How the West Embraced Cambodia’s New Prime Minister

Last week, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spent a “productive day” in Cambodia, where he met with the country’s defense minister and Prime Minister Hun Manet—as well as Hun Manet’s father, former Prime Minister Hun Sen. “We had substantive conversations about ways to strengthen U.S.-Cambodian defense ties, and I’m looking forward to further dialogue,” Austin wrote on X, noting that Hun Manet was a “fellow West Point graduate.”

Other accounts of the visit struck the same note of bland positivity: One U.S. official said the “relationship has a lot of potential and room for growth,” while Cambodian press called the visit “historic” and said the United States would “work closely with Cambodia to establish mechanisms to build better relations and cooperation.”

The subtext of all of this was escalating U.S. concern over Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base, a revamped facility that U.S. officials fear will be used as a Chinese outpost. In 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that China had signed a secret agreement for exclusive rights to part of the base. (The Cambodian government has repeatedly denied such an arrangement.) Last December, Chinese warships docked at Ream for the first time, and in mid-May, Cambodia and China conducted joint military exercises for around two weeks.

But Austin’s trip underscored the rhetorical shift that Hun Manet has successfully executed since he took office last August, when Hun Sen’s 38-year rule came to an end. Through friendly engagement with Australia, Britain, France, and the United States, Hun Manet’s government has appeared stable, development-focused, and more even-keeled than that of his father—even as human rights conditions in the country continue to deteriorate. Western leaders, in turn, have largely abandoned pro-democracy discourse in Cambodia, embracing Hun Manet as a potential bulwark against Chinese influence.

Hun Manet has courted several Western countries. In France, the Cambodian leader inked a $235 million aid deal with President Emmanuel Macron in January. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the same month, he met with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and posed for a photo with Samantha Power, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). And in Australia, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described a March meeting with Hun Manet as “productive” and praised the country’s “marvellous resilience,” even as diaspora protesters rallied against the visit.

Such relations require Western governments to adopt a certain willful ignorance of the repression that they spent years condemning during Hun Sen’s leadership. Since Hun Manet took office, the Cambodian government’s tactics haven’t changed—including jailing political opponents and commentators, suing critics for defamation, and applauding neighboring countries for arresting Cambodian activists. A cyberscam industry that relies on trafficked workers, which the United Nations estimates to be worth billions of dollars, continues unabated. (The Cambodian government says it has cracked down on perpetrators and that the size of the industry is exaggerated.)

Yet in the Hun Manet era, Western governments appear to have accepted the on-the-ground political reality in Cambodia as a trade-off for normal diplomatic relations, choosing to work together in other areas, said Katrin Travouillon, a political scientist at the Australian National University and an expert on Cambodia. “They really embraced this completely depoliticized version of governance, and it’s precisely the vision that Hun Sen has tried to promote over the years,” she said. “Under Hun Manet, it’s actually become really, really palatable for Western governments to buy into this narrative, by virtue of this presumably ‘fresh start’ that he offers.”

Hun Manet’s image as a potential reformer gained favor ahead of Cambodia’s national election last July. His Western degrees, including a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Bristol, surfaced publicly in international media and privately among diplomats as evidence that he could be a more measured leader than his father. But importantly, Hun Sen still wields enormous  political power as president of the Senate and leader of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), and he has maintained his influence as a firebrand both online and offline.

During a meeting with leaders from the main opposition Candlelight Party shortly after the 2023 election—from which the party was barred from competing—a handful of European diplomatic officials encouraged the opposition to “wait and see” rather than writing off Hun Manet, according to an opposition figure who attended the meeting. “It was wishful thinking,” the person said, who requested anonymity to describe the private meeting. “‘He’s Western-educated. He’s a younger generation, with young people all around him’—so there was hope.”

