President Donald Trump said on Friday that he had successfully eased hostilities between Cambodia and Thailand, saying that he had been able to preserve a previous, US-brokered ceasefire that had appeared to be breaking down. “I stopped a war just today,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One as he flew to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida for the weekend.
He said his actions were made possible by his willingness to impose steep tariffs on countries around the world, which he has argued gives the US great leverage on trade and diplomatic leverage. The president said he’d spoken to the Prime Ministers of both countries by phone and now, “They’re doing great. They were not doing great.” He said the conversations left him believing, “I think they’re going to be fine.”
Territorial disputes over exactly where the border lies between the Southeast Asian neighbors led to five days of armed conflict in late July that killed dozens of soldiers and civilians. Trump threatened to withhold trade privileges from the two countries unless they stopped fighting, helping to broker a temporary halt to the conflict. The pact was then reaffirmed in greater detail last month, when Trump attended an Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit meeting in Malaysia.
The ceasefire seemed on the verge of falling apart this week, however, when Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet said a villager was killed after shooting broke out along his country’s border with Thailand. Manet said one civilian was killed and three others wounded when Thai troops opened fire on civilians residing in the area of Prey Chan in Cambodia’s northwestern province of Banteay Meanchey. The same village was the site of a violent but not lethal confrontation in September between Thai security personnel and Cambodian villagers.
The Thai military said that the latest incident began when Cambodian soldiers allegedly fired into a district in Thailand’s eastern province of Sa Kaeo. No Thai casualties were reported. Thailand and Cambodia have a history of enmity going back centuries, when they were warring empires. Their competing territorial claims stem largely from a 1907 map drawn when Cambodia was under French colonial rule, which Thailand has argued is inaccurate. The ceasefire does not spell out a path to resolve the underlying basis of the dispute, the longstanding differences over where the border should run.
