Did you know that there's clear evidence that the US supported Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and that they are therefore at least partially responsible for the Cambodian Genocide? The KR's killing fields are often cited as an example of the brutality of communism, and yet it wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for the support of the liberal-capitalist United States of America. How ironic.
Clear evidence is contained in this Jacobin article (jacobinmag.com
The geopolitical map was in flux after the Vietnam War — North Vietnam installed a provisional government in South Vietnam until the country was reunified in 1976, and Washington was determined to isolate the communist government. At the same time, the United States sought closer relations with China as a way of redistributing global power away from the Soviet Union; it saw Cambodia as a potentially useful counterweight.
In November 1975 — seven months after KR forces seized control of Phnom Penh — Henry Kissinger said to Thailand’s foreign minister that he “should tell [the KR] that we bear no hostility towards them. We would like them to be independent as a counterweight to North Vietnam.” Kissinger added that he “should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them.”
A month later, in discussions between President Gerald Ford, Kissinger, and Suharto (the US-backed dictator of Indonesia), Ford noted: “We are willing to move slowly in our relations with Cambodia, hoping perhaps to slow down the North Vietnamese influence although we find the Cambodian government very difficult.” Kissinger echoed these sentiments, saying “we don’t like Cambodia, for the government in many ways is worse than Vietnam, but we would like it to be independent. We don’t discourage Thailand or China from drawing closer to Cambodia.”
But the KR would largely chart an isolationist course, concentrating instead on its project of building a self-sufficient, agrarian society that ended in mass murder.
At the end of 1978, in an escalation of border disputes between the countries, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and toppled the KR government in early 1979. KR forces fled to western Cambodia on the Thai border to begin a guerrilla campaign against the new, Vietnamese-installed Cambodian government. The genocide the KR had orchestrated was over, but now self-serving foreign parties, including the United States and China, chose to support the KR guerrillas in their campaign against the Vietnamese occupation, as part of an overall policy of isolating Vietnam.
A key method to achieving this end was US support for overt Chinese aid to the KR guerillas. As the New York Times reported, “the Carter administration helped arrange continued Chinese aid” to the KR guerillas. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, explained that he “encourage[d] the Chinese to support Pol Pot.” According to a report from the Associated Press, US intelligence agencies estimated that China supplied KR guerrillas with about $100 million of military aid per year throughout the 1980s.
