Thai-Cambodia skirmishes simmer on

OPINION:

The skirmishing along the border between the Southeast Asian nations of Thailand and Cambodia reflects historic animosities and rivalries that are likely to go on much longer than the Vietnam War.

Thailand and Cambodia are locked in an apparently endless struggle that has as much to do with the need for their leaders to prove their strength to their own people as it does with winning or losing turf. Battles along the Thai-Cambodian border are a legacy of the French colonial era, when the French drew lines on maps after gaining control of Cambodia, along with Vietnam and Laos, and forming the Indochinese Union in 1887.

One country that no foreign force ever conquered during that period was Thailand. Thai kings played European powers against one another, compromising when needed and allying with Washington as a member of the old Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, formed in 1954 as a counterweight to China and North Vietnam, which had just defeated the French. The Thai-American alliance reached its apotheosis during the Vietnam War when American planes flew from Thai bases over North Vietnam in hopes of crippling the military power of the communist regime in Hanoi.

Washington still showers Thailand with weaponry, including warplanes, needed to defend Thai leaders from political rivals. On the Cambodian side of the border, during the 1970s, the bloodthirsty Khmer Rouge killed as many as 2 million of its own people until Vietnam invaded Cambodia and drove it out.

A longtime correspondent who covered the Vietnam War, Alan Dawson, now follows the fighting from Bangkok. Having known him when both of us were journalists in Vietnam and Cambodia, I turned to him for his view of the Thai-Cambodia dustup. Mr. Dawson, who witnessed the defeat of the old Saigon regime and wrote the acclaimed “55 Days: The Fall of South Vietnam” about it, looks at Thai politics with a jaundiced eye.

Defying President Trump’s pleas for both sides to observe the truce he saw them sign at a meeting of leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Kuala Lumpur in October, Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul is ”a backstabbing, party-switching politician,” Mr. Dawson tells me. “You can’t nail him down to a policy.” No wonder Mr. Charnvirakul is known as “a slippery eel.”

Getting back to the border war, “Anutin swears ‘no ceasefire’ until Thailand dominates,” Mr. Dawson says. “He said, ‘Go ahead, Trump, pile on the tariffs, I don’t care.’” What are folks saying beyond the Thai capital? On a drive to one of the 19 spots “that Cambodia has chosen to wage war on Thailand,” Mr. Dawson found people “absolutely livid that Cambodia would attack,” but in agreement “almost unanimously” that “Anutin is a dreadful leader.”

While Mr. Anutin fans the flames, the war simmers on. “It’s very low-level, despite hysteria from anti-Trump headquarters,” Mr. Dawson says. “There [are] no tanks, the artillery is low-grade and, no, the F-16s are not roaming all skies. One F-16 took out a border casino where the Cambodian army was controlling hundreds of drones. Another collapsed a highway bridge and took out a couple of supply camps nearby.”

One thing the war is not about, Mr. Dawson says: the perpetual struggle for control of the ancient Preah Vihear temple. The edifice straddles the Thai-Cambodian line north of the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. Yes, the Cambodians control the temple, thanks to the French, even though the Thai believe it’s theirs (but that’s not the real point). Rather, says Mr. Dawson, Cambodia’s longtime ruler, Hun Sen, and his son, Hun Manet, a West Point graduate who is now prime minister, simply decided “they want to press Thailand over minuscule bits of land that (allegedly) Thailand stole.”

Land grabbing by both sides goes deep into history. When it was known as Siam, Thailand began nibbling at Cambodia, then the Khmer empire, centuries ago. Anna Leonowens, the English woman who wrote about her experiences as a governess and teacher in the court of the Siamese King Mongkut in the late 1800s, Alan notes, “mentioned a small uprising by Cambodians against Siamese.”

Leonowens’ account inspired the novel “Anna and the King of Siam” by Margaret Landon, and then the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, “The King and I.” Both are banned in Thailand for disrespecting the monarchy. “Cambodians love to not forget the terrible atrocities of the Vietnamese and Siamese and, now, Thais, stealing so much of the Khmer empire,” says Mr. Dawson. Messrs. Anutin and Hun “don’t care what Trump says, or what tariffs and trade sanctions he might pile on,” he continues.

Mr. Trump may not have known what he was getting into when he thought he had persuaded the leaders of Thailand and Cambodia to kiss and make up for generations of strife.

• Donald Kirk is a former Far East correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the old Washington Star.