U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is scheduled to visit Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base later this year, the U.S. government has announced, following visits by the Japanese and Vietnamese navies in April.
The visit was discussed by John Noh, acting U.S. assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, and Lt. Gen. Rath Dararoth, secretary of state at Cambodia’s Ministry of National Defense, who met on May 31, on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue security conference in Singapore.
According to the official readout from the U.S. Department of Defense, the two leaders discussed “regional security issues and the bilateral military relationship.” It added that “both leaders look forward to a U.S. Navy ship visit and maritime training to occur at Ream Naval Base later this year, as well as travel by Secretary Hegseth to visit the U.S. ship while in port at Ream.” Noh then “shared his appreciation for Cambodia’s commitment to furthering the bilateral relationship and the open invitation to visit and conduct training at Ream Naval Base.” The statement did not detail exactly when the visit would take place.
Since 2022, the Ream Naval Base, which lies around 30 kilometers from the port city of Sihanoukville on the Gulf of Thailand, has been the subject of a controversial expansion and refurbishment funded by China, Cambodia’s closest foreign partner. The first phase of the upgrades, which Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet opened in early April, includes a 300-meter-long deep-water pier, a 5,000-ton dry dock, a 1,000-ton slipway, office buildings, and a Cambodia-China Joint Logistics and Training Center.
The Chinese involvement at Ream has attracted the suspicion of Western, and particularly U.S., security officials, who fear that the base may be evolved into a full-blown Chinese base. The concerns date back to 2019, when the Wall Street Journal reported that then-Prime Minister Hun Sen had signed a secret agreement granting China’s military the right to use the base for a period of 30 years. The Cambodian government has denied this and subsequent reports about Ream, stating that it would never permit the establishment of a foreign military base on its territory – a pledge that Hun Manet repeated during a speech marking the opening of the new facilities at the base on April 5.
Extending an invitation to Hegseth is the latest attempt by the Cambodian government to assuage concerns about China’s involvement at Ream, which it has promised will be open to warships from all friendly countries. With this in mind, the Royal Cambodian Navy hosted two Japanese naval vessels on a four-day visit to the base on April 19. A Vietnamese navy vessel followed at the end of the month.
The Hegseth invitation is also the latest indication that Phnom Penh is seeking to patch up relations with Washington after a decade of steady deterioration over issues such as Cambodia’s intimate relationship with China and the government’s increasingly fierce political crackdowns.
In February, Cambodia proposed the resumption of Angkor Sentinel, a joint military exercise with the U.S. Army that Cambodia unilaterally canceled in 2017, around the same time that the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces began a similar series of exercises with China’s People’s Liberation Army. This came after the USS Savannah’s port call at Sihanoukville in December 2024, the first such visit by the U.S. Navy in eight years.
Certainly, by defunding democracy promotion activities and forcing the closure of U.S.-funded broadcasters like Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, the Trump administration has removed one of the primary obstacles to improved relations on the Cambodian side.
However, despite the Cambodian military’s show of transparency, the question of China’s influence at Ream is unlikely to go away. Late last month, Cambodia’s Defense Minister Tea Seiha said that parts of the Ream base would remain off limits to foreign militaries. “Some of the buildings are Cambodian command posts, so we have our own restricted areas and open areas. And Cambodia is not the only country to do this,” he said, Cambodianess reported.
Indeed, after the Japanese port call in mid-April, Japan’s ambassador to Cambodia said that his country was “not in a position to prove to the world that the Ream base is not allowing a Chinese presence here.” A certain degree of American skepticism is also likely to persist, especially in light of the alarmed – even paranoid – concerns about China that now reign in Washington, which Hegseth voiced in a fiery major address to the Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore.
“It has to be clear to all that Beijing is credibly preparing to potentially use military force to alter the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific,” he told the assembled delegates, adding, “There’s no reason to sugar coat it. The threat China poses is real, and it could be imminent.”
Despite its show of transparency, Phnom Penh may well find that repairing the damage inflicted on the U.S.-Cambodia relationship over the past decade will take a lot more work.