In 1957, Cambodia's Prince Norodom Sihanouk fled to a monastery near Angkor Wat to become a monk. As it turned out, this was just a maneuver aimed at proving his indispensability rather a fulfilment of his lasting monastic vows. Within a fortnight, he was back in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, launching an attack on his political enemies within the Democrat Party, pitting soldiers against party leaders. He then initiated new elections and won 99 percent of the vote against the only rival party, the socialist Pracheachon. The Communists, realizing that they could not compete against the omnipotent Sangkum, decided to go underground. This is just one episode in Sihanouk's long political biography, but it provides an excellent outlet to understanding this complex political figure, who did not shy from engaging in long-winded, controversial moves in pursuit of Cambodia's independence.Sihanouk's political career, known for its remarkable longevity, spanned eight decades, undergoing myriad transformations. The “Prince of Light” of the 1940s turned into the “Prince of Darkness” in the late 1960s, to borrow Milton E. Osborne's apt metaphors in his Sihanouk Prince of Light, Prince of Darkness (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994). But Sihanouk's career did not end there. He came back to the Cambodian throne in the 1990s as the King Father and eventually departed the scene in the 2010s as the progenitor of a whole nation. Sihanouk's diplomatic initiatives, which were as convoluted and imaginative as his domestic political antics, bemused his counterparts from Washington to Delhi and Moscow to Beijing. Seeing Sihanouk as the political figure at the center of a proud kingdom, defending its right for existence while surrounded by inimical neighbors and the great powers is the interpretative vignette and point of departure for this study.Although William J. Rust's Eisenhower & Cambodia pays intellectual homage to the motivations underpinning the political life of one of the most recognizable monarchs of the twentieth century, it is not intended as yet another biography of Sihanouk. Instead, this diplomatic history of U.S.-Cambodian relations during the Eisenhower administration completes Rust's examination of U.S.-Indochina relations prior to the start of the U.S. war in Vietnam, following up on his research into U.S. policy toward Vietnam and Laos in the 1960s. The book offers the fullest coverage to date of the back-and-forth between Washington and Phnom Penh in the 1950s. Rust rightly understands, however, that a nuanced contextual reading of those relations would be impossible without delving into Sihanouk's image as “a great man in a small country” as seen by U.S. diplomats in Phnom Penh and Saigon, U.S. State Department officials, and two U.S. presidents—Dwight D. Eisenhower, at the center of the story, and John F. Kennedy on its fringes. Additionally, Rust convincingly employs center-periphery Cold War optics, which helps to situate the book as a comprehensive case study, portraying the uneasy search for mutually acceptable terms of engagement between the great powers and their smaller local counterparts, limited by their own interests and agendas.The center-periphery framework puts the story into an international context, explaining the mismatch between the two sides’ expectations of each other. Seen from Washington, the small, formerly French-ruled Cambodia was just a dot on the world map, sitting very low on the U.S. national security agenda. Seen from Phnom Penh, the world seemed an appendage to all social and political problems plaguing the old and proud Khmer empire in its present territorial incarnation. U.S. officials saw Cambodia's internal politics through an anti-Communist lens, a view that, for Cambodian leaders, bore little resemblance to the country's real problems. On the other hand, Sihanouk's obsession with Cambodia's territorial integrity vis-à-vis its neighbors Thailand and South Vietnam rubbed up against U.S. diplomatic calculations regarding regional allies.By outlining the ebb and flow of Washington's relations with Phnom Penh during the Eisenhower years, Rust focuses on both covert and overt channels, demonstrating that the former permeated into the latter, hindering it as a result. Rust's event-driven account shows that the difficult relationships of U.S. diplomats in Phnom Penh—from Robert McClintock through Carl Strom to William Trimble—followed a recurring pattern. Despite different personalities, managerial styles, and degrees of local knowledge, all U.S. envoys invariably clashed with Sihanouk's idiosyncratic persona. As a State Department's Bureau of Research and Intelligence desk officer noted, Sihanouk was “volatile, vain, egotistical and sensitive” (p. 6). In Phnom Penh, opinions were not much at odds with Ambassador McClintock, who eventually made fun of Sihanouk by referring to him as “Snooky” (p. 93). These characterizations resemble earlier observations of the Cambodian leader's complex mixture of personality traits, as exhaustively detailed by Ross Marlay and Clark Neher in Patriots and Tyrants: Ten Asian Leaders (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999): “Depending upon the situation, Sihanouk can be charming, tenacious, revengeful, ebullient, stubborn, wily, intolerant, megalomaniacal, autocratic, shill, or playful” (p. 151).In line with the book's subtitle, the other conspicuous themes in Rust's account are the U.S. government tendency to play “footsie” with Sihanouk's non-Communist rivals and the “doctrine of plausible denial.” Rust convincingly shows that covert actions affecting Cambodia's internal political affairs proved to be, as with the Laotian case in 1958–1960, counterproductive in advancing U.S. anti-Communist goals (p. 3). The book suggests that the failure of the 1959 Dap Chhuon Plot against Sihanouk and the ensuing rebuff of U.S. involvement in the coup irreversibly