The World

Flying home, Shah Mohammad spared Mosaddegh, who was confined to one of his estates, and dismissed Zahedi within a year, revealing himself as a steelier player than the west had expected. Vigilant and paranoid, he privately hated both superpowers, but played off the Soviets and Americans to the extent that Khrushchev ordered his assassination and Eisenhower threatened his deposition. He believed he could out-fox them both. At home he emulated Mosaddegh, commandeering his land reforms and nationalist rhetoric for a modern monarchy, planning to launch his own revolution.

Nasser too was playing the superpowers against each other – ‘Food from the Americans, money from the Arabs, guns from Russia, a veritable magician,’ joked the shah later. Now Nasser demanded funding for a huge project, the Aswan Dam. At first Eisenhower and Dulles were sympathetic, but, suspicious of Nasser’s Soviet links, they withdrew. As Nasser encouraged Palestinian attacks on Israeli borders, in July 1956 he nationalized the Suez Canal, using the resulting funds for the Dam. The British prime minister Anthony Eden, who after waiting for fifteen years to succeed Churchill was now addicted to painkillers and too ill to do the job, absurdly regarded Nasser as a new Hitler – a regular flaw in leaders of the Second World War generation. Meanwhile the French were suffering even more than the British from imperial decline.

On 7 May 1954, the commander of 11,000 French troops at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam sent a final message – ‘The enemy has overrun us. We are blowing up everything. Vive la France!

’ – and surrendered to the forces of Ho Chi Minh. Faced with French reconquest, Ho and Giap had always believed that however much blood was spilt they would defeat the westerners. ‘You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours,’ Ho supposedly told a Frenchman. ‘But even at those odds, you’ll lose and I’ll win.’ Giap had exploited French incompetence by secretly using thousands of bearers to convey artillery through jungles to surround a French army – winning independence for North Vietnam.^*

In neighbouring Cambodia, an extraordinary young king was also striving for independence. Blessed with good looks, impulsive spirit, limitless ambitions and boundless egotism, King Norodom Sihanouk had spent his youth riding horses, playing football, studying films and chasing girls, fathering many children by many lovers from two of his own aunts to actresses and courtesans, and playing saxophone and clarinet in his own royal band. But he was determined to escape French rule. For the next fifty years, Sihanouk would variously be king, premier, president, autocrat as well as figurehead, victim and prisoner of Pol Pot, a career that started in 1941 when Paris selected Sihanouk to be king because he combined the two rival branches of the royal Norodom family.

As the prince was growing up, he was closely connected to a boy who would one day control him and kill a million of his people, including several of his children. Saloth Sar, son of well-off peasant farmers, arrived from the countryside with his brother to live with their cousin, who was a ballerina and mistress of then King Monivong; for eighteen months he trained as a novice Buddhist monk. Later, after an education at a privileged new boarding school, the future Pol Pot won a scholarship to study electronics in Paris.

The French–Vietnamese war helped push the playboy King Sihanouk into front-line politics. After triumphantly winning independence in 1953 following a tour through France and the USA, Sihanouk leaned towards socialism and rejected American hegemony. ‘Had I been born to an ordinary family,’ he said, ‘I’d have been leftist, but I was born a prince … I can’t detach myself.’ Yet Saloth Sar did detach himself. In Paris, he read Stalin, Mao, Rousseau, Sartre, and met his best friend Ieng Sary; they married sisters, and returned as fanatical Marxists. Saloth immediately joined a Viet Minh unit, but then emerged in Phnom Penh as a teacher. It seemed as though Saloth had returned to normal life.

A natural showman, Sihanouk revelled in the limelight but craved real power. On 2 March 1955, he suddenly abdicated (succeeded by his father) and, coining the title Samdech Upayuvareach – Prince Who Was King – he won the premiership. France was gone, and Sihanouk planned to navigate neutral peace for Cambodia.