Cambodia: Pursuit of Crisis

Abstract

Guided shrilly but resolutely by Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the Chief of State, Cambodia during 1964 embarked upon its own special confrontation with the West and with the United States in particular. By the closing months of the year this had provoked a series of ultimata and crises which found the kingdom more than ever voluntarily dependent upon Communist China and ready to negotiate with the National Liberation Front, the political arm of the Viet Cong insurrectional movement in South Vietnam. While these were not necessarily the objectives sought by Prince Sihanouk, as seen from Phnom Penh they represented an accommodation to a deteriorating situation in Southeast Asia as well as a calculated effort to pursue a policy most likely to preserve the country's independence and territorial integrity, at least for the foreseeable future. They also reflected the Prince's profound conviction that Communist China will eventually dominate the entire region, that South Vietnam will inevitably and irretrievably become communist, and that unless the United States agrees soon to a negotiated solution in South Vietnam it is likely to provoke a general war with China and North Vietnam that will spread throughout the area. Although Sihanouk's tactics of the past 12 months alternately baffled and angered the West, from the Cambodian point of view they projected the country's policy of non-alignment into a critical period marked by the enormous worsening of military and political conditions in South Vietnam, Cambodia's eastern neighbor, and responded to the concomitant need to safeguard national interest by dealing with what from Phnom Penh appeared to be the forces of the future. The year 1964 therefore brought a turning but not, from the Cambodian viewpoint, a capitulation, for in the process of accommodation Prince Sihanouk characteristically sought to retain as much maneuverability as possible. In this he is likely to be successful; Cambodia as an ally is much more useful to Peking and Hanoi than Cambodia as a satellite.' Despite the fact that the crumbling situation in South Vietnam and the unhappy predicament of Laos hastened Cambodia's decision to approach North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front, this resort was actually a policy alternative adopted after Sihanouk's repeated failure to precipitate a new Geneva Conference on Cambodia, one that would neutralize the king-