The diversionary theory of war, as systematically articulated in political science, posits that regimes facing domestic instability may manufacture or escalate external conflicts to redirect public discontent and consolidate power. This postulate, later refined through selectorate theory, has traditionally been applied to unilateral cases where a single government initiates hostilities to distract from internal crises. Compared to the classical diversionary war theory, the reality of contemporary international relations seems to exhibit phenomenal cases of “reciprocal diversionary warfare”, where the ruling regimes of two countries in an ongoing war equation simultaneously benefit from managed hostilities while avoiding full-scale war.
The phenomenon of reciprocal diversionary conflict reflects a sophisticated interplay between domestic political struggle and international aggression. Where classical realist paradigms emphasized state-centric motives grounded in relative gains and strategic positioning, the contemporary variant of diversionary conflict betrays an overtly domestic rationality. Leaders do not merely use war as an extension of policy, but as a calibrated theatre for internal legitimation. A current case illustrates how mutual antagonism between two states can be choreographed into a form of mutual reinforcement—an elaborate feedback loop wherein each regime’s internal legitimacy is paradoxically stabilized by a controlled external threat.
Unlike asymmetric provocations that spiral into conflict through miscalculation, reciprocal diversionary wars are informed by a tacit understanding. The de facto leaderships of each side implicitly accepts the other’s need for conflict and responds in ways that escalate only within predefined parameters. The military engagements are real, the casualties regrettable, yet the objectives remain curiously constrained. The intent is not conquest but continuity—not the expansion of borders, but the fortification of narratives. These wars act less as instruments of strategic transformation than as mechanisms of symbolic restoration: a performance wherein national honor is continually contested yet never settled, always justifying further mobilization without requiring actual resolution.
The internal political landscapes of two regimes involved in the contemporary case of reciprocal diversionary war share striking commonalities. One is governed by a faction whose legitimacy rests on a tenuous coalition of oligarchic remnants and populist mobilization, struggling to preserve symbolic capital in the wake of economic underperformance and eroding party cohesion. The other is managed by a post-dynastic authority emerging from decades of personalized rule, and illegal economic statecraft, now attempting to forge a technocratic veneer over its entrenched security apparatus. In both settings, recent domestic dissatisfaction—manifesting as fragmented opposition movements, parliamentary instability, and media skepticism—has created conditions ripe for the externalization of threat. The border becomes the screen onto which these insecurities are projected, giving shape to amorphous internal insecurities through the clarity of military confrontation.
Selectorate theory provides a particularly apt lens through which to understand this convergence. Where survival depends on satisfying a relatively narrow winning coalition—whether composed of military elites, business magnates, or dynastic patrons—the value of external conflict lies not in its outcome but in its utility for political maintenance. Conflict generates rally effects that suppress dissent, enable discretionary spending on security, and reorder media discourse around patriotic themes. Indeed, the symbolic economy of war offers advantages that far exceed its material risks, provided the violence remains compartmentalized and theatrically legible. What distinguishes reciprocal diversion from unilateral adventurism is that both regimes possess the informational and institutional capacity to manage conflict escalation. War is not stumbled into; it is curated.
Curiously, the social dynamics within both polities involved in reciprocal diversionary warfare exhibit signs of synchronized conditioning. In each, state-affiliated media has revived a repertoire of reciprocal accusations and historical grievances, often invoking obscure territorial claims or symbolic landmarks whose salience lies more in their emotional valence than their strategic value. Civil society, while still formally operative, has retreated from contentious issues under the weight of bureaucratic scrutiny and ambiguous legal pressures. This political atmosphere, although distinct in its institutional features across the two states, functions analogously: the border conflict furnishes each with the discursive means to normalize extraordinary measures.
At the military level, the pattern of engagements reveals a choreography that belies spontaneous escalation. Tactical offensives are launched in geographically marginal zones of contested legacy, often involving disputed temples, river crossings, or colonial-era demarcation lines whose ambiguity lends plausible deniability to aggressive posturing. Exchanges are timed with domestic political cycles, peaking around key parliamentary sessions, economic downturns, or corruption investigations. Air power is used sparingly, but with symbolic visibility; drone footage is disseminated selectively to evoke control, precision, and deterrence. Ground incursions remain light, consistent with a doctrine of provocation without overextension. Military fatalities are mourned, yet their number remains low enough to preserve the aura of control. In essence, the violence is episodic, spectacular, and ritualistic—carefully prevented from metastasizing into actual total war.
The architecture of such conflict rests on a dual axis: domestic fragility and performative antagonism. As each regime grapples with eroding internal consensus, it finds in the enemy not merely a scapegoat, but a co-author of its continued relevance. This mutual utility resembles a dialectical entanglement, in which the perceived external threat is both manufactured and metabolized into internal coherence. Importantly, this coherence is not totalizing. It does not require unanimity, but only the suppression of fragmentation. The war, therefore, is not waged to convince all, but to confuse enough—to destabilize alternatives and forestall the crystallization of dissent. In doing so, it achieves a paradoxical form of equilibrium: internal disorder is suspended by the fiction of external disorder.
