Recent
momentous events in Thailand and the United States are more connected than they
seem, and will have an impact on both nations for years to come. In
mid-October, Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyedaj, born in the US
and the only king most Thais had ever known, passed away after 70 years on the throne.
A month later, political neophyte Donald Trump was elected the 45th US president,
defeating a candidate who had spent a quarter of a century in the corridors of
American power. Bilateral relations between these two treaty allies, already at
an historical ebb, are now set for further, faster, and ever more costly
decline.
Thailand and the US emerged from the second world war with common cause
as the cold war got under way. After taking the throne, King Bhumibol committed
Thai troops to assist the war effort in Indochina. When Bangkok finally
dismissed the 50,000 US soldiers based in Thailand in the mid-1970s, it was the
king who assured that the closing of one chapter was merely path and prelude to
another. A decade of rising trade, refugee assistance and large-scale joint
military exercises followed.
Enter 1992. In Bangkok, the
king reached the zenith of his power and international prestige, when his
intervention amid violent unrest resulted in a dictator’s departure and five
years of democratic “spring”. In Washington, president Bill Clinton won the
White House, alongside first lady and future candidate Hillary, and backed
Thailand’s post-cold-war trajectory.
But the unravelling began in 1997 with Clinton’s heavy-handed and
ham-fisted response to Thailand’s financial crisis, contravening the king’s
model of a “sufficiency economy”. His successor’s “War on Terror”, joined by a
Thai prime minister often at odds with the monarchy, further strained
relations. President George W. Bush’s unlawful torture programme began on Thai
soil, and his response to a 2006 coup d’état was contradictory and
self-defeating. During a visit two years later, he shocked his hosts by not
meeting the ageing king.
By the time President Barack Obama placed Thailand atop his second-term
travel schedule, he had all but ignored the country for four years and would
fail to turn the symbolic gesture into substance. Critically, however,
militating against Obama’s drift was a policy articulated in late 2011. The
vision of then secretary of state Hillary Clinton for a US “pivot” to Asia
would depend on long-time friends like Thailand. In addition to political
influence, economic growth, military projection and national security, central
to the policy was the advancement of US “values”: human rights, humanitarian
assistance, rule of law, democracy.
Ironically, voters in the recent US election placed far more weight on
Clinton’s handling of official State Department email than on her foreign
policy experience and acumen. Thus, following the death of the single most
steadfast US ally in Southeast Asia since the second world war, the pivot – and
Thailand’s pivotal role in it – has likewise passed. Foreign policy was limited
and largely incoherent in Trump’s election campaign, characterised by an
isolationism both anachronistic and ill-advised.
Yet, Asian allies matter to the US because China is not one. Its
expansion into Southeast Asia has been comprehensive and swift, particularly in
Thailand, which separates the all-important Strait of Malacca from the volatile
South China Sea. Through the strait passes one-third of global trade and
two-thirds of all oil and liquefied natural gas.
No less important, China’s model of authoritarian capitalism has been
increasingly embraced across the political spectrum. Advancing Thailand’s 2014
coup were popular and prolonged demonstrations against democracy. The currency
of American values has plummeted; how much more might they do so under a
president who holds them in similarly low esteem?
As tens of millions of Thais mourn King Bhumibol and an equal number of
Americans decry Trump’s election, a valuable relationship pivots sharply in the
wrong direction.
Benjamin
Zawacki
This article appeared in the
South China Morning Post print edition as:
A once warm friendship turns
cold for the US
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