During the Obama years the West’s relations with Myanmar took on the quality of a foreign policy parable. After years of enforced diplomatic isolation, the south-east Asian nation’s faceless generals freed the charismatic and long-imprisoned leader of its democracy movement. Soon international sanctions were lifted and elections followed, bringing Aung San Suu Kyi, an English-speaking Nobel peace laureate, to the heart of power.

The sudden return of military rule at the beginning of this month and Suu Kyi’s renewed detention were just the latest evidence of a far darker and more complicated reality. The generals had never truly relinquished their political grip, creating a hybrid parliament containing MPs in uniform; the West and Suu Kyi had accepted that her marriage to a foreigner should bar her from the highest office; and the new Myanmar still faced long-running conflicts with ethnic minorities on its frontiers, most obviously the Rohingyas (whose name Suu Kyi will not even utter) but also many other groups prevented from voting in November’s general election.

When he announced the lifting of Australian sanctions on Myanmar in June 2012, then foreign affairs minister Bob Carr assured his audience that “they understand that if there were to be any serious backsliding or a reversal of reform, that we’re in a position, with one signature, to re-impose them”. While Canberra should reassess its sanctions regime, as Washington already has, the geopolitical landscape has changed considerably in the intervening years and with it the idea of Myanmar being the West’s to “win” or “lose”.

Japan, Singapore and Israel have all invested significantly in the country and each might have its own objections to returning it to pariah status but for them and Australia – which has spent almost $1.5 million on Myanmar’s armed forces over the past five years – there is also the China factor.

Since the diplomatic freeze ended, Beijing has worked to build relations with both Suu Kyi and the generals, pledging $US21.5 billion ($27.6 billion) in investment in hydropower, mining and a host of other areas. As journalist Sebastian Strangio recently pointed out: “The Western countries are forced to diplomatically condemn this coup, but China doesn’t have to do that. It’s pragmatic.”