WHICH WAY DOES THE WIND BLOW?
Thai diplomacy has a long tradition of being supple, transactional, relatively amoral and willing to change as change need be, thus it acts like a weather vane.
Fluctuations in the US-China fortunes are sending shock waves around the world. The Trump-initiated trade war is forcing the world to stand up and take notice. Times like this demand careful national navigation. History suggests that vulnerable but observant countries will take note of the prevailing wind and tack their national destiny accordingly.
While the provocative, epoch-making, table-turning tariff war initiated by Trump has largely backfired, leaving the US bruised and eager to backtrack a bit, there is no easy return to the status quo ante.
The shock caused by the tit-for-tat economic wrangling between the US and China has caused economic production to slow, consumer spending to drop and has disrupted complex supply chains in a highly interdependent global economy.
US decoupling with China proceeds apace, reconfiguring trade patterns as China seeks new export outlets and US manufacturing seeks new off-shore locations.
The legendarily US market, with its arms wide open to the world, driven by the insatiable hunger of American consumerism (and a general lack of customer concern as to where the goods and goodies were produced so long as the quality was good and the price was right) these days is looking more like a castle with a moat and its drawbridges up.
The rapid dissolution of the “Chi-merica” union dates to Trump’s first term and was reinforced by Biden-era trade barriers, especially in tech and autos. In Trump’s second term, the widespread rise in anti-China public sentiment, opportunistically stoked by populist politicians, found numerical expression in Trump’s punitive tariffs of so-called “liberation day” April 2, 2025.
If only the shocking press release had been made a day earlier, and turned out to be a silly April’s Fools bluff, the world would be in better shape right now.
But Trump threw down the gauntlet on April 2, challenging not just China but most of the civilized world. (Russia was exempted for reasons never clarified)
Throwing a temper tantrum across the board at everyone at once seems the epitome of bad diplomacy, no matter how much Trump flaunts his image as a deal-maker. His words and actions are an insult to friends and foes alike, while accruing no clear benefit to the US, either.
Trump’s threw a monkey wrench into the gears of the world economy. While his antics are of dubious economic utility, his daredevil antics all but guaranteed that others would kowtow to him, that others would come running to him, and pay obeisance to him and negotiate terms on his terms.
In this sense he understands ego better than economics. A number of smaller countries with fragile economies did just that, pleading for his mercy and making deals designed to please him.
China, in contrast, stood its ground, and accrued some soft power dignity in doing so. It refused to take the bait and kowtow to Trump.
China’s big enough to get away with that, but what’s a good diplomat from a small country to do in such circumstances? Even though the first round of insanely high tariffs proved to be a bluff, a brash opening hand in which Trump pretended to possess all the good cards, it continues to generate uncertainty, ill will, confusion and anger.
There’s been a great deal of focus on how this affects China and the US, but not enough on Southeast Asia where the stakes are perilously high. For nations such as Thailand, which enjoys close relations with both the US and China, these are trying times. On the one hand a fragile economy overly dependent on tourism, on the other hand, political instability from nepotism and coups. Thailand’s unstable, revolving door politics in which one short-lived government follows another pose a daunting challenge to Thailand’s diplomatic corps as well.
But Thailand’s diplomats historically are among the best in the world, with homegrown traditions that allow them to rise above unrest and uncertainty both at home and abroad.
At a time like this, Thai diplomacy is worth paying close attention to because its tradition of bamboo diplomacy has been a bell-weather for judging the rise and fall of great powers for well over a century now.
Bamboo diplomacy is about leaning with the wind.
Which wind prevails these days? The east wind or the west wind?
While the outcome of the global trade war is not yet known, Thailand has a good track record in anticipating and adapting to changes in the larger political environment. It harks back to the days when it played the colonial behemoths of Britain and France off one another to resist being colonized outright, though many compromises in terms of territory, extra-territoriality and trade rights were made.
Thailand’s traditional mode of accommodating the prevailing wind is at once a thing of beauty and utterly immoral, as a brief look at Thai foreign policy in the last century suggests.
Siam, as it was then called, was close to Germany prior to WW1 but correctly assessed the shifting fortunes in Europe and even contributed, at a very late stage in the game, some troops to France, thus emerging on the side of the Allies and being party to the Treaty of Versailles. Siam quickly signed for the League of Nations and convinced the US, UK and France to give up their extraterritorial rights in return for it being on the right side of history.
And even more audacious example of utter opportunism arose when Siam temporarily sided with the Axis Powers during WW2.
Siam was not wrong in its determination that Japan had the upper hand as it began its conquest of Asia, and accordingly the Thais, under the leadership of the chameleon-like leader Phibun Songkram welcomed the Japanese Imperial Army (hoping it would not linger but continue on its way to the British-run outposts of Malaya and Burma)
Bangkok’s wily diplomacy helped Siam dodge the bullet of Japan’s ferocious strike on Asia, but Japan wasn’t content to just pass through, though Tokyo did consent to leave the Bangkok leadership intact so long as demands were met.
A formal treaty followed and Siam joined the Axis, much to the chagrin of its old Allied associates. But no sooner did Japan’s fortunes begin to wane than an underground track two diplomacy with the US and UK was put into effect, with the result that Siam landed on its feet like a cat at war’s end, seen not as an enemy to be occupied and vanquished, but an ally, albeit a late-in-the game one.
Despite having openly sided with Japan, the seemingly unsinkable Phibun was soon back in power, and the country was renamed, again, as Thailand. During the Cold War, it correctly, if coldly, sided with the overwhelmingly powerful US and its program of anti-communism, but even then there were moments of discreet hedging with numerous clandestine attempts to reach an accommodation with communist China. This eventually led to Prime Minister Kukrit Pramoj traveling to Beijing to establish relations, even as the US was being asked to abandon its many military bases in Thailand.
For the entirety of the Deng years, Thailand’s open embrace of both the US and China was a viable policy, more or less a win-win-win for all sides.
Many middle-class Americanized Thais who were aligned with the US in terms of culture and education felt abandoned by Washington’s utter disregard during the 1997 Asian Financial crisis. Then US-China tensions began to rise after the US bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and other incidents, and the question of which side Thailand was on began to weigh more heavily.
A rising tide of pro-China lean in mainstream sentiment can be dated to around that time, although it had been an article of faith in leftist circles for a long time.
As China and the US currently battle it out for the hearts and minds of trading partners and diplomatic allies in these tumultuous times, the history of Thai diplomacy is worth keeping in mind, and keeping an eye on. If history is any judge, one need only to look at the policies of the Bangkok government to get a better sense of where the prevailing wind is coming from these days.
Inasmuch as Thai diplomacy retains its historical tradition of being supple, transactional, relatively amoral and willing to change as change need be, as it acts like a weather vane, which makes it a good indicator of which way the wind blows.