Another Trumpian peace agreement bites the dust by John Reid

In a very short time, the diplomatic rose-tinted glasses used to promote the 2025 ceasefire between Thailand and Cambodia have shattered. Less than six weeks after what was hailed as a “historic” agreement brokered in part by former U.S. president Donald Trump, air-strikes have resumed, civilians have died, and mass evacuations are underway. What many predicted that Trump’s peacemaking amounted to an elegant, superficial pause rather than a serious foundation for enduring peace has proven tragically accurate.

It’s not hard to see why. The agreement signed in October included the withdrawal of heavy weapons from contested border regions, de-mining operations, release of prisoners, and a resumption of diplomatic channels under regional oversight. Yet from the very beginning, the truce rested on fragile promises: it asked both countries to lay down arms without confronting the underlying root causes centuries-old boundary ambiguity, nationalism, cultural claims, and a legacy of mistrust that no amount of calendar pages or press releases could remedy.

The first crack appeared with a landmine blast that wounded Thai soldiers, one losing a foot, near the border. Bangkok promptly suspended the deal, accusing Cambodia of planting fresh mines; Phnom Penh denied the allegation. What followed was inevitable: each side accused the other of provoking new violence. On December 8, Thai forces launched air-strikes on Cambodian military targets. Soon after, Cambodia reported civilian deaths and mass displacement. In effect, the calm was never real just a pause in a cycle built on ashes.

This is the problem with show-piece diplomacy: it treats war as an on/off switch. Push a few buttons heavy-weapon removal, gestures of goodwill, a podium photo op and voila... ceasefire. Yet peace, at its core, is far messier. It requires boundary commissions, credible verification, de-mining operations under neutral supervision, cultural confidence-building, community trust. There must be time to untangle maps drawn in colonial eras and to heal the wounds of decades. None of that was remotely achieved in Kuala Lumpur under flashbulbs and global media.

The gap between formality and substance is not a new failure, but a recurring tragedy. The contested border region between Thailand and Cambodia much of it steeped in colonial-era treaties and ambiguous demarcations, has festered for decades. The region has witnessed waves of displacement, trauma, and cycles of violence whenever tempers flared or political winds shifted. What the October agreement attempted was not a resolution but a pause and a pause is not peace.

Trump’s intervention was always part theatre: a bold claim, on his social media platform, that “Peace” had been achieved, that trade talks could resume, that economies lifted. The optics were powerful; the reality was hollow. It echoed past interventions in which a deal is brokered, photographed, applauded, only to fade when the parties return to old instincts. Without sustained mediation, demilitarization, and trust-building, such cease-fires are no more than fragile cobwebs across a chasm of history.

Now, as bombs fall again and villagers scramble to flee, the failure is laid bare: a peace deal that was never built to last, but to headline. It is not just a failure of two nations; it’s a failure of illusions that complex historical grievances can be resolved with a signature and a smile. And as churches of temples, villages, and human lives crumble on both sides, one must ask: whose “peace” was that, anyway?

So long as Washington (or any distant capital) treats frontiers like chessboards, and outer diplomacy like reality TV, wars will end only when the cameras fade and start again when the cameras return. The 2025 Syria-style snapshot of peace was giving the region a pause, not a promise.

It may be that this moment serves as a final lesson for those who believe that high-profile mediators have magical powers. In a world where borders are drawn by old treaties and people live by histories and grief, there are no shortcuts. Peace is not a tweet. It is the tedious, painful, human business of compromise, accountability, song, sacrifice and absence of bombs.