Allegations of United States support for the Khmer Rouge

... According to journalist Elizabeth Becker, former U.S. National Security Advisor (NSA) Zbigniew Brzezinski "claims that he concocted the idea of persuading Thailand to cooperate fully with China in its efforts to rebuild the Khmer Rouge. In the spring of 1979, Brzezinski says, he used the visit of Thailand's foreign minister to press forward his plans." Becker has quoted Brzezinski as saying "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help the D.K. [Democratic Kampuchea] ... we could never support him but China could." -20][20] [21] However, in 1998, Brzezinski stated: "The Chinese were aiding Pol Pot, but without any help or arrangement from the United States. Moreover, we told the Chinese explicitly that in our view Pol Pot was an abomination and that the United States would have nothing to do with him—directly or indirectly." [22] In a New York Times obituary for Brzezinski after his death in 2017, he was described as "tacitly encouraging" China's backing of the Khmer Rouge. [23]

In November 1975, U.S. NSA and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told the Thai foreign minister: "You should tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs but we won't let that stand in our way." [24] In a 1998 interview, Kissinger said: "some countries, the Chinese in particular supported Pol Pot as a counterweight to the Vietnamese supported people and We at least tolerated it." Kissinger said he didn't approve of this due to the genocide and said he "would not have dealt with Pol Pot for any purpose whatsoever." He further said: "The Thais and the Chinese did not want a Vietnamese-dominated Indochina. We didn't want the Vietnamese to dominate. I don't believe we did anything for Pol Pot. But I suspect we closed our eyes when some others did something for Pol Pot." [25]

... According to Tom Fawthrop, U.S. support for the Khmer Rouge guerrillas in the 1980s was "pivotal" to keeping the organization alive, and was in part motivated by revenge over the U.S. defeat during the Vietnam War. [27] A WikiLeaks dump of 500,000 U.S. diplomatic cables from 1978 shows that the administration of President Jimmy Carter was torn between revulsion at the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge and concern with the possibility of growing Vietnamese influence should the Khmer Rouge collapse. [28]

According to Michael Haas, despite publicly condemning the Khmer Rouge, the U.S. offered military support to the organization and was instrumental in preventing UN recognition of the Vietnam-aligned government.[29] Haas argued that the U.S. and China responded to efforts from the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) for disarming the Khmer Rouge by ensuring the Khmer Rouge stayed armed, and that U.S. efforts for merging the Khmer Rouge with allied factions resulted in the formation of the CGDK. After 1982, the U.S. increased its annual covert aid to the Cambodian resistance from $4 million to $10 million.[30] Haas's account is corroborated by Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan, who recalled: "ASEAN wanted elections but the U.S. supported the return of a genocidal regime. Did any of you imagine that the U.S. once had in effect supported genocide?" Kausikan described the disagreement between the U.S. and ASEAN over the Khmer Rouge as reaching the threshold that the U.S. threatened Singapore with "blood on the floor".[31]