The United States must engage with both Beijing and Moscow to preclude Sino-Soviet condominium in Cambodia that would effectively preclude a role for the non-communists, with or without Sihanouk, in obtaining and governing an independent Cambodia.
The unravelling of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia in late 1989 led to the establishment of an interim government with a majority of non-communists in leadership positions, including the interim president, Vaclav Havel who only months earlier had been a political prisoner.