The Apathy of Empire: Cambodia in American Geopolitics

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What Americas intervention in Cambodia during the Vietnam War reveals about Cold Warera U.S. national security strategy

The Apathy of Empire reveals just how significant Cambodia was to U.S. policy in Indochina during the Vietnam War, broadening the lens to include more than the often-cited incursion in 1970 or the illegal bombing after the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. This theoretically informed and thoroughly documented case study argues that U.S. military intervention in Cambodia revealed Americas efforts to construct a hegemonic spatial world order.

James Tyner documents the shift of Americas post-1945 focus from national defense to national security. He demonstrates that Americas expansionist policies abroad, often bolstered by military power, were not so much about occupying territory but instead constituted the construction of a new normal for the exercise of state power. During the Cold War, Vietnam became the geopolitical lodestar of this unfolding spatial order. And yet Americas grand strategy was one of contradiction: to build a sovereign state (South Vietnam) based on democratic liberalism, it was necessary to protect its boundariesin effect, to isolate itthrough both covert and overt operations in violation of Cambodias sovereignty. The latter was deemed necessary for the former.

Questioning reductionist geopolitical understandings of states as central or peripheral, Tyner explores this paradox to rethink the formulation of the Cambodian war as sideshow, revealing it instead as a crucial site for the formation of this new normal.

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Author Bio

James A. Tyner is professor of geography at Kent State University. His books include Dead Labor: Toward a Political Economy of Premature Death and The Alienated Subject: On the Capacity to Hurt (both from Minnesota).