Nicholas Tarling has spent a lifetime working on the subject that defines this book: British strategic foreign policy, with particular reference to international relations in Southeast Asia. It shows. Tarling brings to this study both a substantial body of work analysing the international history of Southeast Asia, from a regional perspective, and a series of detailed studies examining British strategic foreign policy regarding Southeast Asia. This book draws and benefits from that work, in a study Tarling sees as addressing two gaps: to try to understand how British policy-makers managed the decline of Britain's role in the region as responsibly as possible; to focus more closely on an important issue not yet covered by his broader studies. The topic is well chosen in both respects. The dilemma of how to manage the construction of a post-colonial state in the landlocked kingdom of Laos was an international problem from the start, the state itself being a product of the landmark Geneva conference and agreements of 1954. Those agreements framed the problem: how great powers, and smaller regional states, could together manage the collision between decolonisation and Cold War in Southeast Asia.

By 1959 the situation in Laos was so fraught British policy-makers rightly saw it as the hinge on which the strategic future of mainland Southeast Asia would turn. Both the Communist powers and the Western bloc led by the United States decided, for different reasons, that the best way forward was to try to renegotiate the structure of the state of Laos, and its place in the international states system, through another round of multilateral negotiations. Tarling's study, working primarily from the vantage point, and through the archives of, the British Foreign Office, describes and evaluates, in detail, the course of those volatile negotiations, dragging on from June 1961 to July 1962.

Tarling argues that the British tried from the start to make the best out of a bad situation, focusing on three things: trying to shape the use of American power in the region in the wider interests of collective security; trying also to prevent the escalation of military conflict in the region, something they often feared American policy might provoke; and minimising any damage such lobbying might cause to British–American relations. This was a tall order, for three reasons. First, the communist position inside Laos was stronger in every respect than all non-communist groups or leaders. Second, the disparity in power between the United States and its Allies influenced quite different perspectives between British and American diplomats, both on the spot and at home. Finally, Thai and Viet reactions to the negotiations over Laos greatly complicated efforts to maintain a unified non-communist position. Tarling well understands that despite diligent, patient, and often astute representations by British diplomats, the crucial changes were beyond their control: the shift in policy from the Eisenhower to the Kennedy administrations, the emergence of Averell Harriman as American point man on the negotiations, and President Kennedy's sensitivity to domestic pressure on foreign policy. Nevertheless, tracing every twist and turn in the situation, both on the ground in Laos and at the numerous rounds of negotiation in Geneva, Tarling argues that the British played an important role in producing a constructive international agreement. Seen from the broader regional perspective, the agreements that neutralised Laos provided, at least in principle, a concept the smaller powers of the region could work with, in their perennial effort to manage relations with the great powers and stabilise the region. The agreements were of course overwhelmed by the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Indeed they played a direct role in that escalation, by displacing American resolve to draw a firm line of containment in mainland Southeast Asia from Laos to South Vietnam. But they were certainly, from the perspective of a declining Western power trying to manage change, making the best of a bad situation.

Tarling has no illusions about the limitations of neutralism in mainland Southeast Asia at the height of the Cold War, nor the diplomacy that framed it. Indeed, his detailed discussion of that diplomacy airs the contradictions, pretensions and flaws of a policy that did seem fated to failure. But his methodology will defeat some readers, handicapped as it is by an overly narrative approach. Tarling frequently reduces his own role to quoting every document he read regarding a particular issue, without necessarily strengthening any analytical point in the process. Case in point: a paragraph-long discussion on p. 424 about whether or not to invite Prince Sihanouk to the final sessions, footnoted four times in five sentences, a trivial point on which the author reaches no conclusion. But serious readers working on the fields of international relations and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, as well as the end of Britain's imperial role, will benefit from this close study. Tarling persuasively demonstrates not only local agency by Western diplomats on the spot but also the central role played by Laotians themselves, especially Suvanna Phuma. At a pivotal moment in the Cold War in Southeast Asia Laos found itself on the bulls-eye, in the collision between power blocs and agendas. Serious students will find it necessary to read this study in order to understand how that story unfolded, and find it difficult to undermine Tarling's conclusions about how it affected the wider Southeast Asian context.