In late July, after years of peace, a nearly week-long armed conflict erupted between the Southeast Asian nations of Thailand and Cambodia over a border dispute dating back to French colonial control over what was then known as Indochina.

However, the border dispute was used more as an excuse than as a genuine source of tension, aimed at disrupting peace, stability and growing cooperation across Southeast Asia in the same manner U.S.-engineered conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East have destabilized those regions.

Added to this, was a Western media campaign attempting to depict the conflict as pitting Thailand—described as a "well-equipped U.S. ally"—against Cambodia—depicted as having "strong China links" as CNN would report—suggesting a proxy war of sorts was playing out.

The truth behind this conflict reveals a complex game of Western-sponsored division and disruption of an otherwise increasingly unified and rising Asia as part of U.S. ambitions.

Washington's attempts

While Thailand has indeed been designated a major "non-NATO ally" by Washington, this designation was made in 2003 when Thaksin Shinawatra was prime minister.

Serving as an advisor to U.S.-based equity firm, The Carlyle Group, before becoming prime minister in 2001, Thaksin worked to privatize Thailand's natural resources and state-owned enterprises, committed Thai troops to the U.S. war in Iraq, and attempted to push through a U.S.-Thailand free trade agreement without Thai parliamentary approval.

The overt threat Thaksin's policies posed to Thailand's sovereignty prompted the Thai military to remove him from power in a bloodless coup in 2006.

From 2006 onward, the U.S. through political interference funded through the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy (NED) attempted to reinstall Thaksin and his political allies into power, prompting violent street protests in 2009 and 2010, as well as a second military coup in 2014 to remove Thaksin's sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, from power for similar abuses.

While in past decades Thailand indeed received the majority of its military equipment from the U.S., following the 2014 coup, Thailand began a major pivot toward China.

It has also increased cooperation through annual Thai-Chinese military drills, offsetting long-standing annual drills conducted with the U.S.

Thailand has begun construction of a Thai-Chinese railway connecting a new central station in Bangkok to China via Laos' already operational line. The project will accelerate growing Thai-Chinese economic cooperation which has already secured China as Thailand's largest trade partner, investor, and source of tourism.

To freeze or even reverse this growing cooperation, the U.S. has invested millions of dollars a year through the NED to produce anti-China media as well as build up political groups and parties attempting to politically capture Thailand from its China-leaning independent institutions which includes both the Thai military and its centuries-old monarchy.

Despite building closer ties with China in recent years, Cambodia under U.S. West Point-graduate Hun Manet, son of long-time Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, still depends on the U.S. as its largest export partner, sending more exports to the U.S. than China and Southeast Asia combined. Cambodia also uses the U.S. dollar as a de facto currency for local transactions.

These economic realities mean Cambodia remains heavily dependent on and thus vulnerable to U.S. economic and political influence.

Having at one point imposed an embargo on Cambodia over "Chinese influence," the U.S. as recently as last year sent its secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, to meet with Prime Minister Hun Manet to improve ties, followed by a U.S. naval vessel visiting Cambodia after years of absence.

More recently, even as Thai-Cambodian troops clashed along their respective borders, the U.S. military announced the arrival of a Cambodian military delegation to discuss "bilateral defense dialogue," including restarting joint U.S.-Cambodian military exercises inside Cambodia and "professional military education."

U.S. influence

The current Thai Government is once again headed by Thaksin's political allies, with the premiership held by his daughter, Paetongtarn Shinawatra. She had been suspended just ahead of the Thai-Cambodian conflict over a leaked conversation with Hun Sen proposing concessions regarding the border dispute neither the Thai people nor the Thai military would accept.

The leaked conversation and the gathering of Cambodian forces near disputed areas forced the Thai military to in turn reinforce its positions. Following a landmine incident injuring several Thai soldiers and the launching of BM-21 unguided rockets into populated areas of Thailand, Thailand's military had no choice but to retaliate.

Had Paetongtarn and Hun Sen simply accepted the status quo and the years of peace it has brought, there would have been no build-up of troops on either side nor any armed conflict between Thai and Cambodian troops.

As a growing body of evidence suggests the Thai-Cambodian conflict was needlessly engineered by U.S.-influenced political factions on both sides of the border, particularly to undermine Thailand's military as well as China, many may ask what the U.S. seeks to achieve through this and other conflicts across the region.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had explicitly stated as early as February of this year that U.S. foreign policy would "prioritize" China and the Indo-Pacific region.

More recently during the Singapore-based Shangri-La Dialogue, Hegseth would claim that the U.S. had been "distracted" by "open-ended wars, regime change and nation building," but now must focus instead on the Indo-Pacific in direct competition with China.

This implies the U.S. will take all the "open-ended wars, regime change and nation building" it has been "distracted" by elsewhere, and fuel them across the Asia-Pacific region instead.

The U.S. is already militarizing several Asian nations including Japan, the Republic of Korea and increasingly the Philippines. Signs now point to Cambodia working increasingly closely with the U.S. military as well.

The U.S. has been fueling a violent conflict inside Myanmar against the central government for years, while funding and backing opposition groups attempting to undermine and overthrow the military and monarchy in neighboring Thailand. Should the Thai military fail to check Thaksin's influence over Thailand, it may be the next to fall in line.

The violence along Thailand and Cambodia's border is just the latest example of not only continuous U.S. interference and destabilization across the Asia-Pacific region, but of how the U.S. seeks to accelerate it—all as a means of encircling and containing China by overturning political orders in the region cooperating with China, and surrounding it instead with belligerent U.S.-installed client regimes in the same manner the U.S. has done in Europe against Russia and in the Middle East against Iran.

Only through a regional effort to expose, confront and expel U.S. interference—especially its dominance over Southeast Asia's information space—can peace, stability, and prosperity prevail allowing Asia to avoid the same fate Europe and the Middle East now suffer.

Only time will tell if those who believe in this future are capable of building this vision faster than the U.S. and its proxies can tear it down. 

The author is a Bangkok-based independent geopolitical analyst and former U.S. Marine

Copyedited by G.P. Wilson

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