damaged U.S. relations with the Cambodian ruler but also further strengthened Eisenhower's “dubious legacy of relying heavily on” the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) “to remove worrisome national leaders” (p. 252).In the prologue, which reads as an epilogue, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Relations and former Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research Roger Hilsman, Jr., speaking with President Kennedy, claimed that during the “Eisenhower administration the CIA ‘did things the State Department didn't know about’” (p. 2). This quotation may serve as an excellent tag line for the book, whetting the reader's appetite, but the subsequent development of the narrative falls flat, failing to provide concrete documentary proof. Those who have had the chance to wade through the released CIA papers of the period will hardly be surprised by this. Instead, by weaving a detailed narrative based on conjecture, memoirs, and oral histories, Rust paints a nuanced story of clandestine U.S. assistance to rebel leader Sơn Ngọc Thành and his Khmer Serei militia against Sihanouk. However, as Rust notes, scholars’ diverging views about the degree of U.S. involvement in the Dap Chhoun affair cannot be adjudicated without more “enlightened declassification of fifty-five-year-old government documents” (p. 183). This gap, however, does not prevent Rust from offering yet another case showing the relationship, or lack thereof, between U.S. overt and covert involvement in distant local actors at the crossroads between the Communist bloc and the “free world.” The Cambodian case thus puts in context other U.S. clandestine operations in the region in the 1950s, such as those in Laos and Indonesia, which would indeed need further documentary evidence.Another important theme in the book is Sihanouk's treatment of neutrality in the increasingly polarized international relations of the early Cold War. For U.S. officials, questions about Sihanouk's neutrality and nationalism were intertwined. Local considerations meant that Cambodia's national interest did not coincide with U.S. interests in the region, and, in Machiavellian fashion, the Cambodian leader took a principled approach toward accepting aid on a no-strings-attached-basis as he sought to preserve his country's neutrality. As Rust demonstrates, this approach did not meet with approval in Washington, especially when local overtures were being made by Communist China. The Eisenhower administration was unimpressed with Sihanouk's “indifference to the global ideological struggle between the ‘communist bloc’ and the ‘free world’” (p. 4). Sihanouk believed that an orientation toward either of the blocs equated to submissiveness and that such a posture would contradict Cambodia's linkage of its neutrality with foreign non-interference in its domestic affairs. In McClintock's words, Cambodian neutrality was “primarily an expression of the country's intense nationalism.” Cambodia, in the American diplomat's view, therefore sought to protect independence “by judiciously balancing Eastern and Western influence” (p. 111). This, as Rust points out, served domestic purposes, as “[p]oliticians on the left and right unanimously endorsed Sihanouk's policy of neutrality” (p. 111).Rust argues that the United States overplayed the salience of Communist ideology in international relations while downplaying the history, people, and politics of individual states. U.S. officials in the 1950s tended to reduce the complexity of relations within and among foreign countries to a zero-sum game in which a country was either lost to or won from an international Communist conspiracy efficiently directed by the Soviet Union (p. 18). This challenged Phnom Penh's overarching security concerns, which had developed independent of global Cold War imperatives and were instead focused on the local rivalry with Saigon and Bangkok. The Eisenhower administration's reluctance to oppose South Vietnam's plotting against Sihanouk, whose neutralist tint was deemed less pertinent to U.S. interests, was in agreement with Washington's desire to maintain Saigon as “a strong anti-Communist bastion in Southeast Asia” (p. 200). Therefore, Cambodia and United States seemed to have reached an impasse in which visions of neutrality and independence from below clashed with the seemingly all-engulfing zero-sum calculus from above.Rust's book is a valuable, well-researched, and lucidly written case study demonstrating the pitfalls that can develop in diplomatic relations between a superpower and a small state when local imperatives and global interests are mismatched. The added value Rust provides to our understanding of the Cold War's spread into locales hitherto thought of as insignificant is that it puts similar experiences in perspective. As I read Rust's findings with rapt interest, I could not help but draw parallels with my earlier study of the Soviet Union's involvement in the Horn of Africa. The Soviet Union, like the United States, had to deal with rival local actors that almost invariably put their own narrowly defined interests above and before vague and broadly drawn global prerogatives, more often than not managing to elevate the status of their localized cleavages into international crises. Although Rust's new book may not add much in the way of novel interpretations of the studied period—for that, see Kenton Clymer's The United States and Cambodia 1870–1969: From Curiosity to Confrontation (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004) and The United States and Cambodia, 1969–2000: A Troubled Relationship (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004)—it undoubtedly enriches our knowledge by offering clear and concise analysis of primary material that will interest not only students of Indochina but also those who seek to develop a wider understanding of center-periphery relations during the Cold War.