Sea change awaits Trump in Thailand
US ally Thailand, which has steadily improved its ties with China, may not be eager to help the US out with regional crises such as that in the South China Sea.
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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.
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