US-Thailand friendship turns cold, further weakening America’s influence in Asia

Benjamin Zawacki says the gradual loss of a solid US ally in the region will only be exacerbated by the Thai king’s death and Donald Trump’s election as US president

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US president Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary pose for a photo with King Bhumibol and other members of the Thai royal family at the Grand Palace in Bangkok, on a visit to Thailand in 1996. Photo: AFP

Published: 9:02am, 27 Nov 2016Updated: 7:01pm, 27 Nov 2016

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.

A Thai marine shows how to catch a cobra as US marines look on, during a jungle survival programme that was part of a joint military exercise in 2013. Photo: AFP

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.