Nicholas Tarling continues his series of close studies of British strategic foreign policy and the international relations of Southeast Asia, during the post-Second World War era of decolonisation, state-building, and Cold War, by this forensic examination of Cambodia's efforts to keep conflict at bay. Working primarily through the very familiar sources housed at the UK National Archives in file series FO371, drawing principally on British perceptions, policies, and actions as the vantage point from which to engage this Southeast Asian story in international history, Tarling presents what an attentive reader will recognise as an insightful, richly documented, and fair assessment of the mercurial Prince Norodom Sihanouk and his long effort, from 1954 into 1970, to preserve the independence and territorial integrity of his small and vulnerable nation. This is not by any means an exercise in external scholarship. British and Western diplomats, especially in the region, paid very close attention indeed to the agendas, calculations, intentions and policies of the regional governments with whom they worked. Their files contain a great deal of insightful analysis of this volatile period in the international history of Southeast Asia, composed first hand and on the spot by very interested but often well informed and thoughtful parties. As he has in previous volumes, Tarling's deep immersion in these files brings this out very well. And until Southeast Asian governments abandon their lamentable policy of refusing to release any significant records of their own for serious research, these ‘outsider’ records, with all their inherent limitations, remain the indispensable source.

Tarling points out that throughout this turbulent and confusing period the British government and Prince Sihanouk actually shared a broad general diagnosis of the region's long-term future and how best to approach it: sooner or later the Western military and political position in mainland Southeast Asia would become untenable, China's influence would rise in its stead, and regional powers would be well advised to plan accordingly; for Cambodia this meant pursuing its own policy of neutralism and lobbying for the wider neutralisation of its immediate region. But each faced daunting problems. For Sihanouk, the intractable problem was the clash between his vision of the long-term future of the region and Cambodia's most pressing and permanent problem: the threats posed to its existence by the irredentism of its neighbours, Thailand and Vietnam. This was greatly aggravated by American intervention in the region, as a patron and ally of both these powers. For the British, the idea of neutralising the region ran afoul of this same American intervention. Sihanouk made it more difficult for quietly sympathetic powers such as the British to make much headway because he practised such a mercurial and eccentric approach to foreign policy. By appearing to lean too willingly towards the Communist powers, especially China, and seeming to be too hostile to the United States, Sihanouk complicated everyone's efforts to carve out a space in which Cambodia could weather the storm. But the real problem was the storm: the war in Vietnam. Until and unless there was a larger settlement of that conflict, Cambodia was caught uneasily between the Cold War of the Great Powers and what Sihanouk saw as the even more dangerous menace posed by his neighbours. Sihanouk's central purpose remained constant and rested on a logical analysis, but his approach necessarily involved responding to the ebb and flow of events. Those responses were not always effective, but the British generally understood what Sihanouk was trying to do, and most of them sympathised. Sihanouk's idiosyncratic conduct of foreign policy probably helped shatter his domestic political position, but the real problem remained the war next door.

Few if any scholars would be as well qualified to present a definitive scholarly analysis of these problems in the international history of Southeast Asia, working through the sources and vantage points of the Western powers, as Professor Tarling. Would that he tried. The problem with this latest volume is a familiar one: approach and methodology. Tarling declares in his Acknowledgements the intention to follow the lead set by Elie Kadourie and give his readers the chance to walk into, and through, the thoughts and actions of those whose history they are engaging. He is concerned with ‘what men and women thought as well as what they did, with the options they argued over and the dilemmas they faced, and not merely the events that took place.’ Quite right. But Tarling's method goes well beyond drawing ‘extensively from original documents in published and unpublished forms and often quote [ing] them.’ Once again this volume is really more a wholesale reproduction of the long and detailed British discussion of events, debating of options, and formulation of policies that can be mined from comprehensively excavating FO371. This reduces the voice of this most learned and erudite scholar to an editor annotating a published collection of documents, as opposed to an analyst presenting his own interpretation of what is to be learned from them in a scholarly monograph. Tarling declares that he ‘does not refrain from judgement but aims more to expose than judge’. But the challenge to the scholar is to analyse, which is more stimulating, useful, and challenging than to judge. When we find the authorial voice in this volume, its conclusions are sharp, crisp and persuasive. But we need to look too hard for it. Only the brief final Retrospect and portions of the last chapter make any real effort to harness the documents to a scholarly interpretation. There really is too little monograph here, too much weaving together of ‘what one clerk said to another’, in daunting detail. Serious readers who apply themselves will be rewarded, and this volume in the Tarling corpus can add something useful for all students of the international history of the region. Perhaps we may yet tempt the Professor to elbow his way into the discussion with a volume driven by his own interpretation of the sources, rather than his running commentary on them. I have no doubt it would be a memorable monograph.