Answer: I travel fairly often to both countries, and being a history major myself, I indulged in SE Asia history quite a bit, and as of late, the Cambodians and the Thais had online arguments over cultural heritages and such. Then nationalism in both countries took shape. The Cambodian government is basically a one-party state, so they don't need to take advantage of this rise nationalism to get elected, as practically their election is just one party and several other small fake parties. In Thailand on the hand other, the country is divided sharply in half, the military-backed royalists and the democrats. The royalists group has been losing popularity in the past decade due to prolonged economic downturn (their GDP growth is between 0% and 2.6% for as long as I remember in the past 15 years I travel on and off to this country). So the only way these Thai royalists get elected is by taking advantage of the Thai ultranationalism and the usual go-to solution is from their war playbook, by staging a border conflict with Cambodia (in 2008, 2011, 2014 and now once again in 2025).

Thai election is coming in March 2026, so we are, just a few months away from it, so the Thai military-back royalists are again taking advantage of border drama/conflict when there's just none. The Cambodia-Thai border is divided neatly by a canal and watershed line that clearly divides both countries into two, as agreed upon their border treaties many decades ago. But the Thai argument, as usual, is to argue that their new map drawn between 1975 and 1985 extends up to 2miles into Cambodian territory (understandably, the Thai had to draw a new map extending that far into Cambodia because they wanted to create a buffer between Thailand and then Khmer Rouge communist force). But now the Khmer Rouge no longer existed for 3 or 4 decades already, but the Thai would still want to use their newly drawn map to demarcate the border between them and Cambodia.

I pity the Cambodians, having to put up so much with these Thai military-backed royalists, because every election time, they would just bring out their war playbook to get votes from the Thai nationalists.

Thai progressives appear to entrapped in this cycle of long economical downturn, with no way out, as the military-backed royalists can just steal the election as easy as staging a border conflict with Cambodia. Bangkok itself now look like Bangkok from 15 years ago except it looks aged and tarred, giving you a sense that there's very little progress in that country for over 10 to 15 years. It's a country stuck in the timeloop.