Sea change awaits Trump in Thailand

Bangkok

A month after his inauguration, US President Donald Trump has not publicly mentioned Thailand. Yet in a looming foreign-policy crisis over the South China Sea, the seeds of which he partly inherited and has partly sowed, the kingdom is poised to play an outsized and oppositional role.

China has territorial disputes over the South China Sea with five South-east Asian nations and a sixth with Taiwan. Last July, a UN maritime tribunal ruled China's means of demarcating territory unlawful. Beijing's defiance notwithstanding, this ruling put most of China's claims on shaky legal ground, to say nothing of its 1,214 hectares of artificial islands constructed since 2013.

As candidate, Mr Trump used the presidential debates to deliver an economic indictment against China - manufacturing threat, currency manipulator, climate-change propagandist - and announced plans to increase the US Navy's fleet from 272 to 350 ships. If the China claims were aimed at viewers and votes, the naval announcement was more l…