Playing the Burma card

I didn't even know there was a Burma card for the US to play in East Asia.  Like most tyrannical, murderous regimes these days, the military junta that rules Burma is close to China.  Could that be changing?

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will visit Burma next month, in a thawing of diplomatic ties between the United States and the Southeast Asian nation whose strong-arm government has outraged the West.
The two-day trip, starting Dec. 1, would mark the first visit by a U.S. secretary of state in 50 years.
President Obama made the announcement Friday shortly after he began a series of meetings here with Southeast Asian leaders about regional security, including disaster relief. Obama is the first U.S. president to participate in a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), whose chairmanship recently was awarded to Burma, also known as Myanmar. The main summit meetings will take place on Saturday.
Burma’s military rulers, who have held power since a 1962 coup, have taken a hard anti-democratic line, cracking down on opposition leaders including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who had been under house arrest for years.
But she was freed last year, and hundreds of other political prisoners have been released since then, suggesting that Burma might be signaling an opening to the West as a hedge in its relationship with China.

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