1964, when it was renounced by the Cambodian government. Following his faction's seizure of a large number of seats of the ruling Sangkum party's representation at the National Assembly in the 1966 general elections, Gen. Lon was elected Prime-Minister, thereby locking the state institutions under the firm grip of the military, just as Sihanouk had feared. However, he resigned from the post in 1967 after a car accident, only to return two years later when the monarch mounted a renewed purge against leftist dissidents. As a representative of the conservative Khmer who had supported the French rule, Lon Nol never accepted Sihanouk's neutralist policy of non-alignment. Though the Prince's sporadic purges of leftist movements would quench Lon's wrath at the growing communist insurgency, what truly worried him was Sihanouk's covert deals with North Vietnam and the Viet Cong, which allowed them to establish base-camps on the Cambodian side of the border with South Vietnam and built a massive supply infrastructure. Lon also knew that Sihanouk's balancing appeasement of the US from 1968 onwards by allowing B-52 aerial bombings and ‘hot pursuit’ cross-border raids against NVA/VC base areas within Cambodia would be ineffective in stopping the wider, home-grown insurgency. One of the measures he was able to undertake was the build-up of a strong anti-communist faction within the FARK's officer corps that would back him should Sihanouk shift again towards the left. Alignment with the United States On March 17, 1970, while Sihanouk was absent from the country on a state visit to China and the USSR, Lon Nol assumed power when the National Assembly in Phnom Penh unanimously voted the Prince out of office. Lon Nol automatically succeeded the latter as Head of State on August 18, and although he claimed that the move was constitutionally legal, it quickly ran afoul of the conservative mentality of the Cambodians, many of whom believed that the Prince ruled through divine favour. To further aggrieve matters, Prince Sihanouk, who had sought refuge in China after being deposed, established a political base in Beijing and entered into an alliance with the increasingly Maoist-oriented Khmer Rouge leadership and other leftist opposition groups. In April 1970 these disparate groups formed the FUNK, an umbrella organization dedicated to the armed overthrow of the pro-western Khmer Republic. Lon Nol also had to deal with a number of dissident FARK senior officers whom, though sharing most of his views,