Synergia Team in Thailand
Synergia team visited Strategic Studies Center, Bangkok – a Strategic Think Tank of Thailand Ministry of Defence established in 1979 under National Defence Studies Institute. The Synergia team interacted with Major General Nirut Duangpanya, Director General SSC and his team of Senior level officers from Tri-Services representing various departments. The discussions were based on the agenda of fostering Regional Integration and identifying mutual benefiting opportunities for achieving the set goal of both nations.
Thailand has had longstanding diplomatic ties with India since 1947, built on a foundation of historic connections based on shared culture and values, dating back over 2000 years. Indian Sanskrit language, art, music and dressing culture was adoptedby the Thai Society in the yearly years. India and Thailand presently work together in regional forums like ASEAN, BIMSTEC, EAS and IORA. India’s ‘Look East’ policy (since 1993) and Thailand’s ‘Look West’ policy (since 1996) now metamorphosed into India’s ‘Act East’ and Thailand’s ‘Act West” are strongly contributing to consolidating bilateral relations including security and economic linkages.For the last two decades, India has been strengthening its relations with Southeast Asian countries in Economic, Social, Political, and Cultural aspects. Thailand’s significance has increased dramatically in the last few years. Besides being a neighbour of Myanmar, it also shares discomfort with China. The trilateral highway project of India-Myanmar-Thailand will help in connecting South Asia with Southeast Asia.
Thailand’s Challenges
China’s Ever-Growing Power and Presence: Amidst rising differences between China and ASEAN Members on the South China Sea (SCS), China is using its One Belt, One Road initiative and making ever-increasing aggressive efforts to make its presence and power felt in the region. Thailand’s security concerns are mainly of China’s dominance of the region. Thailand’s huge economic potential will also be adversely impacted by the situation on SCS as well as the Taiwan strait owing to the huge dependence on Sea lines of communication by Thailand for most economic activities.
Security and Counter-Terrorism: Countering international terrorism, maritime security concerns includingdrugs trafficking, insurgent groups using Thailand territory for shipment of small arms as well as planning and recruitment for terrorist activities have been major challenges.
Regional Integration: With the abundance of rich marine and energy resources, strengthened cooperation of BIMSTEC nations would benefit all member countries surrounding the Bay of Bengal including Thailand, to achieve and sustainability. However, Thailand is also vulnerable to the negative impacts of the big power rivalries between U.S. and China. In the current global context of ongoing US-China rivalry, along with the global strategic cooperation among the great powers, the Bay of Bengal is viewed as a newly contested sphere of influence for powers. The bay has 1.58 billion people and is an important shipping route in the Indo-Pacific region. Hence, a challenge forThailand, and nations in the Bay of Bengal is to get theact together in the region.
Climate Change: Thailand being located in the Bay of Bengal has obviously concern regarding the adverse impact of climate change to include unseasonal floods, depleting forest cover and the resultant soil erosion. The food security is the most critical challenge that will impact the nation, if urgent measures are not taken to address this impending crisis.
Opportunities
Synergia offered help in Leveraging complementary "Act East" and "Act West" policies to deepen strategic partnership between two nations. The specific offers included to expand cooperation incritical areas.
Thought leadership: The need to ideate on global futures including future conflicts was well appreciated by SSC team. The initiative will also focus on research, exchange of papers and conduct of joint seminars on mutually concerning topics. The SSC team expressed desire to work together with Synergia on domains such as space, defence capacity building including emerging technologies, agriculture, digital economy, protection of critical civil infrastructure, green technology andhealth sector.Thailand is equally interested in identifying challenges of supply chains and mitigate the vulnerabilities. Their interests are centered around sustainable development goals (SDG) of the nation.
Way Forward
Collaboration between India's start-up ecosystem and Thailand should be explored.The two countries can work together to bridge supply chain gaps by investing in each other's markets.It is also essential to continue to strengthen strategic and security cooperation through defence engagements.This will provide an effective counter to the growing dominance and power imbalance of China. Stronger strategic and security ties along with economic relations, will lead to greater interdependence and hence, better co-existence of the two nations and the regional integration.
