The coup itself does reflect political regression. But the solution must be to achieve a state where the military and elected politicians will be able to work together again. That rapprochement calls for dialogue between them and with international interlocutors such as the US, ASEAN, China, Russia and India.

What will complicate the possibilities of a dialogue will be the imposition and possible expansion of international sanctions. Already, US President Joe Biden has ordered a series of punitive measures against Myanmar’s military leadership, including robust export controls, a freeze on cooperative US assets and a halt to billion-dollar government funds. The UK and Canada have joined in, and it is not impossible that the scope of sanctions will be widened in the months to come.

The sanctions, and even their expansion, will not work. Measures against Myanmar’s military, known as the Tatmadaw, will not loosen its historical grip on the levers of power. If anything, the measures will hurt ordinary citizens eventually by undermining their economic access to the West. At the same time, the sanctions will push the Tatmadaw closer to China and Russia, two countries that have broken international ranks with America by not making democracy the centerpiece of their foreign relations.

In that global context, what the West could do today is draw a parallel between the possible political evolution of Myanmar and the extant record of Indonesia, which has avoided direct political influence by the military ever since the departure of the Soeharto regime in 1998. Indonesia has been democratic since then.

Myanmar was ruled by the armed forces from 1962 until 2011, when a new government inaugurated a return to civilian rule. During those five decades, the country was characterized by an autarchic economy that paralleled its desire to remain free of foreign political control. There was nothing wrong with the political desire; all countries wish to translate their sovereignty and territorial integrity into the practical ability to make domestic decisions without having to kowtow to foreign powers. That concrete ability rests on the degree of domestic cohesiveness that a nation possesses. 

In this context, the military is an institution that is drawn from the people at large and that does not owe its power to the shifting political bases and passing electoral alliances that shape democratic contestation. Hence, conceivably, the military could enhance national unity, development and security, particularly in post-colonial societies that have to handle the pernicious economic and social legacies of imperialism as best as they can. "Military" is not a bad word in politics. Myanmar is an example of that. Pakistan is another. Indonesia itself is yet another, of course. 

The problem lies not in what the military can do but in what it cannot. It cannot reconcile the divergent demands of diverse political constituencies through negotiation and debate. That is why countries need parliaments and elected politicians to sit in them.

Military rule is top-down by definition; it dictates political outcomes on the ground. Democratic rule works in the opposite direction; popular sentiments and subaltern voices rise through the serried ranks of elected officals (assemblymen, parliamentarians, ministers and, finally, the prime minister or the president) to determine outcomes at the top.

Democracy is no more and no less than a people's ability at the bottom of the political ladder to determine national outcomes at the top of that ladder. 

That is what the ascension of State Counsellor Myanmar Daw Aung San Suu Kyi did to politics; it democratized it. Her popularity, born of her long opposition to military rule, lent credibility to the way in which she and her National League for Democracy (NLD) Party worked later with the military to sustain Myanmar's return to democracy. The Tatmadaw did not lose power but shared it with elected politicians.

That sharing has fallen apart.

Why has the Tatmadaw fallen out with the NLD when the party did not contest the military's ultimate control of Myanmar's affairs after the political rapprochement between the two since 2015? As the Myanmar analyst David Scott Mathieson asks perceptively, "So why take over if you're already in charge?" After all, he notes, the military enjoys a great deal of constitutionally guaranteed power. The Tatmadaw's economic interests are protected, as are its operations against secessionist groups. So why? 

By way of an answer, Mathieson suggests both personal tensions and institutional antagonism, the first between Suu Kyi (the de facto national leader) and Senior General Min Aung Hlaing and the second between the civilian and military wings of the state.

The NLD's convincing victory in last year's election, which improved even on its landslide victory in 2015, alerted the Tatmadaw to an uncomfortable truth. While many believed that the democrats were riding on the back of the military tiger, the military might find itself riding on the back of the democratic tiger, from which it would not be able to get off without the risk of being eaten.

Given Suu Kyi's personal popularity with the masses, perhaps even with a cross-section of soldiers from poorer segments of the population, allowing her and the NLD to continue thriving in the political process was a risk.

Hence the pre-emptive coup. 

Yet carrying out a coup is easy for the military in a praetorian state (as Indonesian was once). Translating military power into political power is quite another matter. President Soeharto's iron rule, as it rusted, made him reach out to leaders from the civil sphere – political, intellectual and religious – in order to legitimize, broaden and deepen the ambit of the military's default power in Indonesia. That formula held till the Asian financial crisis in the closing years of the last century redrew the Indonesian political landscape for authoritarians and democrats alike. 

I am not implying that an economic crisis will – or should – bring about political change in Myanmar. What I am saying is that the example of Indonesia is not irrelevant to Myanmar as it navigates its way between the extremes of exclusively civilian rule and military power. 

Essentially, the Tatmadaw must renegotiate its terms of endearment with the NLD. Each needs the other. It is difficult to see a mass uprising overthrow the military. It is equally difficult to see the Tatmadaw sustaining its control of a populace that has tasted democracy. It is impossible to see Suu Kyi becoming a has-been of Myanmar politics. Nor will the generals consign themselves to historical oblivion.

In short, now is the time for a new rapprochement in the interests of Myanmar’s people. Western sanctions cannot be the basis of that rapprochement. Only dialogue will show the way forward.

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The writer is CEO of PT Lippo Karawaci and president commissioner of PT Siloam Hospitals.