Thai PM to ink Cambodia ceasefire deal but skips summit
After withdrawing from the ASEAN Summit due to the death of the kingdom’s Queen Mother Sirikit, the Thai prime minister will travel to Malaysia to sign a ceasefire agreement with Cambodia, which will be witnessed by US President Donald Trump.
Foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are meeting in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday to kick off a weekend of global diplomacy, and teams from the United States and China were holding trade talks alongside the summit.
Trump will arrive Sunday morning for the first stop of his trip to Asia and was on hand to watch Cambodia and Thailand sign a broader ceasefire agreement after helping broker an end to a deadly five-day border conflict in July.
Dozens of people have been killed and nearly 300,000 temporarily displaced in the most intense fighting between the Southeast Asian neighbors in recent history.
Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said he wanted the ceasefire ceremony to be held on Sunday morning and then he would return to Thailand.
Anutin said he would also miss the APEC Summit to be held in South Korea next week.
Thailand’s cabinet will meet on Saturday to discuss funeral arrangements.
ASEAN plans to push for multilateralism on trade and deeper relations with new partners as it manages the fallout from Trump’s global tariff offensive at its annual meeting.
It will also accept East Timor, Asia’s youngest country, as its 11th member.
In addition to the regional talks, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer will hold a series of trade talks with a Chinese delegation led by Deputy Prime Minister He Lifeng.
The world’s two largest economies are trying to find a path forward after Trump threatened new 100 percent tariffs and other trade restrictions on Chinese goods starting Nov. 1 in retaliation for China’s greatly expanded export controls on rare earth magnets and minerals.
World leaders including Chinese Premier Li Qiang, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa and Japan’s newly elected Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi will join Trump at Sunday’s summit.
Although the talks have not yet been confirmed, the US President is expected to have a highly anticipated meeting with Lula on the sidelines of the summit.
Lula said he plans to argue that Washington’s 50 percent tariffs on Brazilian goods were a “mistake,” pointing to a $410 billion U.S. trade surplus with Brazil over 15 years.
Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Asia that he would consider lowering tariffs on Brazil under the right circumstances.
Trump stated that he did not intend to have a similar meeting with Carney and that he was “satisfied with the agreement we made” with Canada.
Trade talks with the United States’ second-largest trading partner abruptly broke down following an ad released by the Ontario provincial government in which former president Ronald Reagan said tariffs were leading to trade wars and economic disaster.
Trump said the video was fake.
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