Personality over protocol: Thailand-Cambodia tensions reveal ASEAN’s quiet crisis
The leaked phone call between Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and Cambodian Senate President Hun Sen—conducted outside official diplomatic channels—sparked a political crisis in Thailand and exposed structural flaws in ASEAN’s approach to diplomacy. The incident, which followed a deadly border clash, demonstrated how informal and unregulated diplomacy can spiral into instability when conducted by individuals without formal mandates.
At the core of the issue is ASEAN’s overreliance on personal rapport and informal engagement, without shared norms or safeguards to manage such interactions. It is argued that ASEAN must urgently establish soft norms that clarify the boundaries between personal and official diplomacy, especially when non-executive actors influence state affairs.
Rather than abandoning its non-interference principle, ASEAN is argued that it must adopt practical mechanisms—such as documenting high-level informal contacts, defining roles for non-official actors, and enabling quiet intervention by the ASEAN Chair—to preserve regional stability and prevent personalist diplomacy from undermining consensus-building across the region.