration and Nerdah himself are mixed but Johnson says Nerdah is adamant about independence and is prepared to take the fight to the military, where other militias appear content to sit back and focus on controlling their own territories.“In all my conversations with him, he’s reiterating the fact that he's gonna stick with the people and they're gonna demand independence, freedom, and are not giving up,” he said.Johnson has also written for The Washington Times, The Epoch Times, Soldier of Fortune, Asia Times and the West Australian. He has worked on documentaries about Vietnam, Myanmar, and the long running civil war in Aceh, which ended in 2005.

Lorcan Lovett is a Welsh journalist based in Southeast Asia who has reported across the region with a focus on Myanmar since 2017. He has just returned from a trip to the war-torn country and to Bangladesh, where he toured the refugee camps housing the Rohingya.He says life remains tough in the camps but those with access to the internet are following the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague where judges are deliberating on allegations that senior generals in the Myanmar junta committed a genocide against the Rohingya.A verdict is expected in about three months.Lovett spoke with The Diplomat’s Luke Hunt about their plight and the military’s recent counter offensive aimed at taking back territory lost to the rebel ethnic armed organizations since Myanmar erupted into a civil war in early 2021.And there are allegations of atrocities committed by the Arakan Army which has proven itself the most affective fighting force against the junta.Lovett’s work has appeared in The Guardian, The Observer, Nieman Reports, The Sunday Times, and Al Jazeera, among other international outlets, and he has also reported on Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Cambodia as well as from the U.K. and Ukraine.He has featured on NPR, BBC Radio and other radio programmes and podcasts. He writes and presents video reports regularly on his Substack, On Myanmar.

Few political meetings have been anticipated as much as U.S. President Donald Trump’s summit with Chinese Premier Xi Jinping, held in Beijing late last week. It was the first bilateral engagement of its type in a decade and delivered with all the pomp and ceremony that the Chinese could muster.For the rest of the world, however, it was a two-man show based on their interests. Xi left no doubt in the minds of Americans that Taiwan was at the forefront of his agenda while Trump secured trade deals – soy beans and beef – for farmers back home.But where did that leave ASEAN and the middle powers struggling with the U.S.-Israel war on Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz?It remains the world’s biggest issue with the global economy on the brink as emergency stockpiles of oil and gas run low and governments are forced to decide whether to maintain costly subsidies or pass the spiraling costs of energy supplies onto the general public.Bart Édes, a distinguished fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, followed the summit closely and spoke with The Diplomat’s Luke Hunt about what it did and didn’t mean for the region, where China is adamant about Taiwan.“President Xi said at the outset that if the U.S. did not handle Taiwan properly, it would risk a clash between the two great powers,” Édes noted.“He also warned of the Thucydides trap, referring to the Greek historian who observed the clash that occurred when Athens rose to challenge Sparta, a rising power and an existing power, and how over the course of history that has often led to clashes.“And Xi warned against the relationship heading in that direction,” Édes added.It was a calculated warning. Trump and Xi may have added some much needed clarity to their relationship but scant attention was paid to the fog of war that is still blowing in from the Middle East, as thick as ever, as the damage bill continues to pile up.

The European Union is ASEAN’s third largest trading partner after China and the United States and its third largest source of direct foreign investment, with last year’s total merchandise trade reaching about $320 billion.It’s a formidable number, which both sides would like to improve upon and the EU is negotiating free trade agreements (FTAs) with Thailand, Malaysia, The Philippines after successfully signing such deals with Indonesia, Singapore, and Vietnam.Chris Humphrey, executive director of the EU-ASEAN Business Council, spoke with The Diplomat’s Luke Hunt about the status of current FTA negotiations and issues including counterfeit goods, labor rights, environmental standards, and protectionism.In regards to counterfeit goods, he noted that ASEAN’s top six economies – Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, and Vietnam – lost as an estimated $13 billion to illicit tobacco products over the past two years.Indonesia accounted for more than $5 billion of those losses while more than half of cigarettes sold in Malaysia were illicit – making it the only market where illicit cigarettes outnumbered legal sales.“So there are things that need to be resolved. But to be fair to the ASEAN member states, they are working to resolve them,” he said.Negotiations with Myanmar for an FTA were initiated in 2014 but are on hold amid the civil war and Humphrey also points to organized crime and scam compounds as damaging its image abroad, in a similar way to Cambodia and Laos.But he remains optimistic about Cambodia and its plans to leave the ranks of the least developed countries by the end of the decade, if it can purge the country of scam compounds and human trafficking networks.“Cambodia has got one of the fastest growing economies in Southeast Asia. It will naturally start to attract more foreign direct investment going forward. But companies will be wary of dealing with a country that has reputational damage,” he said.Humphrey, who has run the EU-ASEAN Business Council since its formal inception in 2014, also spoke about the impact of the conflict between Cambodia and Thailand, the closure of their border, and its impact on trade.He also talks about the disproportionate affects the Israel-U.S. war in Iran is having on the region, particularly in terms of inflation and its impact on the broader economies from the price of energy to food costs.

