To the untrained eye, the photographs appeared to be surreal. Cambodian Buddhist monks—tens of thousands—walking in the streets with signs, praying in favor of Donald Trump winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Tales even went so far as to assert that Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen himself nominated Trump, with up to 70,000 monks speaking out on his behalf.
But the pageantry wasn’t sitting well. With anyone familiar with Buddhist doctrine, monks are not to be involved in politics. Even more egregious: today’s Cambodia is one of Beijing’s most intimiate proxy states. What are the chances, then, that monks there would come out en masse for an American president in the midst of a growingly fraught U.S.–China confrontation?
The solution, it seems, might not be in Cambodia, though—but in Beijing.
The Trap of “Honor”
It was not a grassroots rally of Cambodian monks, however, but a meticulously staged one orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), says Chinese dissident scholars and political insiders. The mastermind behind this campaign is a strategy that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have supposedly hatched to manipulate Donald Trump throughout his presidency.
The CCP’s International Liaison Department (ILD), its secret “party diplomacy” branch, was responsible for implementing united front activities overseas. The ILD usually aimed at left-leaning political parties and groups in the West. But since Trump’s second presidential election win, the department submitted a special report to the Politburo.
That report concluded that Trump could not be bribed monetarily, nor could he be readily compromised by women. Rather, the analysts said, they found something else: the allure of “honor.” And in the eyes of the West, no honor shines brighter than the Nobel Peace Prize.
So the chanting of the monks in Phnom Penh was part of a much larger strategy: to persuade Trump that worldwide adoration—and the Nobel itself—was within grasp if he played along with Beijing and Moscow’s script.
