ABSTRACT
For fifteen years Prince Norodom Sihanouk and the Sangkum Reastr Niyum overshadowed Cambodian life. Because Sihanouk was removed from office by his own National Assembly in 1970, it is convenient, but misleading, to interpret this period in terms of his decline, a process that few observers noted at the time. The Democrats, Sihanouk's principal opponents in 1955, were driven from politics before the 1958 elections. Nationalization, like many Cambodian policies, seems to have been decided on by Sihanouk on the spur of the moment, with the intention of making Cambodia a genuinely socialist state. Between 1955 and the late 1960s, opposition to Sihanouk's rule was poorly organized and ineffective. By the early 1960s Sihanouk had forged a tactical alliance with elements of the Cambodian left as well as with Communist China. In 1965 over two hundred thousand US troops swarmed into South Vietnam to prop up the Saigon government and to prevent a Communist victory.
