The current Thailand–Cambodia war is not the product of a single triggering incident, but rather the convergence of three long-standing structural tensions: an unresolved and symbolically charged border dispute, the personalization of interstate relations through elite family networks, and the entrenchment of powerful cross-border criminal economies. These dynamics have periodically generated crises for decades, but in 2025 they aligned in a way that transformed a familiar pattern of skirmishes into sustained interstate warfare.