Cambodia is set to resume joint military exercises with the United States next year, a move analysts say could mark a pragmatic effort to repair defence relations that have deteriorated since 2017, while stopping short of signalling a shift away from China.
Officials from Cambodia and the US discussed bringing back the Angkor Sentinel military exercises during meetings last weekend, along with broader military training and defence reforms, according to Cambodian media reports.
The United States has also expressed interest in making additional visits to Ream, Cambodia’s strategically important naval base that has undergone extensive development with Chinese assistance.
The developments came after Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s under secretary of defence for policy, visited Phnom Penh on August 14 and 15. He met Prime Minister Hun Manet and Defence Minister Tea Seiha during the final leg of a four-country tour focused on strengthening military partnerships.
Bora Chhay, a policy analyst and managing director of strategic advisory firm BowerGroupAsia’s Cambodia practice, described the development as a “significant but pragmatic reset”.
He said Washington’s earlier policy, including an arms embargo imposed in 2021 over Cambodia’s expanding relationship with Beijing and concerns about its human rights record, “has not prevented China’s influence from expanding”.
Since 2022, China has financed a major expansion of the Ream naval base. In a report submitted to the US Congress last year, the Pentagon said two Chinese naval combatants had been stationed continuously at the facility even before a joint logistics and training centre opened in April.
The United States is concerned that Ream, located on Cambodia’s Gulf of Thailand coastline, could eventually serve as China’s first regional military outpost. Such a development could give Beijing an operational advantage close to the South China Sea and potentially alter the regional balance of power.
China and Cambodia held their largest-ever joint military exercises last year, with some of the activities taking place at Ream. The drills involved nearly 900 Chinese and more than 1,300 Cambodian personnel, as well as warships, artillery, helicopters and reconnaissance drones.
China currently has only one officially acknowledged permanent overseas military base, located in Djibouti.
Cambodia has traditionally maintained close relations with Beijing and has received billions of dollars in Chinese investment. China is also Phnom Penh’s leading defence partner, according to Cambodian-American political scientist Sophal Ear, an associate professor at the Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management.
Against that backdrop, the planned revival of Angkor Sentinel carries considerable symbolic importance. The US-Cambodia exercises were held for seven years before Phnom Penh cancelled them in early 2017, several months after Cambodia conducted its first Golden Dragon military exercises with China, Ear said.
Washington’s objective “is probably not to ‘win Cambodia back’”, he said. “It is to prevent Cambodia from becoming strategically exclusive to China. That is a much more achievable objective.”
Ear also highlighted what he described as a pattern of US policy that had weakened its own position. Washington spent years raising concerns about Ream, China’s growing influence and Cambodia’s democratic decline, while US-Cambodia military cooperation “steadily atrophied”.
“The result was somewhat self-defeating: the more Washington disengaged, the fewer alternatives Cambodia had to Chinese military cooperation,” Ear said.
“Washington appears to have concluded that if it wants to limit Chinese strategic dominance in Cambodia, engagement is more effective than isolation.”
Defence analyst Abdul Rahman Yaacob, a research fellow at the Rabdan Security and Defence Institute in the United Arab Emirates, said similar developments had occurred elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
He cited Thailand’s 2014 coup, after which Washington reduced the scale of its Cobra Gold exercises and suspended some military assistance. China subsequently expanded arms sales to Thailand and introduced additional joint exercises, including Falcon Strike.
A comparable situation emerged after Cambodia forcibly returned 20 Uygur asylum seekers to China in 2009, prompting Washington to cut aid.
Rahman said these cases showed how Beijing had taken advantage when the United States reduced engagement with Cambodia or Thailand because of concerns over democracy and human rights.
For Phnom Penh, rebuilding defence relations with Washington would help demonstrate its “strategic autonomy”, he said.
“This is something that Phnom Penh is keen to show to the rest of the world – that it is not China’s puppet,” Rahman said, referring to a proposal Cambodia reportedly submitted to the US embassy months earlier seeking the restoration of joint exercises and a broader improvement in bilateral relations.
“The Americans could have accepted a number of recommendations in the proposal,” he added.
Cambodia’s recent deadly border clashes with Thailand also demonstrated the limitations of its close relationship with China, Rahman argued, noting that Bangkok had not been deterred from launching strikes against Cambodian territory.
At the same time, closer military training with the United States could give Cambodian forces access to more advanced warfare techniques, he said.
Ear said Cambodia’s military disadvantage compared with Thailand meant that stronger US engagement could provide “diplomatic and strategic reassurance even if it does not alter the military balance overnight”.
“A Cambodia that conducts exercises with both the Chinese and American militaries, receives Japanese security assistance and maintains relationships with other regional partners is harder to portray as diplomatically isolated or simply a Chinese client,” he said.
Chhay said closer defence cooperation with Washington could strengthen Cambodia’s deterrence and diplomatic profile while expanding its “strategic space in supporting peaceful border management, confidence building” and cooperation with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
For the United States, he said, “Cambodia offers an opportunity to rebuild US influence and preserve strategic choice in Southeast Asia”.
