Cambodia’s Foreign Policy Choice during 2010 to 2020: From Strategic Hedging to Bandwagoning

This research traces the ways in which Cambodia has handled the escalating contention between the United States and China in Southeast Asia from 2010-2020 and the dynamics that shaped Cambodia's foreign policy during that period. The existing literature has tended to view Cambodia's foreign policy choices as monolithic and consistently pro-China. This research challenges this conventional assessment about Cambodia's foreign policy. The analyses in this research indicate that the changes in Cambodia's foreign policy choices toward the United States and China have been driven by domestic political dynamics to a substantial extent, along with the other exogenous variables such as economic, security, and diplomatic factors. In addition, internal factors are not always stable, as most observers of Cambodia's foreign policy have claimed. Due to the unstable nature of internal factors, Cambodia's foreign policy has not always tilted towards China continuously. Cambodia's foreign policy has been in flux and swung between the United States and China. To drive this point home, this research adopts and applies the returns-maximizing and risk-contingency options of the strategic hedging model to demonstrate Cambodia's foreign policy shift from hedging to bandwagoning.