Marcus Tantau, a senior associate at Templeton Research, returns to Beyond the Mekong for an update on the outlook for ASEAN economies as the crisis in the Middle East persists with the costs of the Israel-U.S. war on Iran hitting government expenditure across the region.Tantau spoke with The Diplomat’s Luke Hunt about ASEAN’s outlook for 2026 in January. For this update he has revised his numbers. The cost of oil and shipping remains key. The World Bank had cut around one percentage point off regional GDP forecasts for the year, but this could rise substantially in the event of a severe, long term blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. That, combined with inflationary costs, has raised the prospect of stagflation, a significant problem for economists and politicians attempting to steer economies through turbulent times.

Chris Catto-Smith is a logistics specialist, a career that began with the Royal Australian Air Force in the 1970s. He then moved into the private sector and used his experiences in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, helping farmers and small businesses in getting their goods to market.It’s a difficult job made harder by the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran that has upended oil deliveries through the Straits of Hormuz, which Catto-Smith says has led to “vessel bunching” out of ports like Singapore resulting in supply chain disruptions and lengthy delays.As a result, perishable goods are rotting before they can be delivered and that is punishing financial returns for farmers at the gate and leading to higher prices in Southeast Asian markets where people by their food.Catto-Smith, managing director of Freshport Asia, returns to Beyond the Mekong where he spoke with The Diplomat’s Luke Hunt in Kampot, Cambodia, about the issues confronting supply chains and what can be done to mitigate the impact of the war in Iran.This is in addition to his usual work which aligns with Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR, where he focuses on cold storage and the logistics needed in remote areas, where crops are grown but infrastructure and post-harvest skills required for market are lacking.

Joseph Lo Bianco is president of the Australia Myanmar Institute and a professor emeritus from the University of Melbourne in linguistics, with a sharp focus on the ever evolving civil war in Myanmar, the politics behind it and the prospect of a future federal government.While the junta has deployed a new propaganda unit to tell the good news about a war that has cost about 93,000 lives, opposition ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) have been writing constitutions and forming governments and administrations to run their respective states.Then there’s the opposition in exile, National Unity Government (NUG) which – despite its differences with the EAOs and its allied People’s Defense Force – remains the only viable political outfit with a nationalist agenda for Myanmar.“The NUG does have a well worked out policy about federalism, they have taken this seriously,” Lo Bianco told The Diplomat’s Luke Hunt, adding that this is about delivering the decision making process closer to the people in a country where some 130 languages are spoken.“Federalism doesn’t mean just one thing and Myanmar has to work this out,” he said. “It’s complex. The disadvantages are obvious. You can’t compare Rakhine with Mon or Chin states. Kachin is a huge and has a dominant language.”Under Senior General Min Aung Hlaing the junta has full authority over just 21 percent of Myanmar, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. EAOs and the PDF hold 42 percent, while the balance is in dispute.The Chinland Council and the Karen National Union have written constitutions and a rules-based order while the Arakan Army has seized control of most Rakhine State and built judicial and taxation systems while operating as a de facto government.Other EAOs are heading down the same path while a declaration of independence by an eastern Karen splinter group led by Gen. Nerdah Mya and known as the Republic of Kawthoolei has been dismissed by the KNU and others as bereft of any legitimacy.The buzz-phrase is bottom-up federalism and Lo Bianco adds: “After all the fighting it has to happen. It may not be imminent but it is inevitable."

Michael Martin returns to Beyond the Mekong following the outbreak of the Israeli-U.S. war on Iran, which is having a profound impact across the world and on ASEAN, where oil prices have surged, supply chains are being severely disrupted, and the costs are being borne by ordinary people.Martin, who has retired as a specialist in Asian affairs for the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress and at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), spoke with The Diplomat’s Luke Hunt in Bangkok about the war and Trump’s foreign policy intentions.This includes the prospects for Myanmar, which Amnesty International says is believed to have been supplied with aviation gasoline by Iran. Iranian fuel enabled the military’s relentless aerial bombing campaigns that has left thousands of civilians dead amid a five-year civil war.

Canadian archeologist Dougald O’Reilly and his team were widely credited with solving the mysteries surround the Plain of Jars in northeast Laos, a vast megalithic landscape of massive stone jars scattered in clusters, dating to the Iron Age, around 500 BCE to 500 CE.O’Reilly, a professor at the Australian National University in Canberra, has also released his latest book "Empires of the Southern Ocean," which traces state-level societies across Southeast Asia, encompassing modern-day Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam.He spoke with The Diplomat’s Luke Hunt about his discoveries at the Plain of Jars, which have besotted and mystified archeologists, explorers, and tourists for centuries and the issues confronted by his team in preserving the site.

Marcus Tantau is a Senior Associate at Templeton Research, where he leads the firm’s Southeast Asia practice from Singapore. He specializes in corporate investigations and strategic intelligence and advises financial institutions on how to navigate complex risks.He spoke with The Diplomat’s Luke Hunt on a broad range of topics, including the election of To Lam as Vietnam’s president and Communist Party chief, and how regional leaders are faring, among them Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim, Indonesia’s Prabowo Subianto. and Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of the Philippines.