For Hillary Clinton, the meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi in late 2011 was a moment of both professional triumph and personal celebration.
Clinton, then the U.S. secretary of state, was in Yangon, Myanmar, to sit down with the woman she called her “inspiration” as part of a broader, if undeclared, U.S. strategy to drive a wedge between nations on China’s perimeter and Beijing, including long-isolated Myanmar, under the aegis of the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia. And during a tenure at the State Department in which Clinton hadn’t accomplished much beyond hard-toned speeches and “soft” diplomacy, her opening to Myanmar was a rare diplomatic victory. A year later, Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit the country, ostensibly to promote democracy, but also to nudge Myanmar closer to Washington’s sphere of influence.
