Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the US-Thai Treaty of Amity. I had somebody send an article to me, I'm going to go ahead and discuss it here in a second but basically their question was: "Does the US and Thailand have a "special relationship"?

I think it would kind of be a fair statement. Now the article specifically they sent me when they asked me this, they were asking me in the context of the Treaty of Amity; they said is sort of under the Treaty. The Treaty is really a Commercial Treaty although the United States and Thailand have other agreements. The Treaty of Amity itself is a commercial agreement. As I have discussed many times on this channel before, pursuant to the terms of the Treaty, an American wishing to do business in Thailand can be granted "National treatment" in order to do such business so long as they meet certain formalities. If they are granted National treatment they can basically operate very much as a Thai would operate in Thailand and they can basically overcome such issues as things like the Foreign Business Act where you have to have 51/49 Thai to Foreign shareholding if you want to set up. Under the Treaty of Amity it is possible for Americans to do business in Thailand with 100% corporate ownership by an American or an American company. That is kind of the commercial aspect of all of this.

The person who sent me this sent me an article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Officers sought to bond US-Thai militaries. Quoting directly: "The Cabinet has approved a draft Memorandum of Understanding in which the Royal Thai Armed Forces (RTAF) would station a liaison officer at the US-Indo-Pacific Command, said a source. The draft MoU between the Thai Defense Ministry and the US Department of Defense involves the appointment of an officer to work at the post in Hawaii for 1 year, said the source." To the person who sent me this, this doesn't really specifically speak to the issue of the Treaty of Amity. The Amity Treaty is a Commercial Treaty for Americans doing business here in Thailand or for that matter, for Thais doing business in America. Things like the E-2 visa, the US Visa for investors in the United States very much operates sort of under the light if you will, under the auspices of the Treaty of Amity because Thais can go to America and engage in businesses under an E-2 Investor Visa very similarly to the way Americans can come to Thailand and do business here. 

Yeah with respect to this, while I will say this sounds like a really cool thing and I think it is probably a good idea that Thailand engages in that way, that definitely has more to do with sort of the Defence Agreements between Thailand and the United States and those sort of issues. When people have brought up that, they have asked, the person that sent me this asked, this is the first time Thailand's been doing this notwithstanding the fact that the United States and Thailand routinely deal with things like Cobra Gold here in Thailand which is a joint operation, joint training exercises they do down here; it goes back a long ways, there is major history of that. Yeah but this really doesn't surprise me. There are a number of people from a number, there are a number of countries that engage with the United States in a similar manner both inside this region and outside this region. So I am not really overall surprised. I think it just kind of dove tails in a way with the overall relationship between Thailand and the United States that has been going on now for nearly 190 years if you go back and look at the history of the Treaties and the agreements between Thailand and the United States, there is quite a long history of cooperation between the US and Thailand in both Southeast Asia and globally.