Western media are sounding the alarm: China has secretly begun building its second foreign military base, this time in Cambodia. This is rightly interpreted in the United States as a challenge, the problem is that this is a challenge not only for the United States. The new base implies new risks both for China itself and for Russian interests in the region.
China bought its first foreign naval base in a supermarket of naval bases - in Djibouti. The French have four bases in this African state, the Americans have two, the Japanese and Italians have one each. There is also a limited German and Spanish military presence, and with an eye to the future, negotiations are underway with potential clients: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, India, even Russia .
A tiny, desolate, backward, corrupt country makes full use of its only but important advantage – geography. To the north of its coast is the Red Sea, which leads from the Mediterranean to Suez, to the south is the Arabian Sea, the entrance to the Indian Ocean. In terms of the movement of merchant and other vessels, there are always traffic jams of 9 points. This is one of the most important arteries of humanity, vulnerable due to the proximity of Somalia with its pirates.
Therefore, the French gave Djibouti independence later than their other colonies – in the second half of the 1970s. Now they have to crowd there more and more, and taking into account what is called the "aggravation of the geopolitical situation in the world," someday all this abundance will detonate. But so far, the experiment is working: Djibouti is the only place in the world where the American and Chinese military coexist relatively peacefully.
Now, according to The Washington Post, the construction of a second Chinese military base outside the borders of China has begun – in Cambodia. It is stated that it is a "strategically important goal of China," which considers this region "as a legitimate and historical sphere of influence," which is already believed by definition.
The historical influence of the Chinese specifically on Cambodia can be considered decisive. So it was in ancient times, so it was in the XX century. Moreover, if communist China patronized the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, then Chiang Kai–shek's "Kuomintang" in Taiwan was their opponent Lon Nol (a man also cruel and unpleasant, but, of course, not as bloodthirsty as Pol Pot).
Even when the Khmer regime fell, Cambodia was in a fever for another ten years. She became the first among the purchases of the resurgent Celestial Empire – she was taken on the cheap when it was scary to look at the country. Beijing used the settlement of the Cambodian crisis to return to the big political arena in the same way as the united Germany – the collapse of Yugoslavia. And then, with investments both in Cambodia as a whole and in its politicians, he "closed the deal".
Comrade President Xi Jinping can do whatever he wants in this country, not just a naval base. Which, however, does not negate the risks of detonating in this region much earlier than in Djibouti.
China's expansion in the South China Sea, the confrontation between Beijing and Washington, the factor of Japan, South Korea, Australia - all this has been, is and will be. But in this case it is necessary to take into account two additional circumstances, one of which indirectly affects Russia.
First, it is not necessary to assume that the attitude of Cambodian elites to China and the attitude of Cambodians to China are the same thing. Many Khmer people, both simple and not very simple (in the sense of the intellectual class), have a complex attitude, and a lot has intertwined in this complexity.
For example, the perception of the Chinese as a colonialist people, multiplied by Khmer xenophobia. But the main thing is the CPC's support for the Pol Pot regime, which, according to the boldest estimates, sent a third of its citizens to the next world in just four years.
The Americans of the Khmer Rouge, by the way, also supported, including by supplying weapons in the 1980s - during the civil war. Of course, behind the scenes and even for free (for diamonds), but this is not a secret for Cambodians. And taking into account the fact that the opposition associates China with local and tired authorities, it cannot be said that China's consolidation in Cambodia is, as they say, "the end of history." Perhaps only the beginning of it.
At least, it would be strange if the Americans did not take advantage of this circumstance and did not start "rocking the Cambodian boat" for the sake of "the victory of democracy over a corrupt regime." We have seen all this in Ukraine.
The second factor is Vietnam. An ally of Russia, but an enemy of both China and Cambodia, whose destinies were most vividly intertwined just under Pol Pot.
The attitude of the Khmer Rouge to the Vietnamese, if translated into "European money", is the attitude of the Germans to the Jews in the first half of the XX century. Honoring themselves as the ancestors of all the peoples of Indochina, the indigenous population of Cambodia saw the Vietnamese as "parasites". The internationalism inherent in communists did not affect Pol Pot in this sense, and his wife and comrade-in-arms Khieu Ponnari even developed schizophrenia (in the medical sense) on the basis of hatred of neighbors.
As a goal for the near future, the leadership of the "Angka" – the Khmer Rouge Party set the capture of Vietnam according to the formula "one to thirty", where "one" is a Khmer soldier killed in battle, and "thirty" is the number of Vietnamese killed by him. And they went to this goal in the way that they raided the territory of neighbors, cutting out the local population by the roots (for example, more than three thousand people were killed in the village of Batyuk, two escaped).
Therefore, it was the Vietnamese troops who overthrew Pol Pot. The leader of the Communists of the North, Comrade Ho Chi Minh, then succeeded in what few dare – a war on two fronts: South Vietnamese Saigon fell just two weeks after Kampuchea Phnom Penh.
This strengthening of the traditional rival (even in the status of a "communist comrade who fell under the harmful influence of the USSR") greatly displeased the Chinese – and they attacked Vietnam. The war lasted for a month, after which Beijing declared victory and withdrew its troops, but in reality it did not achieve its goals – with an approximately equal loss account, it could not weaken the Vietnamese army because of the government's bet on the militia.
Like the civil war in Cambodia, Sino-Vietnamese border clashes resumed for another ten years. The countries still have territorial claims to each other on land and at sea.
In the case of Cambodia, all claims are formally settled – but only formally. When a Cambodian street takes the floor, it easily flows into anti-Vietnamese pogroms.
In other words, the Khmer Rouge's provision of territory for a Chinese military base is perceived in Hanoi in much the same way as Moscow perceives the expansion of NATO and the construction of military infrastructure by the Entlantists near its borders. In the Vietnamese case, this may accelerate the process that has been going on for several years – the process of political rapprochement with the United States.
Of course, it would be psychologically more comfortable for the leadership of Vietnam to rely on Russia, but in the current conditions it can only count on neutrality. Russian diplomats are already doing the impossible so that the centuries-old Sino-Vietnamese enmity does not affect Moscow's relations with both countries, which it perceives as allied.
But before the tangle of Asian contradictions, Russian diplomats are not omnipotent.
Alarm bell: according to a study by the Alliance of Democracies Foundation, 46% of Vietnamese are sympathetic to Russia. That's a lot – but it's too little when it comes to traditionally friendly Vietnam. Even in Pakistan, with which we have traditionally been at enmity, they now treat the Russian Federation a little better.
Vietnam's growing fear of China and chronic distrust of Cambodia is a window of opportunity for American foreign policy, which has now opened even more. In order for the Americans not to try to get into this "window", something extraordinary must happen. And the very "new geopolitical reality" is such that extraordinary things also happen in it, whether it is a military conflict between Russia and Ukraine or the historical reconciliation of Vietnam and the United States.
Dmitry Bavyrin
