Beijing & Washington race to revive Thai-Cambodian ceasefire before 22 Dec ASEAN summit

Major-power shuttle diplomacy in Southeast Asia evokes the 1989 Paris Conference that ended Cambodia’s civil war, when China, the US, and ASEAN each backed rival sides yet ultimately sought stability. Today’s parallel outreach again exposes ASEAN’s chronic dilemma: its ‘centrality’ narrative collides with members inviting extra-regional patrons whenever internal mechanisms falter. The border dispute itself is a long tail of French colonial cartography and the 2011 Preah Vihear firefights; every decade it resurfaces whenever nationalist politics in Bangkok or Phnom Penh need rallying fodder. Over a 100-year lens the episode is less about this week’s death toll than about whether ASEAN can evolve beyond consensus diplomacy into real conflict-management institutions. If it fails, external powers will keep filling the vacuum, entrenching a 21st-century version of the 19th-century ‘Great Game’—only this time played out with satellite data, drone strikes, and supply-chain leverage rather than gunboats.