WI Pol Pot doesnt provoke Vietnam

[alpha]

Ok so ive just seen a documentary about Pol Pot. It seems that if he didnt piss off the Vietnamese they would have left him alone. So my question is what if he didnt fight the vietnamese how would Cambodia look like today?

This is the link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDPXkL0lFRw

I bet it would be worse a lot worse

 

[profxyz]

I don't think preventing invasion was possible unless Pol Pot cuts ties with Communist China, which would require a radically different Pol Pot I guess (one not crazy enough to think that the Cultural Revolution was worth copying).

Furthermore, it's probably safe to say that postwar Vietnam considered the former French Indochina as basically its 'strategic sphere' - given the immense 'help' the two countries were for the Vietcong/Viet Minh - and so it's probably inevitable that at some point, Vietnam was going to try and control Laos and Cambodia. So the only way for Pol Pot to not fight the Vietnamese was to align with Vietnam & the Soviet Union.

Given this, it's probably safe to say that such a dictatorship could not have gotten as out-of-hand as it did in reality. The Soviet Union and Vietnam would probably have used their influence to stop the massacres.

 

[BigDave1967]

The UN would probably stay out of it. I think Pol Pot could very well have been assassinated later on by Khmer Rouge elements preemptively to avoid being purged.

 

[HeavyWeaponsGuy]

The Khmer Rouge were pretty much Khmer ultranationalists with communist aspirations from day one, so as others have said, changing Pol Pot's behavior really requires a different Pol Pot. In keeping with the eerie similarities between the Khmer Rouge and the Nazis: the Khmer Rouge leadership were totally and completely devoted to the pursuit and implementation of their radical ideology, which included relentless extermination of non-Khmer minorities (notably the Chinese and Vietnamese) and the violent expansion into what was considered to be rightfully Cambodian land.

It should be noted that the first blow of the Cambodian-Vietnamese War was struck by the Khmer Rouge. That in and of itself indicates a lot about the Khmer Rouge leadership's perception of their ability to actually win a war with their extremely militarized neighbor that had several times the population of Cambodia.

 

[alpha]

Interesting if someone were to make a TL out of this but it would be pretty dark. Darker then Zhirinovky's russian empire i bet

 

[HeavyWeaponsGuy]

Interesting if someone were to make a TL out of this but it would be pretty dark. Darker then Zhirinovky's russian empire i bet

The Vietnamese have every reason to prevent the development of a crazy state on their border, if only to stabilize Cambodia and to prevent a massive, ongoing refugee crisis constantly spewing impoverished, half-dead refugees into Vietnam. I make the argument that, unfortunately, OTL was about the worst possible outcome for Cambodia (1/3rd of Cambodia's population dead or close to it). There are so many ways that the Khmer Rouge could not have been prevented, but they succeeded anyway.

OTL is pretty dark on its own sometimes.

Plus, the Vietnamese already had a ready-made alternative to the Khmer Rouge in the form of the Khmer Minh remnants, so they not only have a bone to pick with the Khmer Rouge, but they have a successor all lined up and ready to go.