Hello, this is Kenji. I am writing this week’s newsletter from Bangkok, where I am attending an annual meeting with colleagues from across the region.
I was posted here as an editor about a decade ago, and it’s always a pleasure to come back, but the positioning of Thailand — and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations as a whole — has shifted significantly, especially since tensions between the US and China started to heat up around 2018.
Getting caught between great power rivals like this is something smaller nations seek to avoid, and members of Asean are no exception. But even when countries do get drawn into these power plays, it is not always in a negative way, such as Vietnam attracting substantial investments and emerging as a major manufacturing hub of various tech products during this period.