Lessons for Burma from the American Revolution
- Billy Ford
- Jun 2
- 11 min read
Updated: Jun 4
By: Billy Ford
June 2, 2026
Some argue that Burma’s revolution cannot succeed until its leaders trust each other and overcome their narrow self-interest. This article argues otherwise. Durable political order does not require altruistic or even virtuous people. It requires well-designed institutions that channel self-interest toward collective benefit. That is a central lesson from the American Revolution for Burma. The American founding was chaotic, faction-ridden, and built on self-interest from the start.
This paper draws on a comparison of the American Revolution (roughly 1775–1783) and Burma’s Spring Revolution (2021–present), motivated in part by the release of Ken Burns’ twelve-hour documentary The American Revolution earlier this year. The comparison between two revolutions nearly 250 years and 8,000 miles apart is not a prediction of where Burma’s will go, but it offers insight about coalition-building, legitimacy, external support, and the slow, uneven work of state formation amidst revolutionary conflict. What follows is six lessons drawn from that comparison, addressed both to Burma's resistance and to the international actors who seek peace in Burma.
Comparing the Revolutions
The American Revolution struggled with the core problem of building political cohesion among the 13 distinct colonies which had little reason to trust one another. Not unlike Burma’s states and regions, American colonies differed by religion, nationality, ethnicity, economic interests and political tradition. Burma’s fragmentation is somewhat older, rooted in exclusionary governance and political systems, decades of civil war, violent oppression, and the Myanmar military’s poisonous efforts to divide. But in both cases, cohesion was a distant aspiration despite a shared cause against an illegitimate occupying force.
“The colonies had grown up under constitutions of government so different; there was so great a variety of religions; they were composed of so many different nations; their customs, manners and habits had so little resemblance; and their intercourse had been so rare, and their knowledge of each other so imperfect, that to unite them in the same principles of theory and the same system of action was certainly a very difficult enterprise.” – John Adams, Letter to Hezekiah Niles, 1818 |
The revolutions in Burma and America also follow a similar territorial logic with incumbent forces (the Burmese military and British Army) holding cities and infrastructure while resistance groups controlled rural areas, with competing administrative claims over the same populations.
The American and Myanmar revolutionary forces were both composed of hybrid military structures, mirroring their hybrid political structures. The American revolutionary forces combined a centrally commanded Continental Army under General George Washington with state-level militias and irregular partisan units. This was not unlike Burma's hybrid structure of PDF forces, ethnic armed organizations, and local defense forces.
The most important parallels are with political structure and sequencing. In both cases, stakeholders recognized that political negotiations cannot wait for military victory. For the American forces, the Continental Congress (not unlike the new Steering Council in Burma) was a sea of competing interests, secret committees, and procedural inertia. Burma’s resistance faces similar challenges. The question is not whether politics can be deferred. It cannot. The question is how to structure bargaining so it produces decisions rather than paralysis or worse, defection.
“[The Continental] Congress is a disputatious assembly and not necessarily an efficient assembly through these years. Yes, they are running a war. Yes, they are founding a nation, but there’s a tremendous amount of infighting. There’s a tremendous amount of inertia. There are more committees than anyone could count, and there were secret committees.” – Ken Burns, The American Revolution, Episode 3 |
The most consequential differences, of course, are the nature of the adversary and the international environment. The American revolutionaries fought an imperial power that could be expelled. Burma’s military is a domestic institution embedded in the state. In the international arena, France gave the Americans decisive material support driven by clear strategic interest. Burma’s resistance has received nothing comparable.
Lesson 1: Institutions first, trust later
Some say that the resistance struggles because key organizations and their leaders are narrowly self-interested, and that the people of Burma are too divided and distrustful of one another to ever come together and fight the junta. In its most insidious form, the narrative goes that there is something distinctive about the people of Burma that makes it impossible to achieve peace. None of this is true.
One of the leaders of America’s founding, James Madison, addressed this directly in the Federalist Papers (No. 51): “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The entire Madisonian project was designing institutions for a world of self-interested, faction-prone people. Separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism were designed to steer self-interest and ambition for the public good.
Madison was a delegate from Virginia to the Continental Congress during its most dysfunctional period. His experience of gridlock in the Continental Congress from 1780-83 shaped the institutional design philosophy he later articulated in the Federalist Papers. The Revolution, and the new republic, could not wait for less self-interested people before progressing. Self-interest is a feature of human beings and institutions must be designed around this reality.
This simple insight runs through the broader Enlightenment tradition. Hobbes argued that without institutions, self-interest produces war. Locke observed that even good people are biased by their self-interest and need impartial institutions. Hume held that institutions should be designed as if every man is a “knave”. The through-line is the same. You do not need good people to have a good society. You need good rules and an effective enforcement mechanism.
The “wait for better people” view in Burma yields fatalism and is actively dangerous. If peace requires moral transformation first, anyone who wants to delay peace need only point to the moral failings of their opponents. The argument becomes unfalsifiable and indefinite. In Burma, the military has weaponized this logic in two ways. It brands its most powerful adversaries as "terrorists" and then argues, “there are no governments or armies worldwide that negotiate with any terrorist groups.” And it insists that stability and resistance disarmament must precede any political progress, a sequence it can control by manufacturing instability and attacking resistance groups.
James Madison’s lesson for Burma is crucial. Do not fall into the fatalism of waiting for good or altruistic people. The irony is that Myanmar people are consistently rated as some of the most generous in the world. Regardless, that is not a pre-requisite for social stability or resistance cohesion. Resistance actors should not ask whether their revolutionary partners are good or trustworthy enough to negotiate with. They should assume that everyone is self-interested and create rules around revenue-sharing, decision-making and dispute resolution that give self-interested actors an incentive to cooperate.
Trust, where it develops, tends to follow functional cooperation. It rarely precedes it.
Lesson 2: Stop waiting for unity that successful revolutions rarely have
The previous lesson was for the resistance. This one is primarily for the international community. The most common reason given for withholding support from Burma's resistance is that it is too fragmented, making it too weak to defeat the military regime and too unpredictable to govern if it wins. This sounds prudent but it is a standard that few successful revolutions in history would have passed, including the American one.
If the American revolutionaries had been held to the standard of unity that donors and regional governments now demand of Burma's resistance, they would not have qualified for support. The level of social cohesion among the American colonies ahead of the Revolutionary War is often overestimated. The thirteen colonies had little in common beyond their subjugation to British rule.
Their populations came from entirely different countries. English, Dutch, German, Scots-Irish, Swedish, and French Huguenot communities were concentrated in different regions, often living in relative insularity. Most colonists would never have traveled beyond their own colony. Puritan New England was theologically and culturally foreign to Anglican Virginia and Quaker Pennsylvania. Southern plantation economies had little structurally in common with northern merchant and artisan communities; and colonial governments ranged from royal appointments to proprietary charters to self-governing assemblies. Most colonists identified primarily with their colony rather than any broader American identity, because no such identity yet existed.
These fragmented colonies built cohesion over eight excruciating years of war, because they created rules to govern their relationships and institutions to keep them honest. As with the American revolutionaries, the resistance in Burma can build cohesion through repeated interactions under a shared set of rules and institutions which are perceived as legitimate.
Here is a deeper point. Even after independence, high levels of social cohesion were never achieved in America and it was never a precondition for development. Nearly 250 years later, the United States is a superpower but still not a nation of widespread cohesion. Only about a third of Americans say most people can be trusted, a standard proxy for cohesion. What has held the country together is not affinity among its citizens but institutional engineering that constrained self-interest and channeled it toward the public good, alongside political decentralization that prevented power from over-concentrating.
The implication for the international community is straightforward. The unity standard now applied to Burma's resistance was never applied to revolutions that succeeded, and it functions today mainly as a reason for internationals not to act or to side with the junta. The people of Burma need the world to engage with the messy, plural coalition that is fighting and supported by the public. That coalition is negotiating complex political and military questions across distance, under active bombardment, and through the weight of long-standing grievances. Patient support to these difficult processes is the only path to a stable political system. The most likely alternative is military-led governance and perpetual war.
Lesson 3: Maintain public support through effective governance
Wartime governance is not optional. A revolution wins not only by fighting but by making participation in the cause rational. The American revolutionaries understood this. Washington's standing orders to the Continental Army consistently forbade plunder and required that supplies be paid for when possible, even during the desperate winter at Valley Forge in 1777-78. The contrast with British and Hessian forces, who routinely commandeered property and were widely associated with predatory behavior toward civilians, helped consolidate American support in the communities the revolution needed.
Similarly, the Spring Revolution’s strongest comparative advantage over the junta is its public support and capacity to govern without predation. Many ethnic minority communities in Burma already have decades of experience with governance. Building on that foundation, alongside other political and military efforts, is key. There is a reason why the military junta’s “Four Cuts” strategy focuses on inflicting civilian suffering, displacing communities, and targeting resistance civil administration.
Lesson 4: Create systems for managing difference
The Continental Congress was factional and chronically dysfunctional. It also ran the revolution and won. The politics of nation-building are rarely efficient because the stakes are existential.
Faced with a body that was too large and fragmented to make timely decisions, the Continental Congress authorized standing committees to make decisions. By creating the Board of War, the Committee of Secret Correspondence, the Naval Committee, the Treasury Board, the Congress separated urgent operational coordination from the larger political and constitutional debates that paralyzed the full Congress. It was imperfect and frequently dysfunctional, but it allowed the revolution to keep working while delegates argued endlessly about sovereignty, representation, and land claims.
The Articles of Confederation themselves offer another lesson. Drafting began in 1776, but it was not ratified until 1781. The negotiations represented a deliberate decision to defer the hardest questions about central authority. The Articles were intentionally weak, but specific. They provided sufficient wartime coordination to win the war without requiring agreement on the deeper sovereignty questions that might have killed the coalition. The weakness later became a challenge, but for a wartime confederation, it worked.
The lesson is not to despair when internal disagreement or gridlock arise, but to delegate authority and design processes for resolving differences. Burma’s resistance institutions need decision procedures that separate urgent wartime coordination from long-term constitutional debates, create transparency over who decides what, and reduce incentives for veto politics.
The goal is not consensus on every topic, but shared command, budgeting, and diplomacy. Certain sovereignty questions can be deferred to more stable bargaining later when legitimacy is clearer and more transparency is possible.
Lesson 5: Make the strategic case for international support
France backed the American Revolution because it served French interests, not out of solidarity with American ideals. Burma’s resistance is quickly learning that its steadfast partners of the past, including the United States, will only support the resistance if it has something to offer in exchange.
The resistance must more clearly articulate why supporting a federal democratic Burma is in others’ interests. The core question skeptical governments ask is not whether the junta is committing egregious human rights violations but whether the resistance offers a credible alternative that can serve their interests. Pointing to functioning governance, effective dispute-resolution procedures and aligned interests helps answer that question.
On this point, the resistance has a strong case to make. The junta cannot deliver on the issues that matter most to international stakeholders: it will not dismantle the scam centers it profits from; it cannot loosen China's grip when it depends on Beijing for survival; and it cannot stabilize a country when it is the primary agent of instability. The resistance can offer counter-scam intelligence and operations in territory it controls, a check on Chinese consolidation, and the only realistic path to stability.
Lesson 6: Design for endurance
The American Revolution lasted eight years and came close to collapse multiple times. Territorial gains were reversed on multiple occasions. The winter at Valley Forge in 1777-78 is the iconic example. General Washington's army arrived demoralized after losing Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress was based. At least one in six of the American soldiers at Velley Forge died, mostly from disease and starvation, and many more deserted.
The army survived in part because it had built the administrative and logistical capacity to absorb the shock, and because Washington used the encampment to professionalize the force. Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a Prussian volunteer, arrived in February 1778 and standardized drills, training, and discipline across the army. The force that emerged in spring 1778 was smaller but more capable than the one that had entered winter quarters.
Valley Forge was not the only near-collapse. Washington's army shrank from 25,000 at the outset of the war to fewer than 4,000 effective troops during the disastrous retreat across New Jersey in late 1776. The southern theater essentially collapsed in 1780 after Charleston fell and General Gates was routed at Camden. Soon after, in early 1781, Continental soldiers from Pennsylvania and New Jersey mutinied over unpaid wages. Each crisis was survived not only through battlefield effectiveness but through institutional resilience. They showed the capacity to regroup, adapt, and keep functioning when the war's dynamics turned against the revolution.
The dynamics of war are unpredictable, and the ability to absorb difficult moments, like the current one in Burma, is essential. This means investing in the capacities that survive battlefield fluctuations, including finance, administration, logistics, internal accountability, decision-making systems and civilian protection. The Steering Council offers a new opportunity to improve these systems which are critical to ensuring the movement makes it through this decisive moment.
Post-Revolution Politics
Victory over the British in October 1781 did not automatically produce a functioning federal union. The Continental Army demobilized and the militias returned to their states, which under the Articles of Confederation lacked effective institutional connections for economic and political coordination. Interstate commerce was hampered by a currency crisis and the Congress's inability to regulate trade or negotiate credible agreements with European powers.
A key factor that held the new republic together was the sustained engagement of a critical cohort of founders over the following decades. Madison, Hamilton, Jay, Jefferson, Adams, and others continued building the institutions of federal union: the Constitution ratified in 1788, the Bill of Rights in 1791, the federal judiciary, the national bank, and the permanent army and navy.
They argued through the thorniest divisions among the new states, building a strong foundation of political, legal, economic, and social institutions to regulate interactions, both among the states and within the new independent society. The lesson for Burma is not only that revolutions must be won militarily, but that the hard work of institution-building takes decades.
Conclusion
The American Revolution does not predict Burma’s trajectory. But it offers a clear reminder that revolutions succeed not because they are composed of good people or because they spark unity among the masses, but because they have systems and institutions that allow cohesion to build over time and under pressure, and to gradually turn distrust into cooperation.
The American Founders were self-interested wealthy elites, and many owned enslaved people. Letters from that time showed that members of the Continental Congress were factional, vain and viciously dishonest with one another in ways that nearly broke the coalition. The American Revolution did not succeed because it had good and honest people. It succeeded because the revolutionaries were constrained by rules, procedures, and accountability mechanisms that made self-interest serve collective ends. The same can be true for Burma.