Moving a Mafia State: Why Thailand's Punch Lands Harder Than America's

The Diplomat

2 days ago

If you want to influence the Cambodia's regime, you must pressure its criminal economy – not just its formal trade.
Over the past few weeks, both Thailand and the United States have ratcheted up the pressure on Cambodia, each seeking to influence the kingdom's behavior in line with their respective domestic interests. But the contrast between their approaches – and their likely effectiveness – is striking.
The U.S., true to form, opted for blunt force: a threatened 36 percent tariff on all Cambodian exports, announced last week by President Donald Trump as punishment for Phnom Penh's 'persistent' trade barriers and 'unfair' practices. Thailand, too, is taking a (less characteristically) blunt tack, imposing costs on the regime in the wake of the Thai-Cambodia border dispute and ensuing fallout. It has shut border crossings, cut utilities, blocked Cambodian labor access, and then, last week, issued an arrest warrant for a powerful ruling-party senator and seized Thailand-based assets that Bangkok has linked to online scamming operations.
The scope of this argument does not extend to the legitimacy of either the American or Thai grievances with Cambodia. My point is more about the how. One party has demonstrated astute awareness of the kingdom's political economy and the other has not. Results are likely to follow accordingly.
Over the past five years, the Cambodian People's Party (CPP) has evolved from merely corrupt and repressive into a paradigmatic and globally damaging mafia state – perhaps the world's most durable. Putting its other predatory interests aside for a moment, CPP ruling elites own, protect, and profit from an industrial-scale cybercrime economy that generates an estimated $12-$19 billion annually – an amount that dwarfs the value of its licit industries (including its low-margin, tariff-vulnerable garment sector) and is equivalent to roughly half its formal GDP. Scam compounds dot the landscape, guarded by armed security, surrounded by barbed wire, and shielded invariably by corrupt ties to political elites. This is not crime exploiting a 'governance gap.' It is governance by criminality.
Thailand has seen this reality up close, particularly in Poipet, the notorious border town where scams and casinos dominate. For years, it has more or less tolerated the status quo, benefitting from its own cross-border flows of cash, labor, and goods. But recent mutual antagonisms – including a deadly border skirmish and Hun Sen's escalating interference in Thai politics – appear to have crossed a line for Bangkok.
Over the past month, Thailand has struck back hard, first through nationalist posturing over the border dispute, and then through a series of unprecedented moves targeting the Cambodian regime's true vulnerabilities.
This culminated last week when Thai authorities raided 19 properties, seized luxury cars, froze assets, and issued an arrest warrant for a key Cambodian scam patron.
Kok An, the so-called 'Godfather of Poipet,' is a CPP senator, close associate of the Hun dynasty, and one of Cambodia's wealthiest men. He is also one of the 28 political elites highlighted by respondents to my May 2025 study as meriting international accountability for their role in the scam industry. (The list is included in Appendix A to the report.)
While it would be tremendously gratifying to see the remaining 27 actors get the same treatment, it remains to be seen how far Thailand is willing to take this approach. Indeed, Thailand's own elites are enmeshed with Cambodia's so this knife of accountability will likely only cut so deep. Yet, whatever its limitations, Thailand's strategy has demonstrated something Washington seems unwilling to acknowledge: the Cambodian regime will not be moved through traditional diplomatic means or pressure on its formal economy alone.
The State Department's approach to tariff negotiations, like so much U.S. diplomacy before it, fails to distinguish between the façade and the true engine of the state-party. Garment exports – the main target of U.S. trade policy – employ hundreds of thousands of workers but contribute only peripherally to the ruling elite's survival strategy. Indeed, tariffs risk collapsing the country's last licit industry and hurting ordinary Cambodians, pushing the regime deeper into its own criminal ecosystem and further into Beijing's orbit. This potential tariff-induced labor disruption certainly makes Phnom Penh nervous, but the CPP has repressed garment workers before and – with all the coercive power in the country consolidated into its hands – will do so again. The 'state-society schism' is vast in Cambodia and the voice of the people holds little sway.
The scam economy is far less expendable to the CPP elites, who have also fully captured Cambodia's formal institutions. Accordingly, it is difficult to imagine senior party officials putting up much resistance in trade negotiations were their tariff-proof cash cow (defrauding Americans via slave labor) meaningfully pressured.
That's why Thailand's moves strike closer to the mark, hitting the criminalized patronage networks that actually sustain the CPP. And, to be clear 'hitting' those networks doesn't mean cozying up to the regime or hoping against reason that their efforts to deny, obfuscate, or repress their way out of mounting international pressure will now somehow abate.
Despite its paper-thin posturing, this is a hostile, criminal regime and we need to move past protracted suspended disbelief about its true nature. Just because Prime Minister Hun Manet is touting his latest 'high-level taskforce to combat scams' (the third such artifice enacted in the last year alone), the embassy will not somehow now manage to 'protect American citizens' or 'hold perpetrators accountable' via 'close cooperation with Cambodian law enforcement.'
None of this suggests that Washington should abandon engagement altogether. But it does imply that if the U.S. wants to make progress – whether on trade, human rights, or regional security – it must start asserting its leverage through adversarial (as opposed to purely dialogical) diplomacy where the regime is most vulnerable: its vast poly-criminal enterprises.
This indicates need for a strategic pivot away from status quo carrots and 'collaboration.' That means aggressively pursuing transnational accountability for its scam-linked elites and their networks – targeted asset seizures, public exposure campaigns, and transnational investigations into money laundering through casinos and real estate. It means strengthening regional cooperation with neighboring states to disrupt these networks collectively rather than piecemeal.
Most critically, it means abandoning the illusion that the Cambodian regime can be swayed by treating it like a normal trading or diplomatic partner. It is not. The CPP is a sophisticated criminal enterprise wrapped in a flag. And, it has made clear that it will protect its illicit economies at all costs – because those economies are what, in turn, protect it.
If you want to move such a regime – to end a border dispute, balance a trade deficit, uphold basic universal commitments to rights, or any other end – you have to hit it where it hurts.