Robert G. Sutter - The Cambodian Crisis and U.S. Policy Dilemmas

Robert G. Sutter

First published 1991 by Westview Press, Inc.

Published 2019 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sutter, Robert G.
The Cambodian crisis and U.S. policy dilemmas/Robert G. Sutter.
p. cm.(Westview special studies on South and Southeast Asia)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-8133-8047-2
1. CambodiaPolitics and government1975 . 2. United States Foreign relationsCambodia. 3. CambodiaForeign relations United States. 4. United StatesForeign relationsVietnam.
5. VietnamForeign relationsUnited States. 6. United States Foreign relations1989 . I. Title.
DS554.8.S87 1991
327.730596dc20 90-13015
CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-29050-4 (hbk)

By 1990, the decade-long conflict in Cambodia caused by Vietnamese military occupation of the country had entered a new stage, and negotiations for a peace agreement had become more active. Vietnam withdrew most if not all its forces from Cambodia. Vietnamese officials and representatives of its client government in Phnom Penh expressed some flexibility regarding a compromise political settlement of the Cambodian conflict. This was strongly encouraged by their main international supporter, the Soviet Union. The three resistance groups (those led by the Khmer Rouge, Prince Sihanouk, and former Prime Minister Son Sann -- see ) and their main international backers in China, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) -- see map, and the United States responded with varying degrees of flexibility.

All parties in the conflict appeared to see their interests as better served by making some adjustment in their positions, rather than by sticking to the intransigence of the previous 10 years. They held repeated deliberations, including an international conference on Cambodia that began in Paris July 30, 1989. But obstacles to a peace agreement remained. They centered on guaranteeing Vietnam's military withdrawal and achieving a peace agreement in Cambodia that would neither allow the return of the genocidal practices of the Khmer Rouge, nor permit Vietnam to continue domination over Cambodia.

U.S. policy faces dilemmas in Cambodia. Most notably the United States wants to help push back Vietnamese expansion in Indochina, and to support the positions of our treaty ally Thailand and other friends in ASEAN. But the United States strongly opposes the Khmer Rouge and fears that Vietnamese withdrawal may result in expanded scope for the Khmer Rouge and their brutal rule. In the past, U.S. policy dealt with these competing pressures by adopting a low posture that followed the lead of ASEAN. The United States has provided small amounts of nonlethal assistance to the two noncommunist resistance forces led by Prince Sihanouk and Son Sann, but it has refused any support to the third and most powerful member of the resistance groups, the Khmer Rouge. As the Vietnamese began to withdraw and the search for a peace agreement intensified, U.S. policymakers in the Bush administration and Congress proposed steps to strengthen the two noncommunist resistance groups led by Sihanouk and Son Sann, to block the return to power of the Khmer Rouge, and to relieve human suffering in Cambodia.

But U.S. policymakers strongly disagree about what steps are appropriate to reach these goals and support broader foreign policy objectives. Policy issues facing them at the start of the 1990s include the following:

The collapse of the U.S.-supported governments in Phnom Penh and Saigon in 1975 marked the end of the U.S, role, begun in the 1950s, as the major foreign actor in Indochina. Under terms of the Nixon doctrine begun in 1969, the United States had already withdrawn U.S. combat troops from mainland Asia (with the notable exception of Korea) and had made clear to U.S. allies and associates that they would bear more responsibility for their own defense. Nevertheless, the United States has continued to maintain important political-strategic and humanitarian interests, and lesser economic concerns, in relations with Cambodia and Vietnam. U.S. policy in this area also is particularly sensitive because of the deep impact which the Vietnam War has had on American society and on the lives of several million U.S. servicemen and their families.

America's current political-strategic interests center on assuring a settlement in Cambodia that restores stability to Southeast Asia, secures the interests of our treaty ally Thailand and the other members of ASEAN, and checks the expansion of Soviet influence--through Vietnam or other means--in Southeast Asia. Such stability has been seen as unlikely to be restored under a peace agreement that allows the Vietnamese to continue to dominate Cambodia through its client, the PRK (also known as the "State of Cambodia") or other means; or one that allows the Khmer Rouge significantly to expand its power and re-establish draconian rule in the country.

The United States has a strong interest in the strategically and economically important communication routes that converge at the Straits of Malacca and other passageways in the region. The Soviet presence at U.S.-built bases in Vietnam--including Soviet bombers, fighter aircraft, submarines, and surface warships--has at times posed a potentially serious challenge to U.S. access to those routes, U.S. interest in working with ASEAN members to check Soviet-backed Vietnamese expansion proceeded in parallel with U.S. cooperation with other Asian regional actors concerned with Soviet and Vietnamese influence, notably China and Japan. Indeed, common opposition to suspected Soviet expansion or "hegemonism" in Asia was a central feature of U.S.-Chinese negotiations following President Nixon's opening to Beijing in 1972.