Deng's Greatest Mistake

In 1979, Deng Xiaoping, confronting the growing influence of Soviet social-imperialism in Asia, made the decision to back the remnants of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. This move — aimed at checking Soviet power — represented a profound strategic error.

Meeting with U.S. officials, Deng warned:

"Vietnam is the Cuba of the East. They intend to control the whole of Indochina and threaten the stability of the region."(U.S. State Department Memorandum, 1979)

The analogy to Cuba reflected Deng's fear that Vietnam would serve as a Soviet proxy, just as Cuba projected Soviet influence into Latin America. In this framework, Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia appeared to Dengt as imperial expansion. In reality, Vietnam’s destruction of Pol Pot’s regime represented a necessary historical process in Southeast Asia.

The Khmer Rouge had catastrophically alienated the Cambodian masses, weakening the revolutionary cause in the region. Vietnamese intervention, though influenced by Soviet interests, objectively removed a failed and ultra-left regime whose continued existence endangered the credibility of socialism itself. The costly and unecessary Sino-Soviet split was a dogmatic error, Deng was wrong to turn to the US.

Strategic contradictions with the Soviet Union should have been handled through political and ideological struggle — not by undermining the broader advance of socialism. Supporting Vietnam’s revolutionary action against the Khmer Rouge would have strengthened the position of the socialist camp as a whole.

Deng’s overall legacy — resisting revisionism and correcting left deiavtions — remains critical to the survival of socialism into the late 20th century. His Cambodia policy must be understood as a grave mistake. In the world struggle, revolutionaries must defend the general interests of socialism first, even amid contradictions, rather than fragment the camp through short-sighted maneuvering.