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Professor Kenton Clymer has condensed this absorbing, sure-footed study from the two-volume version that he published with Routledge in 2004. General readers will probably prefer the shorter book, but they will have lost the richesse of Clymer's earlier notes and a good deal of narrative detail.
To say that Cambodia and the United States have always been strange bedfellows is obvious to anyone who knows anything about either of the countries or anything about them both. The lopsided, often uncomprehending relationship dates from the early 1950s and was a by-product of the collapsing French empire and the burgeoning Cold War. For the next forty years, U.S.-Cambodian relations were hostage to Cold War agendas and to the fighting in Vietnam. It is only since the early 1990s that Cambodian national interests as distinct from American concerns have played a role in the formulation of U.S. policy toward the kingdom.
U.S.-Cambodian relations between 1953 and 1993 form the core of Clymer's book. His narrative is hampered to an extent by the fact that between 1965 and 1969 and between 1975 and 1993, the United States and Cambodia had no formal diplomatic relations. The relationship was also troubled by the preemptive U.S. invasion of Cambodia in May 1970 and the intense aerial...