Foreign governments have invested in hope for Cambodian democracy for more than three decades. In the early 1990s, following the country’s civil war and the Khmer Rouge genocide, the U.N. spent at least $1.6 billion on a massive peacekeeping mission and oversaw Cambodia’s first elections in 1993. Those initial efforts broke down, with Hun Sen pressuring the U.N. to appoint him as an additional prime minister after he and the CPP lost to the royalist party. “We have not been able to achieve peace and national reconciliation,” the head of the U.N. Transitional Authority in Cambodia told the New York Times in March 1993.

Yet the U.N. and Western governments have clung to the idea of Cambodia as a near-success story of Western intervention—always on the cusp of achieving genuine democracy with the right combination of coaxing, aid, and firm rebukes. After initially withholding $18 million in aid after the July election, citing a “pattern of threats and harassment against the political opposition,” USAID reversed course and argued that the assistance would help advance a “more prosperous, democratic, and independent country where all voices are heard.”

Hun Sen played that belief to his advantage throughout his tenure, scooping up more than $20 billion from foreign donors while consolidating control over a lucrative patronage system and crushing dissent with mass trials, as well as facing allegations for involvement in political violence. In his final years in office, he directly threatened opponents and citizens, dismantled Cambodia’s independent local media landscape, and allowed the human trafficking industry to proliferate.

Hun Manet’s premiership has offered cover for countries to curry favor with Cambodia for pragmatic reasons, namely stemming China’s influence in Southeast Asia, said Sebastian Strangio, the author of Hun Sen’s Cambodia and In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century. In a practical sense, countries thought Hun Sen “stepping back would create new leadership that … would be more open to productive relationships with the West, be less suspicious of Western intentions, and would maybe dial back the repression,” Strangio said.

However, throughout his nearly one year in office, Hun Manet has kept up the heavy repression that characterized his father’s regime. At least 14 opposition politicians from the Candlelight Party have been arrested during Hun Manet’s tenure, according to human rights organization Licadho, along with 12 other politicians, activists, or journalists, plus two union leaders. Other exiled activists and their families were rounded up in Thailand ahead of Hun Manet’s visit to the country in February.

Public critics in Cambodia, including a political commentator and a leader of a human rights NGO, have been arrested or charged with defamation, while others have resorted to public apologies. The government appears to be pursuing still more avenues for censorship, working to complete three separate laws related to online behavior and digital security that experts say could be used to surveil people and further restrict free speech.

Unlike his father, who liked to defend government actions and rail against his perceived enemies in speeches, Hun Manet rarely addresses such events directly. Instead, he has projected an image of good governance focused on economic growth, aiming to make Cambodia an upper-middle-income country by 2030 and a high-income country by 2050. These are appealing, if lofty, goals for Western governments to engage with as they look to fill in the gaps left behind by China’s slowing Belt and Road Initiative spending.

Working with Cambodia solely on economic growth may be mutually beneficial for now, said Pech Pisey, the executive director of Transparency International Cambodia. But the same dynamics that Western governments choose to ignore are those that must change to ensure long-term prosperity. “They will not address the fundamental issues around rule of law, corruption, and a level playing field that would translate to more investment and economic growth,” Pisey said. By propping up public services and programming, Western democracies will “ensure that the government will survive to enact an even more repressive agenda.”

What Cambodia’s next wave of domestic resistance might look like, as well as how opposition groups might manage relationships with Western governments, is not yet clear. Exiled former political leaders are no longer embedded in day-to-day politics, while those inside the country don’t enjoy the same public closeness with diplomats they once did. The opposition figure who attended the meeting with European diplomats said Candlelight Party leaders were focusing “internally” on helping local elected officials and otherwise have “taped our mouths shut.”

Across Cambodia, citizens’ efforts to subvert government corruption, land grabs, environmental degradation, and extortion by tycoons have continued, but the work is lonelier and more dangerous. “It’s much more difficult than it was before,” said one environmental activist, who requested anonymity out of concern for their safety. “The son is taking tougher action than his father. Before we could do a lot of things, but now we need to think twice before we act.”