As Jamie already mentioned, the verboten subject in talking about Burma is China — namely, its responsibility to rein in the very junta it arms to the teeth. (90% of Burmese military weapons come from Beijing).
Jim Fallows, Steven Clemons and Matt Yglesias all agree that the United States is hobbled by its failed interventionism, and thus has no ability — much less any moral credibility — to coax the next superpower into doing anything it doesn't want to do. As such, couldn't we quit the saber-rattling over human rights violations in Rangoon already? (If you're Yglesias, any expression of outrage over the bludgeoning of monks, the on-camera assassination of a foreign journalist, and the categorical shut-down of an entire country's Internet access is coterminous with hawkish rhetoric, in which the new prey is — China.)
If I had to nominate the paragraph that best encapsulates this new vogue of realist thinking by wide swaths of the American left, it would be this one by Clemons:
But that does not mean that China will simply be America's puppet and will solve all of the problems we see in Burma, Darfur, and other parts of the globe because we have pressured it into doing so. China is a shrewd calculator of its interests. So too the United States used to be.
Judge of Nations, spare us yet. Lest we forget, lest we forget! I never thought I'd see the day that a foreign policy wonk waxed nostalgic about America's losing streak in the Great Game. "So too the United States used to be." Yes, in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iraq, Indonesia, the Philippines, etc.
You'll find no mention in Clemons' post, by the way, of China's bald-faced facilitation of the genocide in Darfur out of the "shrewd calculation" of its oil interests. It's only that he "very much hope[s] that China does use influence that it can bring to bear on Sudan and the Burmese junta." This is like asking a rapist to lead a Take Back the Night rally before he stopped, you know, raping women.
It's not that the United States demands that China swoop down like an avenging angel to end the enslavement of democratic activists, or beat back the mass murder and displacement of hundreds of thousands of black African Muslims. It would be enough if China only stopped arming the enslavers and funding the mass murderers.
What feckless puppeteers we are to ask for that.