In Geopolitics Today - Monday, July 5th
US Imposes Additional Sanctions on Myanmar and Antarctica in Modern Geopolitics
US Imposes Additional Sanctions on Myanmar
Last Friday, the Biden administration announced a new set of sanctions against Myanmar’s current government. The statement released warned of “increasing costs” over the government’s activities regarding “suppression of democracy” as well as a “campaign of brutal violence” against protesters.
In practical terms, the costs Blinken’s statement refers to were announced first by the US Department of Treasury, which declared that it had frozen the assets of 22 individuals associated with the regime. Of those sanctions are said to be three members of the State Administration Council (SAC), four cabinet ministers, and fifteen former officials. The statements made clear that the sanctions demonstrate continued US will to coerce Myanmar’s officials and policymakers into a change of policy in Myanmar.
At the same time, the US Department of Commerce announced that it was imposing sanctions on Wanbao Mining as well as two of its subsidiaries, on the grounds that they have been linked to “labor rights violations and human rights abuses.” King Royal Technologies, a telecommunications company in Myanmar, has also been placed on the sanctions list because it provides telecommunications support of the Burmese military.
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Antarctica in Modern Geopolitics
Despite a scramble by the empires of the 19th and 20th centuries to stake claims in the remote Antarctic region, it remains mostly untouched even today. This is largely due to the challenging nature of the environment that any presence in the region must account for, complicating the effort of establishing any sustained forward presence without incurring excessive costs.
This has not stopped states from claiming parts of the region as their own, but with the cost of enforcement so high, any claim is difficult to uphold without a physical presence. The Antarctic region’s isolation and hostile climate feed negatively into cost-benefit calculations of anyone considering a presence there. The conventional wisdom between states, based on this assumption, has been that even when state claims do overlap, the inability by any actor to realistically enforce their claims has led to virtually no friction.
But this view may not hold for long. Technological advancements have shortened distances and innovations may soon significantly reduce the burdens of permanent claim enforcement in Antarctica. The prevailing wisdom which informed the Antarctic Treaty may no longer be convincing when improvements in transportation and communication threaten to make the continent accessible, and an environment where state enforcement of claims incurs little cost while promising many benefits.
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