Today, Southeast Asia is in crisis.
The two neighboring nations of Thailand and Cambodia are trading heavy fire across their border zone in the second time
that they've been at each other's throats just this very year.
A fragile ceasefire, implemented with the help of Washington DC,
now seems to have fallen apart
and both sides are speaking and acting as if they expect these battles to get a whole lot worse before they get better.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians have fled the conflict zone.
Both sides claim that the other side is to blame for the violence and Thailand, the stronger of the two nations by far,
has made it clear that it won't accept anything short of a total victory.
When Thailand and Cambodia fought their first recent exchange in July of this year, that was already bad enough.
But this time, both sides know precisely what they're getting into.
Both sides fully understand the balance of power
and neither of them are going to have an easy time backing down no matter how much they'd like to.
So, as bombs fall across Southeast Asia, we've got to ask a very important question.
Can this be contained as a minor territorial dispute or are we looking at the world's newest all-out war?
The prelude to war.
To understand the course of any conflict, we've got to understand why that conflict is happening.
And in this case, that means we've got to turn back the clock.
Thailand and Cambodia have a very long and troubled history
and they've shared a poorly defined, disputed border zone for more than a century.