Hired guns hijacking Myanmars narrative in the Western press

In the fifth year of Myanmar’s civil war, a curious pattern has emerged in the opinion pages of Western publications.

Well-crafted essays in Forbes, The Hill, The Washington Times, and Modern Diplomacy have begun arguing, with varying degrees of sophistication, that the United States should rethink its approach to Myanmar’s military regime. The arguments differ in emphasis but converge on the same conclusion: engaging, not isolating, Myanmar’s junta serves US interests.

To anyone watching Myanmar closely, these pieces did not appear in a vacuum. They have consistently arrived at strategically significant moments — as the junta staged its sham elections in late 2025 and early 2026, as the BRAVE Burma Act advanced through the US Congress and as new US authorities on scam-center enabler countries took effect.

Their timing tells a story that their authors do not. Western journalism has always shaped how the world sees Myanmar’s revolution. What has changed is that the junta now understands this, too, and is investing heavily in controlling the narrative where it matters most: in the publications that policymakers in Washington, London and Brussels read.

How Western coverage shapes the revolution

The impact of Western journalism on Myanmar’s resistance movement is neither abstract nor distant. It operates through identifiable channels that translate words into policy, funding and diplomatic outcomes.

The first category is investigative and human rights reporting. Organizations like the BBC, Al Jazeera and the International Crisis Group have documented the regime’s atrocities in ways that directly shaped international responses.

The BBC’s exposure of scam compounds operating under junta-allied militia protection in Karen and Shan states contributed to the growing international consensus that Myanmar’s military is not a partner against transnational crime but an enabler of it.

The Washington Post’s editorial board, in January 2026, independently declared Myanmar’s election “a charade” and called on America to say so — a position that reinforced congressional momentum behind the BRAVE Burma Act, which the House passed the following month.

The second category is analytical journalism — the kind practiced by outlets like The Diplomat and Asia Times. Since the February 2021 coup, The Diplomat alone has published hundreds of articles tagged to the crisis, many offering nuanced assessments of the resistance’s internal dynamics.

Some of this coverage has been genuinely useful. Articles examining the anti-junta National Unity Government’s structural weaknesses — its close association with the ousted National League for Democracy, its difficulty in building genuine federal coalitions, and competing visions of federalism among ethnic armed organizations — have served as external pressure for reform.

The NUG’s 2021 Rohingya policy statement, a significant shift from the NLD’s previous stance, came partly because sustained international criticism made continued silence untenable. But analytical coverage has also come at a cost.

When Western outlets frame the resistance as hopelessly fragmented or treat the military as the only institution capable of preventing state collapse, they inadvertently reinforce the junta’s central propaganda theme.

This framing circulates through the policy ecosystem — from think-tank briefings to congressional staff memos — and shapes how governments allocate attention and resources. The line between rigorous analysis and narrative reinforcement is thin, and not every editor or analyst walks it carefully.

The third category, and the one that has emerged most aggressively over the past year, is what might be called advocacy journalism in disguise — opinion pieces that present themselves as independent analysis while advancing a specific policy agenda aligned with the junta’s interests.

The engagement offensive

The Myanmar military’s investment in Western influence operations is now well documented. The junta contracted Israeli-Canadian lobbyist Ari Ben-Menashe’s firm, Dickens & Madson, in 2021 for US$2 million. In 2025, it hired the Republican-linked DCI Group for $3 million annually. More recently, the McKeon Group joined the roster.

These firms do not simply arrange meetings with legislators. They place narratives, seed opinion pieces and manufacture the appearance of independent analytical consensus where none exists.

The results became visible in a concentrated burst of publications beginning in late 2025. A January 2026 piece in The Hill argued that US sanctions were “helping China” and urged a “strategic recalibration” toward engagement. It presented this as a pragmatic reassessment, but its core logic — that isolation has failed and only engagement can counter Beijing’s influence — echoed talking points that lobbying firms have been circulating on Capitol Hill.

A piece in The Washington Times the same month went further, urging direct diplomatic engagement with the regime. The junta’s own Ministry of Information promptly republished it on its official website,moi.gov.mm, as evidence of shifting American opinion.

In February 2026, a Forbes article framed Myanmar’s staged elections as evidence of “institutional functionality” and argued for lifting sanctions to access rare earth minerals.

In March, Modern Diplomacy published a lengthy essay attacking the BRAVE Burma Act as counterproductive, characterizing targeted sanctions as an attempt to “collapse the country’s financial system” and branding Myanmar’s democratic resistance as agents of American interventionism.

Each piece was timed to coincide with a legislative or diplomatic milestone. Together, they formed a pattern that went beyond coincidence.

The resistance fights back

What happened next is worth studying, because it demonstrates both the potential and the fragility of the resistance’s capacity to contest these narratives.

The Modern Diplomacy essay drew a published point-by-point rebuttal in the same outlet. The response documented how the original piece misrepresented the BRAVE Burma Act’s provisions, ignored the US Commission on International Religious Freedom’s evidence that the Tatmadaw destroyed 379 religious sites in 2025 and omitted the regime’s documented role in harboring transnational scam operations.

The rebuttal cited the actual text of the legislation, Treasury sanctions data and DOJ actions — the kind of granular factual engagement that distinguishes credible counter-narrative from mere protest.

