Described as “thoroughly contextualized,” “didactic,” “brimming with intrigue,” and serving as “catharsis,” Noah Kulwin and Brendan James’s Blowback podcast, which launched in 2020 with a season on the roots of the Iraq War, quickly became an instant classic of the genre. A profound work of leftist public historiography, Blowback carefully guides listeners through entangled, often contested histories of American imperialism. Its seasons, which have since covered the Cuban Revolution, the Korean War, US involvement in Afghanistan, and now, the Khmer Rouge, expertly balance engrossing storytelling with clear, principled political education. Accessible yet rigorous in its analysis, they offer much-needed heft to the entirely accurate but sometimes still unspecific claim that the US has vats of blood on its hands from its numerous covert and overt projects of hubristic foreign intervention. Indeed, far from one-dimensional or preachy, Kulwin and James lean into the stunning morass of American empire, which is always shaped by local conditions and contingencies, competing or allied imperial forces, and often more than a few eccentric but distressingly influential political actors. They demonstrate that history is at once propelled by overarching, often stubbornly rigid ideological projects as well as the unanticipated, sometimes clownish bumbling of individuals, who, in attempting to accrue power and influence, can dramatically and suddenly alter the state of play.

I spoke with Kulwin and James about their recently released Season 5, which interrogates the complicated and staggering story of the Khmer Rouge and their infamously genocidal leader, Pol Pot. We discuss their role in the history of the Cold War and global Communism, the US (and—to no one’s surprise—Henry Kissinger specifically)’s support for the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror, and perhaps most importantly, why it’s not common knowledge that Communist Vietnam, and not the liberal democratic West, decisively defeated the Khmer Rouge for good.

Charlotte Rosen (CR): Why is the history of the Khmer Rouge ripe for interrogation? What is the standard narrative that people know? And how does the season try to debunk that?

Noah Kulwin (NK): The standard narrative of the Khmer Rouge, or the Communist Party of Kampuchea, who ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, is that these were radical Communists who tried to do the most radical Communism that could have ever been conceived and it didn’t go well. In fact, it produced a genocide and is a black mark on the stain of radical social movements everywhere. To the extent that there is any common knowledge of this, America is not narrated as an offender. The Khmer Rouge, and their infamous leader, Pol Pot, are simply bad guys from the other team in the Cold War.

Part of the story we tried to tell with a bit more nuance this season is that, in fact, the story of the Khmer Rouge is very much wrapped up in the history of American foreign policy, particularly around the Vietnam War.

Brendan James (BJ): Yeah, some people might know that the Khmer Rouge were an outgrowth of the Vietnam War, insofar as the Vietnam War eventually sucked in Cambodia and created conditions for this horrible group to carry out one of the great human catastrophes of the 20th century.

But what we wanted to do was start from the top and see how French colonialism, and then US imperialism, set up the events that followed. We discuss how, in the early ’50s, at the onset of the Cold War, Indochina was passed from France to the United States, and then how Vietnam—when it slowly began to mutate from a limited engagement to a military action to a full-blown war—became a vortex that sucked in Laos and Cambodia and, you could argue, China as well.

As is well known, the US eventually withdraws from Vietnam, and surprisingly, the Vietnamese try to make nice with the West, saying, All is forgotten, we just ended the war with you, but we would like to normalize relations, we would like to do diplomacy, we would like to make some common interest happen despite all that you did to us within the past several years. But the US says no to war reparations and no to normalized relations. In many ways, for the US, the Vietnam War is not over.

As we discuss, the US made common cause with the Khmer Rouge specifically in order to crush the Vietnamese. The US was aligned in this with China, which opposed Vietnam for its own geopolitical strategic reasons. Together, they supported the Khmer Rouge’s war against the Vietnamese. In the process, the Khmer Rouge dropped their Communist politics and they made common cause with the West. They stopped doing any lip service to Communism, dropped their Mao jackets, put on safari suits and green fatigues, and they never talked about Communism again. This shows that they were really a nationalist movement first and foremost. Which, of course, you can say about a lot of Third World socialist movements, but these guys, as one sees in our season, were a truly noxious time bomb of xenophobia, directed at minorities in Cambodia.

Perhaps the biggest point we want to make is that the US backed the Khmer Rouge’s war against Vietnam, and in so doing made a willful alliance with genocidaires, which is not something we normally hear about. Put differently, the supposedly liberal democratic West allied with the now globally maligned Khmer Rouge in order to punish Vietnam. It was Vietnamese Communists who defeated Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

The biggest point we want to make is that the U.S. backed the Khmer Rouge’s war against Vietnam, and in so doing made a willful alliance with genocidaires.

CR: Embedded in this season is a discussion about the contingency of the Cold War, and how particular developments like, say, the Sino-Soviet split, significantly altered what seemed like settled trajectories. We also see a total breakdown of an easy narrative about East versus West, or capitalism versus Communism.

How should we think about the Khmer Rouge within the historiography of the Cold War, and within the history of the global Communist movement?

NK: They certainly identified as Communists. And they were certainly a part of a tradition of ex-pats who went to France, specifically Paris, to study and take in the great texts of Communism, the great theories. They then brought these ideas back to their country to attempt to carry out a mostly nationalist struggle, but one with an eye toward building socialism for the future of their country after independence. That is a very common story.

At this point, the Khmer Rouge were quite garden variety, really. Take Khieu Samphan, who was the head of state, a little bit of a front man for Pol Pot throughout their years in power. But Samphan wrote a paper that had many prescriptions for Cambodia that were not unheard of by Western state makers. It was a little bit more inflected with local disdain for the exploitation of the West and the history of the French and the Americans in the area, but it was fairly moderate by the standard of what came later.

