The Myanmar Earthquake Will Reveal What Happens When a Major Disaster Strikes and the U.S. Is Nowhere to Be Found

A powerful earthquake strikes a war-torn region as the global humanitarian system faces its first test without U.S. leadership.

At 12:50 p.m. on Friday, a 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck Myanmar, followed twelve minutes later by a 6.6 magnitude aftershock. The quake caused widespread damage across the region, including toppling a building under construction hundreds of miles away in Bangkok, killing several construction workers. The death toll in Myanmar is rising by the hour and is likely to reach the tens of thousands. Meanwhile, humanitarian officials are deeply concerned about the structural integrity of dams along the Irrawaddy River. Speaking to reporters at the United Nations in Geneva on Saturday, a representative from the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent warned that these dams may fail—compounding an already dire emergency.

The epicenter was in the Sagaing region, near Myanmar’s second-largest city, Mandalay, in the northwest of the country. Sagaing is also the epicenter of Myanmar’s civil war and the humanitarian crisis caused by the brutal conflict that has raged for the past four years.

In February 2021, Myanmar’s military toppled a civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi. That government was the result of a peace agreement in which Myanmar’s long-ruling military junta had agreed to gradually hand over power to civilian authorities. The peace process was often halting, but it did formally end decades of military rule in the former British colony—until February 1, 2021, when the military came roaring back, imprisoning and killing civilian leaders and seizing power once again.

The people of Myanmar resisted. Armed groups sprang up throughout the country, many of which banded together to form a shadow government known as the National Unity Government. In recent months, groups associated with the NUG have made sweeping gains, putting the Burmese military very much on the back foot. By the time the earthquake struck last week, the military controlled only about 20% of the country.

This includes much of Sagaing, where militias and the military are battling town by town for control.

According to the United Nations, about half of the 3.5 million people displaced by fighting across Myanmar are concentrated in Sagaing. Once a peaceful agricultural region, it is now the beating heart of the civil war. “The Sagaing region’s strategic importance and proximity to key resistance movements has contributed to it becoming one of the most contested regions in Myanmar’s conflict,” according to a recent report from the Center for Information Resilience. “Its open geography and high number of IDPs living in camps have then left Sagaing’s inhabitants yet more vulnerable to the impacts of violence.”

So the very region hardest hit by Myanmar’s civil war is now also the site of a major natural disaster. It is a catastrophe layered atop an existing catastrophe. That alone would make international support for earthquake victims difficult under normal circumstances. But now, these relief efforts are being hampered by the sudden and swift withdrawal of the United States from international humanitarian crisis response.