Thai Foreign Policy Thailand (known unti

Monty Python's animator Terry Gilliam once depicted international relations satirically by representing countries as fish swimming in the sea, with the larger ones (the US, the Soviet Union, and China) eating up the smaller ones. Such humor is uncomfortably close to reality for most of the world's countries, which lack the land, population, resources, finances, infrastructure, industrialization, technology, and military means to compete on an equal footing with the United States and its fast-charging competitor China in their imperialist designs.

Therefore, as Shannon Tow writes2, small countries in Southeast Asia, such as Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam "seek a close relationship with the great power they perceive to be geopolitically dominant at a given time, [while not] actually align[ing] with that power. They instead seek to maximize their manoeuvrability and hedge against what they view as regional domination by one state. They will adopt this policy approach, however, only so long as they believe that the Sino-US relati

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sputed number one player in Asia due to its political and economic clout"3 since World War II, should be replaced by the rising economic powerhouse of China as the chief focus of Thai diplomacy. This reassessment of the relative importance of the United States and China from the Thai perspective was also induced by the slow and inadequate US response to the Asian economic crisis. The U.S. chose to use the arm's length device of the World Bank and I.M.F. (both largely controlled by the United States) for financial aid rather than giving it directly country to country as China did. China also earned the gratitude of the weaker economies of the financially fragile region by refusing to devalue its currency (the yuan), which would have undoubtedly triggered other economic crises. Thus China made a public relations coup, while the US misplayed its hand by alienating long-time friends such as Thailand. China had always been feared and respected for its political and military power in the region, but this event underlined its new financial clout. And while growing Chinese power is obvious, "Thai policymakers do not see China as a hegemonic power in the truest sense of the word. Rather China is seen as a major power that is well-entrenc
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1333
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)