Thailand Shows The West Has Already Lost Southeast Asia – Analysis

By 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...