Michael Hollister
It doesn’t begin with tanks. It begins with a fiber-optic cable. With a battery production facility. With a data center in Thailand’s heartland, owned by Chinese interests. While the West talks about “values,” China invests—systematically, irreversibly.
Thailand, long a neutral buffer between competing great powers, is tilting. Not loudly. Not on command. But through infrastructure, through economic logic, through cultural proximity. The country that once served as a bulwark against communism is becoming China’s gateway for trade, logistics, infrastructure, and IT security.
And the West? It’s present—but always a few years too late. Too moralizing. Too slow. Too distant. The United States may still fly joint exercises with Thailand, but China’s influence already runs through the ground, the power grid, the smartphone, the corporate office.
Thailand represents the microcosm of a global shift: a tectonic revolution in Southeast Asia’s center. Anyone seeking to understand why the West has lost influence in the region need only look here.
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