President Donald Trump said on Friday (November 14, 2025) that he had successfully eased hostilities between Cambodia and Thailand, saying that he’d been able to preserve a previous, U.S.-brokered ceasefire that had appeared to be breaking down.

“I stopped a war just today,” Mr. Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One as he flew to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida for the weekend. He said his actions were made possible by his willingness to impose steep tariffs on countries around the world, which he has argued gives the US great leverage on trade and diplomatic leverage.

The President said he’d spoken to the Prime Ministers of both countries by phone and now, “They’re doing great. They were not doing great.” He said the conversations left him believing, “I think they’re going to be fine.”

Territorial disputes over exactly where the border lies between the Southeast Asian neighbours led to five days of armed conflict in late July that killed dozens of soldiers and civilians.

Mr. Trump threatened to withhold trade privileges from the two countries unless they stopped fighting, helping to broker a temporary halt to the conflict. The pact was then reaffirmed in greater detail last month, when Trump attended an Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit meeting in Malaysia.

The ceasefire seemed on the verge of falling apart this week, however, when Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet said a villager was killed after shooting broke out along his country’s border with Thailand.

Mr. Manet said one civilian was killed and three others injured when Thai troops opened fire on civilians residing in the area of Prey Chan in Cambodia’s northwestern province of Banteay Meanchey. The same village was the site of a violent but not lethal confrontation in September between Thai security personnel and Cambodian villagers.

The Thai military said that the latest incident began when Cambodian soldiers allegedly fired into a district in Thailand’s eastern province of Sa Kaeo. No Thai casualties were reported.

Thailand and Cambodia have a history of enmity going back centuries, when they were warring empires. Their competing territorial claims stem largely from a 1907 map drawn when Cambodia was under French colonial rule, which Thailand has argued is inaccurate.

The ceasefire does not spell out a path to resolve the underlying basis of the dispute, the longstanding differences over where the border should run.

Cambodia’s leader Hun Manet has accused Thailand of preventing more than 20 families from returning to their homes on the disputed border, according to his letter to the head of the U.N. released on Thursday (September 18, 2025).

The Thai army said the Cambodian residents had “illegally occupied” Thai territory.

The Southeast Asian neighbours agreed a truce in late July following five days of clashes that killed at least 43 people on both sides— the latest eruption of a long-standing dispute over contested border temples on their 800-kilometre (500-mile) frontier.

Both sides have since traded accusations of ceasefire violations.

On Wednesday (September 17, 2025), Thai forces fired rubber bullets and tear gas at several hundred Cambodian protesters during a stand-off in a disputed border village, a move that Phnom Penh said injured nearly 30 people, including a soldier and a Buddhist monk.

In a letter dated September 17 to United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Hun Manet said Thai forces had “widened the conflict zone by erecting barbed wire and barricades”, and “forcibly” evicted Cambodian civilians from their “long-settled lands” in two border villages in northwestern Banteay Meanchey province since last month.

“Twenty-five families have already been blocked from their homes and fields,” Hun Manet wrote, adding that a Thai military spokesperson had threatened more evictions, “potentially affecting hundreds of households comprised of about a thousand inhabitants”.

July’s military clashes between Cambodia and Thailand were their deadliest in decades, with 300,000 people also forced to flee their homes along the border.