Modern Diplomacy’s editorial team agreed to run the rebuttal alongside the original, indicating that the editors recognized the first piece warranted a factual counter-narrative. Sean Turnell, the Australian economist who spent nearly two years imprisoned by the junta and now advises on Myanmar policy, publicly praised the rebuttal as exactly the kind of substantive response the moment demanded.

Eurasia Review published a separate analysis that unpacks the junta’s disinformation campaign against the BRAVE Burma Act, traces the pattern of timed op-ed placements across multiple outlets, and identifies the lobbying infrastructure behind them. These were not coordinated actions — they were parallel responses from different actors recognizing the same pattern.

The lesson is clear: when the resistance engages substantively, with verified facts and precise timing, it can contest the narrative even against a well-funded propaganda operation.

But these successes were ad hoc and depended on individual initiative rather than institutional capacity. The next wave of junta-aligned pieces will require a response within 48 to 72 hours to be effective, and the resistance currently has no mechanism to guarantee that.

Credible revolutionary journalism

This brings me to the question I am often asked: can an activist write credible journalism?

The Western tradition draws a firm line between reporting and opinion, between objectivity and advocacy. That distinction has genuine value. Objective reporting from inside Myanmar — produced at extraordinary personal risk, in a country that is now the world’s second-worst jailer of journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists — creates the evidentiary record on which future accountability will depend.

No op-ed can substitute for that. But objectivity has structural limits in an asymmetric information environment. When one party to a conflict operates a 64-year-old propaganda apparatus backed by Russian cognitive warfare expertise, Chinese diplomatic cover and million-dollar Western lobbying contracts, while the other party relies on a handful of volunteer communicators, the commitment to presenting “both sides” can become a mechanism of distortion.

Treating the junta’s manufactured talking points and the resistance’s documented evidence as equivalent “perspectives” is not balance. It is false equivalence that systematically advantages the better-resourced party.

This is where the op-ed becomes essential — not as a replacement for objective reporting, but as its necessary complement. The opinion pages of Western policy publications are where arguments for recognizing the NUG, passing the BRAVE Burma Act or sanctioning jet fuel suppliers are made in terms that congressional staffers and foreign ministry officials engage with.

When the junta’s lobbyists place pieces arguing for “strategic engagement,” the counterargument must appear in the same space and at the same analytical level, or it effectively does not exist.

I write as a Myanmar American who grew up under military rule and understands, from lived experience, both the Myanmar public’s aspirations and the regime’s methods of control. I am an activist, and I do not pretend otherwise.

But I would argue that transparent advocacy, grounded in verifiable facts, is more honest than the pieces placed by lobbying firms through intermediaries who do not disclose their commercial relationships with the regime.

The junta employs professionals — lobbyists, PR strategists, think-tank affiliates — to produce content designed to read like independent analysis. When a former congressman publishes an op-ed urging engagement with the generals, and the junta’s Ministry of Information republishes it the same week, the reader deserves to know the full story behind that placement.

When a Myanmar American democracy advocate publishes under his or her own name, with their position clearly stated, the reader knows exactly what lens they are reading through. Transparency about one’s perspective is itself a form of intellectual honesty.

The recent rebuttals succeeded precisely because they maintained the standards that give activist writing credibility: factual accuracy, engagement with opposing arguments on the merits, citation of primary sources and willingness to acknowledge complexity.

The Modern Diplomacy rebuttal did not simply denounce the original. It went through it, claim by claim, citing USCIRF reports and referencing the actual legislative text. The editors published it because it held up to scrutiny.

Op-eds serve the revolution in ways that no other form of communication can. They reach the specific audience — policymakers, their staff, think-tank analysts, editorial boards — that determines whether sanctions are imposed, aid is allocated or elections are recognized.

They create a counter-narrative in the very publications where the junta’s lobbyists are trying to build consensus for engagement. And when they are written by people with genuine knowledge of Myanmar’s situation, they carry an authority that no amount of lobbying money can buy.

At the same time, op-eds written by people who understand Myanmar’s internal dynamics can speak to the Myanmar public in a language that purely Western analysis cannot. When an activist explains to an international audience why the resistance is not fragmenting but adapting, that message resonates back home as evidence that the world has not forgotten.

The stakes ahead

The junta is betting that it can lose the ground war and win the information war — that foreign governments will accept its staged elections, that donors will prioritize minerals over justice and that the resistance will never build the capacity to fight back in the pages where policy is made.

The resistance must prove that bet wrong. That means treating the opinion pages of Western publications not as a luxury but as a front line. It means building rapid-response capacity so that the next wave of junta-aligned pieces meets a factual counter within days, not weeks.

It means cultivating editorial relationships at the outlets where policy debates are shaped. And it means recognizing that activists who write with rigor, disclose their perspective and engage with evidence are not a liability to the cause of credible journalism — they are a necessary part of the information ecosystem that a democratic movement requires to survive.

Five years into this revolution, silence in the opinion pages is not neutrality. It is ground conceded to a military regime that knows exactly how much a well-placed op-ed is worth.

James Shwe is a Myanmar American activist and semi-retired professional engineer. He writes on Myanmar’s sovereignty, democratic resistance and regional geopolitics