The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History by Austin Jersild

Abstract

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.