The Nixon Doctrine the Case of Cambodia

¶ … Nixon Doctrine, declared by President Richard M. Nixon in the summer 1969 just a few months after taking office, represented a slight alteration of American policy during the Cold War. Nixon upheld the fundamentals of George Kennan's strategy of "containment" for the spread of Communism, insofar as he promised American support for any democratic third world nation in its fight against Communism. The shift came with the type of support America offered; the Nixon Doctrine promised that America would send military and financial assistance, but no troops. A quick glance at the prior history of American troop commitments during the Cold War gives some sense of Nixon's rationale. The American intervention in Korea under Truman had resulted in a stalemate, with a hostile Marxist North Korea separated from the U.S.-backed South Korea by a narrow demilitarized zone. Meanwhile in the Americas, Roosevelt's "Good Neighbor" policy meant that Cold War strategy was conducted largely without troop involvement: when Communist governments were either democratically elected, as with Arbenz in Guatemala, or seized power through revolution, as with Fidel Castro in Cuba, the response from the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations came through covert operations (a CIA-sponsored coup in Guatemala, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba). As a result, the Nixon Doctrine was, in some sense, a synthesis of previous Cold War strategies employed in different regions. The Nixon Doctrine responded to the stalemate (and heavy loss of American lives) that accompanied the large-scale commitment of troops in Korea and Vietnam by announcing that troop involvement would no longer be American policy. But the Nixon Doctrine likewise learned from the history of Cold War covert operations, in its recognition that American money and weaponry (presumably combined with policy advice) could be employed to contain the spread of Communism. However the success of the Nixon Doctrine overall is a matter of debate.

To take one particularly interesting example that immediately followed Nixon's establishment of the Doctrine, we might consider the seemingly peripheral case of Cambodia. For Nixon himself, Cambodia would prove to be anything but peripheral: this small neutral nation would, in 1970, be the cause of tremendous social unrest within the United States itself. The reasons for this are complicated but fascinating. Like Vietnam, Cambodia had been part of the French colonial protectorate of Indochina at the time of World War Two (Brinkley 2011, 45). During World War Two, Cambodia was occupied by the Japanese from 1941 to 1945, but after the end of the war it became once more a French colonial possession in the era of widespread decolonization. However, Cambodia received its independence from France in late 1953 peacefully, unlike Vietnam, which was engaged in warfare against the French under Ho Chi Minh's leadership. The contrast extended to the types of government established: about six months before Ho Chi Minh's forces in Vietnam won their victory against the French at Dien Bien Phu, Cambodia was made independent as a constitutional monarchy much like the U.K., with a parliamentary government and prime minster, but a monarch, King Sihanouk, as official head of state (Brinkley 2011, 125). Fascinatingly, in two years, Sihanouk would abdicate as King in order to run for, and win, the office of Prime Minister. Perhaps this granted him a greater legitimacy as the country's ruler: because Sihanouk abdicated in favor of his own father, when his father died in 1960, Sihanouk was heir to the throne. He took the title of Prince Sihanouk and became head of state in addition to remaining Prime Minster. In the 1960s, Sihanouk observed the growing American involvement in Vietnam and adopted an official policy of neutrality toward the Cold War: by 1961, he had officially committed Cambodia to the Non-Aligned Movement, that group of third world nations, most of them newly-independent colonial possessions in Asia and Africa, which declared neutrality in the Cold War (Shawcross 2002, 55). The reasons for this strategy in Cambodia would be obvious: not only was the Cold War something other than cold in neighboring Vietnam, but Cambodia's position between heavy American involvement in the Pacific (with continued presence in Japan, Korea, and the Philippines beyond the escalating Vietnam conflict) and various Communist neighbors (including China) made neutrality the obvious geographic choice. The difficulty was that Ho Chi Minh's forces used Cambodian neutrality to their advantage by storing weaponry across the Cambodian border, leading Nixon to give the orders (from 1969 to 1973) for secretly carpet-bombing the neutral country and in the process killing neutral civilians. This is, of course, a war crime (Shawcross 2002, 4). And for an America which was already witnessing fierce protests against the Vietnam conflict, the revelation of the Nixon administration's expansion of the conflict into a neutral nation gave added force to anti-war agitators. The end result was the 1970 standoff at Kent State, in which the National Guard opened fire against college students protesting Nixon's war policy in Southeast Asia.

It was what transpired subsequently that renders the Cambodian situation fascinating. In 2016, Cambodia is an impoverished corrupt country, with a government best described as one-party authoritarian rather than ideological (Brinkley 2011, 377). The reason for Cambodia's present misery is that, after the U.S. began illegally bombing the country, immediately a military coup under Lon Nol -- rumored but never proven to be approved by the Nixon administration -- removed Sihanouk from power (Nolan 1990, 55). The new military leaders immediately became engaged in warfare against the North Vietnamese, but the result was a broad Communist insurgency within Cambodia itself, which managed to take control of the country and ousted the Lon Nol government by 1975. In other words, six years after Nixon announced the Nixon Doctrine -- and just a year after he himself was forced out of the Presidency -- it was demonstrated that the Nixon Doctrine's policy of supporting friendly governments with money and weapons in their fight against Communism was an abject failure. Cambodia not only became a Communist country, but one with a particularly brutal nature: the Communist ruling party, the Khmer Rouge, under the leadership of Pol Pot, would kill off two million Cambodian citizens, roughly 25% of the population.