WASHINGTON, April 5, (AP): Day after day, Chinese rescue teams haul children and elderly people from collapsed buildings as cameras beam the thanks of grateful survivors around the world. Russian medical teams show off field hospitals erected in a flash to tend the wounded. Notably absent from the aftermath of the 7.7-magnitude earthquake in the poor Southeast Asian nation Myanmar: the uniquely skilled, well-equipped and swift search-and-rescue teams and disaster-response crews from the United States.

At least 15 Asian and Western government rescue teams have landed crews reaching hundreds of workers in size, alongside initial pledges of financial aid reaching tens of millions of dollars, as the death toll of the March 28 quake tops 3,000, Myanmar's government says. Cameras showed Vietnam's team on arrival, marching square-shouldered to the rescue behind their country's flag.

While Myanmar’s military junta and civil war have posed challenges, the US government has worked with local partners there previously to successfully provide aid for decades, including after deadly storms in 2008 and 2023, aid officials say. The American government dwarfs other nations' rescue capacity in experience, capacity and heavy machinery able to pull people alive from rubble.

But in Myanmar after the most recent quake, the US has distinguished itself for having no known presence on the ground beyond a three-member assessment team sent days after the quake. "We all worried what would be the human impact” of President Donald Trump’s dismantling of the six-decade-old U.S. Agency for International Development, said Lia Lindsey, a senior humanitarian policy adviser for Oxfam, which scrambled to provide tents, blankets and other aid to quake survivors.

Now, Lindsey said, "we're seeing it in real time. We’re seeing it in increased suffering and increased death.”' The United States, the world’s largest economy, long saw its strategic interests and alliances served by its standing as the world’s top humanitarian donor. Myanmar's quake is as close to a no-show as the nation has had in recent memory at a major, accessible natural disaster.

Current and former senior private and government officials say the Myanmar disaster points to some of the results - for people in need on the ground, and for U.S. standing in the world - of the Trump administration's retreat from decades of US policy. That approach held that Washington needs both the hard power of a strong military and the soft power of a robust aid and development program to deter enemies, win and keep friends and steer events.