There is a profound difference between the act of silencing guns and the work of ending a war. In Southeast Asia today, the renewed conflict between Thailand and Cambodia drives that truth home more forcefully than any diplomatic communiqué ever could.
As airstrikes resume and civilians flee border provinces that had barely recovered from the last wave of fire, the world is reminded that ceasefires do not automatically translate into peace.
This truism also holds even for those adorned with the signatures of powerful external brokers like U.S. President Donald Trump.
The U.S. President may claim credit for halting gunfire earlier in the year, but pauses are not peace.
They are, at best, the breathing space between unresolved historical claims and the next round of artillery. And at worst, they are a deception: a window used to rearm, reposition, and refuel the same conflict that the world momentarily claps itself for suspending.
The Fragility of Personality-Driven Diplomacy
Trump’s involvement, much like other high-profile “strongman diplomacy” interventions of recent years, succeeded in creating a pause. It did not, and perhaps could never, address the structural foundations of the dispute:
- a colonial map that sliced the border ambiguously,
- competing national narratives and sacred claims to heritage territory,
- defence establishments that thrive on demonstrating resolve rather than restraint.
The failure is not in the handshake but in the architecture. When peace depends more on the charisma of an outsider than on the institutional willingness of both countries to accept binding terms of coexistence, it is peace built on sand.
Peace Cannot Be Outsourced
The seduction of a headline ceasefire is real. It allows both sides to claim victory, outsiders to claim relevance, and global media to declare the conflict “managed.” But as border villages empty once again, it is clear that no single broker, however forceful, theatrical, or unorthodox, can substitute for:
- painstaking demarcation of boundaries,
- independent verification and monitoring of compliance,
- regional frameworks that reinforce civilian protection.
Ceasefires are signatures on paper. Peace is lived reality. And lived reality cannot be outsourced.
The Civilian Cost Behind Diplomatic Applause
In the glare of geopolitics, the quiet catastrophe of displacement is too easily ignored. Thousands of families now shelter in makeshift locations, schools remain shuttered, and heritage sites, which are in fact repositories of collective memory, tremble under the percussion of modern weaponry.
Every new cycle of fire deepens trauma, hardens identity narratives, and erodes the foundations on which trust might someday be rebuilt.
When a ceasefire collapses, it is not simply that diplomacy has failed. It is that communities have been instructed, yet again, to live in fear of a border they did not draw.
Beyond the Trump Pause
The world needs to outgrow the illusion that conflict resolution is a matter of personality. Authentic peace requires boring, patient, meticulous work: cartographers, lawyers, historians, civil society monitors, humanitarian corridors, grievance panels, and regional diplomacy that survives the exit of any single personality.
The applause that follows a dramatic brokered truce must be matched with equal investment in formal border arbitration and permanent observation missions. Community-level reconciliation can’t be left out. So too is protection of civilians as non-negotiable.
Without this, pause-driven diplomacy becomes complicit in the very cycles it pauses.
In the final analysis, the world must confront the distance between a ceasefire and peace. Thailand and Cambodia are not just fighting over territory. They are wrestling with history. And history cannot be interrupted into peace. It must be resolved into it.
Trump called it peace. It was, in fact, only a pause. A ceasefire delays conflict. Peace dismantles it. A ceasefire stops guns. Peace disarms narratives. In a world too eager to celebrate quick fixes, Southeast Asia reminds us that the greatest danger is not that wars continue, but that we keep mistaking their interludes for endings.
If diplomacy wishes to reclaim credibility, it must resist the temptation of applause and commit instead to the painstaking construction of durable peace, the kind no bombardment can casually erase.
The author, Collins NWEKE is Senior International Trade Consultant & Economic Diplomacy researcher. He was a former Green Councillor at Ostend City Council, Belgium, where he served three consecutive terms until December 2024. He is Chair emeritus of Nigerians in Diaspora Organisation Europe and author of an upcoming book: Economic Diplomacy of the Diaspora. Collins is a Fellow of both the Chartered Institute of Public Management of Nigeria and the Institute of Management Consultants. He is also a Distinguished Fellow of the International Association of Research Scholars and Administrators, serving on its Governing Council. A columnist for The Brussels Times, Proshare, and Global Affairs Analyst with a host of media houses, Collins writes from Brussels, Belgium
