Yet this orchestrated persecution only confirms the Shinawatra family’s long-held conviction: Thailand’s establishment will tolerate pro-poor reforms only when it lacks the means to block them. Their strategy, enduring judicial harassment and public vilification while safeguarding incremental gains, is not weakness, but a pragmatic understanding of asymmetric political warfare.

For all its flaws, Pheu Thai remains the sole political vehicle capable of challenging Thailand’s military-monarchy complex, the entrenched power structure that has governed unchecked since the Cold War. This latest crisis is another battle in a century-long class war, one where every challenge to the elite status quo by the rural poor has been met with coups, judicial overthrows, or, as now, manufactured scandals. As of early July, the kingdom stands at another precipice: whether the remnants of the coalition can limp on, or whether the tanks will roll again in another coup remains uncertain, though the latter is increasingly likely as, on the 25th of July, the military declared martial law in 8 provinces near the border. What’s undeniable is that the real casualties will be, as always, Thailand’s working class.

It didn’t have to be this way. When Vietnamese forces, along with exiled Cambodians made up of the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation liberated Phnom Penh in January 1979, they launched one of the most ambitious post-genocide reconstruction projects in modern history. Vietnamese engineers restored Phnom Penh’s water and electricity within weeks; medical teams vaccinated over two million Cambodians against polio and other diseases; and agricultural collectives revived food production. Assistance from Hanoi’s administration and the hard work of the Cambodian people laid foundations and literacy rates rose from 5% to 88% by 1987. A new generation of Cambodian teachers, doctors and civil servants, many trained in Vietnam, began rebuilding their shattered society…

…Cambodia is a product of UNTAC’s 90s “end of history” free market fever experiment. The state abdicated its role in providing social care and basic infrastructure to the market, supplemented by a vast international aid program (the largest ever in dollar amount at its time). Today though, as aid funds dry up, the state finds itself completely lacking the capacity to function. Very few levers are left for Hun Sen, and his successor son Hun Manet, to pull to address the country’s social and economic crises.

The “transition” from father to son merely formalises what UNTAC set in motion: capitalism without development and genocide survivors as disposable labour. Thirty years after the UN promised peace, Cambodia’s proletariat remains trapped between the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields and the sweatshops.

At the onset of this war Cambodia’s economy is hemorrhaging from self-inflicted wounds by the elite classes and global market shocks. The garment sector, 40% of GDP and a direct legacy of UNTAC’s sweatshop model, collapsed as Western brands fled, with 90 factories shuttering and 85,000 workers laid off in the past year alone. Foreign direct investment cratered by 32%, while youth unemployment hit 18.4%, a time bomb in a median-age-25 population. The riel (currency) is in freefall, inflation hit 4.5% despite stagnant wages, and 1.2 million Cambodians now survive on under $1.90/day as rice exports dwindle under elite land grabs…

…This war is not about a temple. It has also been misinterpreted as a scrap between Hun Sen and The Shinawatras, some kind of 4D chess game between the US and China or simple nationalist grandstanding. It is none of those. This war is the outcome of a decades-long project of anti-communism on both sides of the border, a war against the poor, fought by the poor as commanded by the elite. Both the US and China have called for peace– along with almost every other state in the region. Those who attempt to paint it as Chinese meddling in Southeast Asia obviously try to do so in bad faith, both parties have accepted some Belt and Road funding, bought some weapons, etc. While those inclined to see this as some kind of US instigated conflict completely fail to see the woods through the trees.

Yes, ultimately it was the US pax-Americana project that birthed these repressive state apparatuses decades ago, but today little direct interference remains beyond the “free” markets they left behind, along with their unexploded ordinance and incalculable trauma. To point the finger at the US is to flatter them, particularly the current administration. This war is between two of the aforementioned reactionary state apparatuses they also happened to leave behind…

…In Bangkok there is a rogue military holding a civilian government hostage, in Phnom Penh there is a state gutted by the fever dreams of the Chicago School, both perpetrating a completely unjust and unnecessary conflict. The only losers in this war, however it ends, will be the poor of Thailand and Cambodia. This is what The Eastern Tigers and organisations like UNTAC were made for. Class war against the poor.

Peace between nations is the only class-based solution.