This dynamic is particularly visible in the elite-military nexus within each polity. The military, long enshrined as the guardian of sovereignty, occupies a dual role—as both strategic actor and symbolic institution. Within this schema, even limited operations become tests of patriotism, loyalty, and belonging. Promotions are fast-tracked, procurement is accelerated, and command structures are insulated from civilian oversight under the rationale of national emergency. In some instances, longstanding internal rivalries within the armed forces are temporarily set aside, united under the banner of territorial integrity. Yet this unity is performative; the deeper function is to shield the military from scrutiny while preserving its budgetary and political relevance. The war thus becomes a device of institutional preservation, defending not the state per se but its custodians.
Meanwhile, international responses—rhetorically urgent yet substantively non-interventionist—allow both regimes to position themselves as embattled sovereignties resisting foreign manipulation. Multilateral bodies issue cautious calls for restraint, but refrain from naming aggressors. Regional frameworks, already weakened by competing alignments, fail to produce coordinated mediation, thereby granting space for strategic ambiguity. Major powers, with vested interests in stability but limited appetite for entanglement, apparently endorse de-escalation while supplying logistical and rhetorical support to both sides. The result is a diplomatic equilibrium wherein conflict is publicly condemned but privately tolerated. This international ambiguity forms the third pillar of the conflict’s sustainability: without clear external constraints, the war remains a domestic tool cloaked in international confusion.
International actors, while plausibly not central to this internal calculus, nonetheless play an important role in enabling its continuity. By maintaining formal neutrality and expressing symmetrical concern, external powers avoid the diplomatic entanglement that would otherwise force a more decisive stance. Multilateral institutions, constrained by consensus rules and competing interests, often default to conflict-avoidance mechanisms that preserve the status quo. Regional neighbors, wary of precedent and preoccupied with their own internal dynamics, issue bland calls for de-escalation. Meanwhile, great powers with strategic stakes in the region selectively supply military aid, surveillance capabilities, and diplomatic cover—hedging their bets in the event that either regime proves more pliable in the long term. Thus, the international system does not simply fail to prevent conflict; it tacitly licenses it through its reluctance to disrupt clientelist equilibriums.
There are reasons to believe that the current entanglement, far from being a lapse into primitive statecraft, represents a refined mode of state governance adaptation. In an era where legitimacy must be continuously reproduced in fragmented media environments, and where electoral procedures coexist uneasily with informal power networks, war serves as a unifying spectacle. It simplifies narratives, compresses dissent, and renders leadership indispensable. This is not the war of Clausewitz but the war of Baudrillard—a hyperreal conflict in which simulations of national survival conceal the actual preservation of elite continuity. It is more than postmodern, it is hyper-modern. Each skirmish is less a move on a strategic chessboard than a pixel in a broader image-management campaign. Each casualty is mourned, but each also becomes a node in the mythos of national resilience. The violence is real, but its meaning is curated.
Historical parallels abound, yet the present case challenges even the most sophisticated models of conflict behavior. Here we observe not a zero-sum game but a symbiotic antagonism—a dance of adversaries whose opposition is functional to their cohesion. This is not a mere misfortune of geography or a relic of colonial cartography. It is the operational logic of regimes that have always required enemies to justify their structure. The enduring tension between them has less to do with policy divergence than with mutual dependency. Each needs the other to maintain the illusion of existential threat; each thrives on the other’s permanence. Thus, war becomes not the failure of diplomacy but its shadow twin—its necessary inverse.
To assert this interpretation is not to minimize the suffering of those displaced, wounded, or killed by the conflict. Rather, it is perspective to locate that suffering within a structure of political rationality that transcends the immediate spectacle. For those at the top, the war represents continuity; for those at the bottom, it is disruption. Yet disruption, when ritualized and bounded, becomes a form of predictable trauma. It is the calculated rhythm of insecurity—the measured release of chaos to restore domestic order.
This logic is further reinforced by the ways in which information is curated and weaponized. Both polities exhibit advanced forms of information control, albeit expressed through different institutional modalities. One relies on vertically integrated propaganda ecosystems coordinated across state and military bureaucracies, where all national crises are reframed as chapters in a broader existential struggle. The other adopts a more decentralized but no less effective strategy of narrative manufacturing, outsourcing legitimacy to pliant media outlets and strategic civil society proxies who echo nationalistic talking points with the patina of independence. In both cases, war narratives do not emerge organically from conflict; they precede it, laying the discursive groundwork upon which hostilities become not just acceptable but necessary.
For now, the traditional ruling elites (one military, the other one dynastic) endure, militarized leadership appears strengthened, their oppositions silenced, their militaries invigorated. The war, though illegible by classical metrics of victory, has delivered its intended dividends: renewed political centrality for embattled coalitions, strategic insulation from dissent, and a reconstitution of sovereignty not through international recognition but through internal reproduction. This is not the war of conquest, nor the war of attrition—it is the war of survival. It does not seek to win in the conventional sense; it seeks to persist, to extend its temporality long enough to outlive its alternatives.
All content on this platform is anonymously published, generated by AI under human guidance, and intended for analysis and intellectual engagement. Views expressed may not represent those of any individual or entity, without guarantees of accuracy or completeness. For further clarification and sharper understanding, directly engage us via greaterasiapacific.th@gmail.com
Greater Asia-Pacific 