Initially, the Khmer Rouge were very much talking and thinking in terms of Marxism/Leninism. But they really had no support from the Soviet Union, except for maybe the indirect support of Moscow, which was supplying the Vietnamese and initially working with the Khmer Rouge, then a kind of guerrilla auxiliary of the Viet Cong in Cambodia during the height of the Vietnam War. Nixon and Kissinger chose in 1969 to begin bombing Cambodia, which was at first secret and later continued through 1973, turning the country upside down and making possible the Cambodian-Vietnamese Communist alliance. In fact, the Viet Cong did most of the fighting against Americans in Cambodia from ’70 to ’73. So the Khmer Rouge were—at least at first—a part of the Communist situation in the Third World.

When the Khmer Rouge came to power, though, the Vietnamese broke ties with them. When the radical program of the Khmer Rouge began to stall out, their xenophobia led them to exterminate Vietnamese people both within Cambodia’s borders and over into the border with Vietnam, which led to a war between the two countries.

China was actually the Khmer Rouge’s patron at this time, but it didn’t think they were doing anything right. Mao had this famous meeting with Pol Pot where he is talking in typical Mao riddles and digressions, where he says everyone makes mistakes; the thing is to not worry if you made a mistake, you can always just correct yourself. And Pol Pot is just smiling and nodding and not saying anything, probably not planning to correct himself or take in anything that Mao is saying.

So the Khmer Rouge really were not respected as a serious Marxist/Leninist movement at that point. By the time they were out of power, they had been kicked out by the rather orthodox Marxist Vietnamese. The Soviet Union wanted nothing to do with them. And then when they made common cause with America and American’s allies in the region, like Thailand, it was the Vietnamese and the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc that were trying to dislodge the Khmer Rouge’s seat at the UN, which the US made sure did not happen. The Eastern Bloc was trying to get food aid in, and they did—Cuba sent doctors and took Khmer and Cambodian people into Cuba to study.

Meanwhile, China and the US are trying to stop all that from happening, despite the fact that there were famine conditions happening inside of Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge had been ousted. The US made sure that no western NGOs or Red Cross, etc., or Oxfam were allowed in for months and months. All this, again, while the US protected Khmer Rouge control of Cambodia’s seat at the UN. There was some mutual suspicion—the Vietnamese, who were now the occupying force sponsoring a government after the Khmer Rouge fell in Cambodia, were wary of western NGOs. But really it was a policy of the United States to stop and strangle this non–Khmer Rouge Cambodia, simply because it was too close to Hanoi at that point.

It is obviously a very cynical policy and, to many who haven’t heard of it before, a very shocking policy.

CR: I want to take us to your experience speaking with Cambodians who lived through this history, which make up some of the most moving parts of the season. What did that process look like?

NK: Vincent Bevins connected me with somebody he knew, a Vietnamese person who was living abroad, who then connected us with journalists on the ground in both Cambodia and in Ho Chi Minh City. These people were able to put together a really amazing program for us where we were able to go see the village of Neak Loeung, which comes up in the show and is a meaningful place in the history of the Cambodian War.

One person, Nhi, was able to take us with some of her friends to villages along the Vietnamese-Cambodian border. These are places that suffered really horrific violence in the late ’70s at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge’s assaults on Vietnamese people along these borders is what led to Vietnam intervening in Cambodia. We talked to around a dozen people who lived through this period, really serious conversations, and it was a very special reporting experience. A lot of what we learned in these conversations is not at all common knowledge in the West.

BJ: Yeah, I would echo all the praise to our fixers who were able to translate our agenda. We wanted to get a sense not only of the American war but of this war with Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

One thing we have discussed in several interviews promoting this season is the lack of rancor against America in these countries, at least among the people we spoke to. I wouldn’t want to say it is representative of everybody. But we were there, saying, We are American, talking about these American crimes, these American policies against their country, both in the prosecution of the Vietnam War and then the support of the Khmer Rouge. And people were saying, We are just glad the war is over, we don’t want any more wars, we just want to get on with our lives. I’ve got my little shop or my farm here, we are just trying to get on with it.

It’s worth noting because there are still those who contend that, say, once colonized people get a state, strap in for a never-ending campaign of revenge. This is an argument frequently applied to Palestinians struggling to liberate themselves from Israel’s genocide and occupation. But what we’ve observed, both in researching this season and in others, is that the people in these parts of the world have an astounding lack of hatred. After the Vietnam War, for example, everyone in the American pro-war faction was waiting for the Vietnamese to start chopping people’s heads off. They wanted a bloodbath. But that bloodbath never came. There was, of course, a lot of political crackdown—which always happens, it happened in the US too after the Civil War. But it was not the wholesale massacre of millions, which was expected and desired by the Americans who wanted to say, See, this is what these people are really like. It was the Khmer Rouge who did that, and they became our allies.

CR: What do you hope listeners will leave with in their understanding of the modern history of US empire?

BJ: To an extent, our work shows that the concept of “blowback” is more like a feedback loop. In Season 1’s story, we partnered with Saddam, who was first a useful anti-Communist and then a good instrument against Iran, whom we don’t like. His war with Iran gets Iraq half-destroyed and Saddam decides to plunder Kuwait, whom we do like. So now the US gets to make an example of Iraq in the post–Cold War situation, to show that the US can and will give its military budget a reason to exist. Then 9/11 happens. Now we can use Iraq as a way to expand this new campaign, the war on terror, across the Middle East and again revitalize the sense of the American military crusade. That links up with our fourth season, with the Mujahideen, where the US uses a local band of fanatics against the Soviets and their allied government. