Maple Leaf Diplomacy

Insight Myanmar · Mar 3, 2026 · 2h 32m

Episode #495: Mark McDowell, a Canadian foreign service officer and former ambassador in Yangon from 2013 to 2016, traces Myanmar through a set of mismatches between how the country is narrated abroad and how it actually operates on the ground. He describes his first visit in the early 2000s as a moment when ordinary life could feel disarmingly quiet and culturally intact even as the background reality remained a military dictatorship and a long civil war. That doubleness, he argues, is part of why outsiders repeatedly misunderstand Myanmar, replacing contact and complexity with…