I have always remembered one teaching: “Keep your enemies close.”

In politics, there are no permanent friends and no permanent enemies. Today’s friend can be tomorrow’s enemy, and today’s enemy can be tomorrow’s friend — that is what makes politics, in the old phrase, “the art of the possible.” Compromises that once looked unthinkable often turn out, in hindsight, to have been the only realistic path forward.

For most of the opposition, the Myanmar generals are the enemy. And the military under Senior General Min Aung Hlaing regards the opposition — the National Unity Government (NUG), the National League for Democracy (NLD), the Ethnic Resistance Organizations (EROs), the People’s Defence Force (PDF), and the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) — as sworn enemies in return.

But if we could transform that enmity into something closer to friendship — or even just a working relationship — we might do more to protect our people than years of confrontation have managed. An adversary kept at arm’s length, with no incentive to trust us, is free to keep plotting against us. An adversary drawn closer, with something real to gain from cooperation, has a reason to stop.

Where things stand

The coup took place on 1 February 2021, when the military detained Aung San Suu Kyi and other elected leaders and seized power, claiming — without evidence accepted by international observers — that the November 2020 election had been fraudulent. The crackdown on the protests that followed killed more than 3,000 people, and many of those who survived it went underground or into the jungle, eventually forming the People’s Defence Force under the nominal command of the NUG, a shadow government set up by ousted lawmakers in April 2021.

Five and a half years on, the war those events triggered has become one of the deadliest conflicts in the world. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) estimated in mid-2026 that the fighting had killed over 100,000 people, and the United Nations puts the number of people displaced at well above 3.6 million. Far from winding down, the violence has intensified: ACLED recorded more than a dozen mass killings and over 450 civilian deaths in just the first half of 2026, much of it concentrated in the central “dry zone.”

Diplomacy has not achieved much either. ASEAN’s Five-Point Consensus — agreed with Min Aung Hlaing himself in April 2021, and calling for an end to violence, dialogue among all parties, a special envoy, and humanitarian access — remains largely unimplemented five years later. In 2026, Myanmar’s military-aligned parliament went so far as to pass a resolution declaring the Consensus “no longer relevant,” and rejected ASEAN’s proposal for a permanent special envoy. Meanwhile China, India, and Russia have all deepened their engagement with Naypyidaw, giving the junta options that reduce its incentive to negotiate with anyone else.

There have been small, symbolic signs of a thaw: Aung San Suu Kyi, now 80, was moved from prison to house arrest in April 2026 as part of a prisoner amnesty, though more than thirteen years of her sentence reportedly remain. The UN Secretary-General called it “a meaningful step,” while noting it does not amount to the unconditional release that the NUG and international bodies have demanded. It is a small illustration of the wider point: nothing changes quickly, and nothing changes for free — but small openings do sometimes appear.

This is the landscape any talk of reconciliation has to reckon with. It is not a symmetrical or comfortable one. But it is the one we have.

The case for talking anyway

I understand the objection, because I have heard it made forcefully before: that the opposition would be signing its own death warrant by forming any coalition with a military whose entire project — a return to autocratic, military-dominated rule under the 2008 constitution — is the opposite of a secular, federal democracy built on the 1947 Panglong spirit, in which Aung San and ethnic leaders originally promised the country’s minorities autonomy within a genuine union.

That objection is not wrong to raise. But politics rarely offers the chance to simply defeat and erase an opponent; both this civil war’s five years of fighting and the decades of ethnic insurgency that preceded it suggest that neither side can eliminate the other outright. Where total victory is not realistically available, the alternative to a negotiated settlement is not “principled resistance until total victory” — it is prolonged war, at a continuing cost the numbers above make plain.

The military holds the apparatus of state: administrative control, security forces, and the ability to make or block policy. The opposition holds something the military still needs and does not have: the loyalty of most of the population, and support — however inconsistently applied — from ASEAN, the UN, the EU, the US, and Myanmar’s other regional partners. Any durable settlement has to be built on that exchange: guarantees of safety, property, and a real role for the military’s institutions, in return for a credible, verifiable transition toward the federal constitution the opposition wants.

None of that requires trusting the military’s current leadership out of naivety. It requires structuring an agreement — with verification, phased steps, and international guarantors — precisely because trust cannot simply be assumed. A ten-year transitional arrangement, reviewed and eventually tested at the ballot box under a jointly negotiated federal constitution, is one way that structure could look. Whether ten years, five, or another figure, the underlying principle is the same: an interim arrangement that both sides can point to as protecting their core interests, with elections as the mechanism for resolving what an interim deal cannot.

What this asks of both sides

If NUG, NLD, the EROs, the PDF, and the CDM movement can hold together and negotiate as a united front, they arrive at the table with more leverage — and more credibility as guarantors of any deal — than any of them would have alone.

The other side of that same requirement is sincerity. A peace process that both sides expect to be broken the moment it stops being convenient is not a peace process; it just delays the next round of fighting. If a negotiation fails, the door should stay open rather than triggering immediate retaliation. If one succeeds, both sides have to be able to walk away from it, years later, without accusations of betrayal — the discipline runs in both directions, not just toward the opposition.

There is an old idea, sometimes framed as “the hero suffers a little at first but wins in the end,” which captures something true about long struggles: setbacks are not the same as defeat. Reframing the conflict as one in which both sides — including the current government — are capable of acting in good faith is not the same as excusing what either side has done. It is a precondition for any negotiation actually happening, because a negotiation premised on the other side being purely villainous rarely produces one that holds.

The stakes

Instead of both sides fighting over a shrinking, war-damaged economy, the alternative on offer is building a larger one that more people can actually share in — an unglamorous, incremental kind of win that nonetheless beats the status quo of a war that has already cost more than 100,000 lives and displaced millions.

This is not a call for the opposition to abandon its principles, least of all federalism and the promise of Panglong. It is an argument that principles are realized through negotiated settlements, not through decades of attrition that neither side can win outright — and that reaching that settlement will require treating today’s enemy as tomorrow’s possible partner, however difficult that is to accept.

References

• Reuters/Al Jazeera, “Who is fighting in Myanmar’s multi-front civil war?” — casualty and displacement figures, PDF/NUG structure
• MoeMaKa, “Death Toll in Myanmar’s Civil War Surpasses 100,000 After More Than Five Years” — ACLED fatality estimate
• NBC News, “Myanmar military escalates civilian killings, monitor warns” — 2026 mass killings data
• BTI 2026 Myanmar Country Report — bti-project.org — coup timeline, NUG formation, crackdown death toll
• The Diplomatic Insight, “What Is ASEAN’s Five-Point Consensus on Myanmar?” — Five-Point Consensus text and 2026 developments
• Al Jazeera, “Myanmar’s former leader Aung San Suu Kyi moved to house arrest” — Suu Kyi’s current status
• Lowy Institute, “Myanmar and ASEAN: Five points, but little consensus” — regional diplomatic context

Note: This is a fast-moving conflict, and figures on casualties, displacement, and the political situation may have shifted since these sources were published. It’s worth checking current reporting before publishing.