Name: Temple Tantrum: Cambodia and Thailand’s Border Brawl Explained
Uploaded: 2025-07-28T02:27:11.000Z
Duration: 10 min 23 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

What the heck is going on between Cambodia and Thailand well as you can see I'm down here in Virginia Beach Man, every time I leave the house something happens.

All I want to do is get on my paddleboard, right?

I'm sure all people want to do in Thailand and Cambodia is live, right?

Now this is the very basics of the story since the story is kind of still Developing and I kind of give you a 30,000 foot overview here Essentially both sides of Cambodia and Thailand have been fighting over their border neither side actually wants war But they can't stop the fighting Funny thing is that is the exact plot of my novel The Last Republic, which is an alternate history book about Brigham Young founding the nation of Deseret instead of the territory of Utah and how 170 years later kind of blows up in America's face and And you know in a lot of ways this current conflict between Cambodia and Thailand goes all the way back to the French who didn't exactly draw lines correctly when kind of mapping out Cambodia and both sides are very interested in these temples that are in a mountain range on the board between Cambodia and Thailand and You know, it's kind of interesting is that there's been violence on the border and over these temples for Wow, almost over a decade and I think there was even one conflict in 2009 to 2011 and currently both leadership On Cambodian side on the Thailand side.

It's almost like Game of Thrones because you're dealing with some dynastic Politics here with both the Cambodian People's Party and the current government the coalition government that's running Thailand and While it seems like this conflict might be over a temple There's a lot more to it than just the temple Okay, and in a nutshell there are quite a few temples on the Thailand-Cambodia border But this one in particular Prasat Thamyin Tham is of particular concern It lies on a section of the border that's contested although Wikipedia says this particular temple is in Cambodia So what's going on?

Each side has a story here Thailand says that Cambodia deployed drones to conduct surveillance of Thai troops near the border and then Cambodia fired rockets and artillery into Thailand killing some civilians Cambodia claims that Thai soldiers placed barbed wire around the temple deployed a drone and then they started firing shots Maybe in the air maybe at Cambodian troops and afterwards F-16s from Thailand bombed targets in Cambodia.

Neither of these countries Thailand or Cambodia is a particularly authoritarian state Thailand has a constitutional monarchy with ongoing political instability and a coalition government The military remains a pretty darn powerful actor behind the scenes Cambodia is also a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliamentary government But in practice it functions as like a one-party state the Cambodian People's Party or CPP So why is this important?

well in countries with relatively democratic governments people are far more susceptible to misinformation than They are with strictly authoritarian regimes that tightly control the media and Internet so you have this this weird situation or where you have quasi or semi democratic governments with people who can access the Internet and find out their own information or be influenced by outside or even internal actors So I can tell you this if I was part of a political party in Thailand and I wanted to embarrass The current ruling party I might convince people that yes We should go to war that way the current party fails and you can rise to power in the next elections Misinformation is a weapons Platform now, I don't actually think anybody is in particular pulling the strings I think this is one of these situations where you have two countries and Both of these countries don't really want to fight but they can't stop fighting Now the US is aligned with Thailand We do this exercise called Cobra Gold with them every year If you're a Marine, you probably drank the snake blood at Cobra Gold That's like a big thing doing the jungle training with Royal Thai Marines who are some really tough hombres China is allied with Cambodia and China has called their relations ironclad They regularly conduct exercises together Golden Dragon comes to mind Peace Angel, which is sort of like a humanitarian mission Comes to mind as well Cambodia and China both participated in those two exercises one thing to note Thailand's military is about three times the size of Cambodian.

They have modern fighter jets They have a modern Navy complete with an aircraft carrier.

It's not very big Cambodia's military has maybe 125,000 troops they have no real frontline aircraft.

That's similar to the f-16 They have no real Navy and kind of more importantly no real money I had no real source of funding to suddenly build up their military if they had to Now the question that a number of people sent me which these were people for both Cambodia and Thailand or like Ryan What is going on?

I can tell you the main question I got was will there be an all-out war and I don't think so It's a tough one because neither side can really invade or sustain I've often said that there's only five four and a half Expeditionary armies in the world.

All right, the United States Great Britain France Russia and actually Russia is less of an expeditionary nation than it was when I started saying That there were five expeditionary armies in the world and to a lesser extent China.

China is actually going to eclipse Russia Fairly soon, but by expeditionary I mean that those five countries have the ability to travel somewhere by themselves and sustain themselves logistically at scale so they can move troops and then support those troops with a Navy and Logistics and supplies Neither Cambodia nor Thailand Really has any kind of expeditionary capability where they can move across their borders and sustain at scale in a long-term Confrontation or in any kind of expeditionary operations that actually move soldiers very far away from the borders Cambodia has a struggling economy It really can't afford a war and it has no real expeditionary capability or logistics capability to supply troops behind enemy lines Thailand has some expeditionary capability and they do have a fairly modern Navy But they also have this shaky coalition government, which might not actually survive war.

I mean are these guys really gonna drive?

200 miles and capture Phnom Penh in Cambodia Like what what what does that give you?

What would be the objective of a total war?

Right, and if you take a look at Thailand invading the scenario of Thailand invading Cambodia What are you gonna do?

There's two roads two highways highways that lead to Phnom Penh in Cambodia and Both those highways are covered by or across from farmland I saw this movie when Russia invaded Ukraine didn't work out too well for the Russians So if if Thailand were to enter Cambodia to perform some kind of objective such as regime change in Cambodia, I mean I could see Cambodian soldiers using drones and tactics from Ukraine to slow down these Thai soldiers until essentially the Thailand government collapses Um, so this is really one of those no-win situations and The odds are that these two nations are just gonna sit on the border and trade tit-for-tat throw drones throw artillery engage in small-scale gun battles Because nobody really has the political will To end the conflict and nobody has the military capability to actually prosecute the conflict To a conclusion, so I think that's kind of what's going on and as time goes on I'll take a look at footage Coming out of Cambodian Thailand, but I think what we're gonna see a lot of is we're gonna see a lot of drone warfare Mainly because it's cheap.

So we're gonna start seeing drone drop munitions on both sides.

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