The shouting and hand-wringing by politicians over Burma is almost over. Soon, attention will turn to the inglorious task of finding a scapegoat for political embarrassment. In Brussels there are calls for more sanctions against the Rangoon junta and, in response to big talk from the French President, his Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner is waving a little stick and a European company, perhaps Total, will be held up to example.

Burma is a tiny sore, a snag in the woodwork that occasionally trips us up and begs the question: why did we not mend this problem years ago? Tellingly, when asked about British investments in Burma, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, admitted that he could think of none. He might have asked John Battle, a former Labour Foreign and Commonwealth Office minister, who in 2000 led a campaign against Premier Oil, a small British explorer that found gas in the Andaman Sea. Campaigners latched on to Premier, the only significant British investor, and made wild accusations that the company used slaves to build a gas pipeline. Premier became embroiled in the politics and played a clever game. Instead of distancing itself, it became more engaged with the regime, forcing embarrassed military officers to take part in human rights seminars and, occasionally acting as an intermediary, helping to secure the release from prison of James Mawdsley, a young Briton who had staged a rash protest in Rangoon.

Still, Premier tired of the Government’s nagging and the cost in management time of dealing with Burma. It quit in 2002, selling its investment in the Yetagun gasfield to Petronas, the Malaysian oil company.

That was five years ago and what has changed? Burma is poorer, its people more desperate and isolated and, it seems, the army more entrenched than ever before. Mass protests led by Buddhist monks have failed to prise the generals from their villas. There are no significant Western investors, other than Total, which operates another gasfield, piping fuel to power stations in Thailand. It is Burma’s neighbours that hold the few cards that matter, notably China, which provides military support to the generals, and Thai logging companies, which raid the Burmese forests. As long as businessmen from Shanghai to Singapore can secure supplies of hardwood and gemstones, the generals will survive. While tribal warlords and corrupt Thai police facilitate the drug trade on the Burmese frontier, there will be little support in Asia for regime change in Rangoon.

Isolation from the West is a virus that is slowly killing Burma. Moral voices, including that of Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader who lives imprisoned in her own house, call for more sanctions, but at best they are ineffective, at worst they will harm people who have suffered enough. For every multinational that has struck Burma off its list of manufacturing locations, there have been countless deaths and lost jobs that would have prevented the steady flow of desperate young Burmese women into disease-ridden brothels in Thailand.

This is killing by neglect and those in Europe who protest that foreign investment fills the generals’ pockets are washing their hands of responsibility and forcing the Burmese to prostitute themselves to their neighbours.

It’s been going on since Ne Win took power in 1961 and steered the country on a bizarre path of socialist autarchy, militarism and Buddhism.

Watching the extraordinary spectacle of monks in saffron robes marching through the streets, it’s tempting to see this as a Gandhi-like civil rights movement, “loving kindness” confronting the jackboot of tyranny. It is nothing of the sort; this is a Burmese quarrel, a civil war with all that is dreadful within family conflict. If every Burmese family has a member in monastic orders, the same could be said of representation in the Armed Forces, which number about 400,000, roughly equivalent to the number of monks.

These two communities are perhaps the only institutions that function effectively in Burma. One is loved, the other feared, but neither offers any solutions to the country’s backwardness and isolation. Both the mendicant monks and the parasitic military are a burden on a society that has never properly developed a professional middle class.

It is depressing that our only response to such a crisis is to shut an entire country back into its cage. Decades ago, when American and European multinationals monopolised the global investment game, sanctions had moral authority and some limited economic effect. Today, Asian investors have clout in every corner of the globe and an attempt to organise a boycott without their participation is not just pointless but likely to undermine the moral authority of Western business principles.

If our only response to offensive regimes is to cut them off, we not only lose a business advantage but the moral high ground as well.

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