For years, it has been fashionable to describe Cambodia as stuck: locked in authoritarian stasis, impervious to pressure, immune to meaningful change. That assessment is beginning to look suspect. While clearly still the dominant force in Cambodian politics, Hun Sen’s legitimacy within his Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) is likely more diminished today than at any point in the past decade. And yet, just as a potential “window of opportunity” for change opens, the international response remains miscalibrated, timid, and dangerously out of step with reality.

This “window” is not a moment of democratic awakening. Cambodia is not suddenly on the brink of popular revolt. In fact, pro-CPP nationalism is at an all-time high as Thai F-16s roar overhead. But popular opinion ceased to move the regime long ago, if it ever did. No, this is something far more familiar and far more consequential in a fully criminalized one-party state: a moment of incipient intra-elite fracture.

Hun Sen’s four-decade-long grip on power has derived largely from his ability to command the loyalty of a coalition of venal elite powerbrokers. This mandate has been weakened considerably this year by his own choices: regional brinkmanship, strategic embrace of globally harmful criminal economies, and a conflict that he prepared for, instigated, and then lost. Beneath the war-driven nationalist noise now emanating from Phnom Penh (including from generally critical voices) lies potential dissatisfaction among the elites who matter: security figures, business magnates, and political actors who have paid a real price for Hun Sen’s decisions. This is a true structural vulnerability – and yet the world is responding as if nothing has changed.

Part of the problem is familiar: Western institutional inertia that relies on outdated policy models and suffers from a reliable tendency to mistake choreography for change. The response to Hun Manet’s coronation in 2023 captured this dynamic perfectly. The transition was widely framed as a generational reset that offered a window of opportunity for reform. It never was.

© The Diplomat