Gareth Porter has also published in The Foreign Affairs. I suppose that just about covers the entire political spectrum excepting the far right and the far left.
<http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19880301faessay7897/gareth-porter/cambodia-sihanouk-s-initiative.html> Cambodia: Sihanouk's Initiative Gareth Porter
>From Foreign Affairs, Spring 1988
Article preview: first 500 of 6,761 words total.
Summary: Prince Sihanouk has offered, under certain conditions, to share power with the existing regime in Cambodia in order to keep out the Khmer Rouge. The Vietnamese need to withdraw their troops from Kampuchea, but the Chinese, who back the Khmer Rouge, can afford to play for time. The USA has been reluctant to use its influence.
Gareth Porter is on the faculty of The American University?s School of International Service. He edited Vietnam: A History in Documents.
For many years the conflict over Vietnam�s occupation of Cambodia appeared intractable: Vietnam refused to negotiate except with China, while China flatly refused to negotiate; Hanoi would not consider any settlement in which the Khmer Rouge had a role, while the Khmer Rouge, backed by China, insisted there could be no settlement that did not include them. Cambodia seemed to be condemned indefinitely to Vietnamese military occupation, on one hand, and the continuous threat of the return to power of Pol Pot�s Khmer Rouge, on the other.
But since former Cambodian chief of state Prince Norodom Sihanouk opened direct negotiations with the Vietnamese-sponsored People�s Republic of Kampuchea last December, a peace settlement has for the first time become a real possibility. Indeed, the broad outlines of such a settlement, built around Sihanouk's return to Cambodia, have begun to emerge. Although the negotiations could still be snagged on the problems of power-sharing in a transitional Cambodian regime and insulating national elections against Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army, the international context is far more conducive to a peace agreement today than it was in the early 1980s. Hanoi's interest in a negotiated settlement has increased as it has encountered difficulties with its plan to withdraw unilaterally all of its troops by the end of 1990. The passage of time has also brought a more pragmatic Chinese attitude toward Cambodia and a new configuration of relations among the United States, China and the Soviet Union that gives both China and Vietnam reasons for wanting an early settlement.
II
Underlying the diplomatic stalemate that prevailed over the Cambodian war for so many years was the bitter conflict between China and Vietnam. Although an element of geopolitical rivalry over influence in Laos and Cambodia was undoubtedly involved, the conflict was fueled primarily by Chinese animosity and Vietnamese fears. Chinese leaders were angered by Vietnam's "ingratitude" for China's aid in the war against the United States and "betrayal" following a series of "anti-Chinese" actions after 1975. For their part, the Vietnamese, recalling a thousand years of Chinese efforts to sinicize them, believed Beijing was reverting to its historical policy of trying to keep weak and pliant states on its southern border.
It was the border war between the Democratic Kampuchea regime of Pol Pot and his erstwhile Vietnamese allies that triggered the violent Sino-Vietnamese confrontation of early 1979. In retrospect, the self-destructive policies of the Pol Pot period appear to have had more to do with racial antipathy toward the Vietnamese "hereditary enemy" than with communist ideology. Obsessed with reversing the centuries-long decline of the Khmer people, Pol Pot was apparently convinced after the Khmer Rouge victory in the Cambodian civil war (1970-75) that he had created a revolutionary force powerful enough to take back the formerly Cambodian land occupied for centuries by the Vietnamese.
Democratic Kampuchea�s disastrous socioeconomic policies, aimed at creating a powerful Cambodia in just a few years, resulted in as many as two million Cambodian deaths from sickness, starvation and execution. Pol Pot's purge of party and . . . -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>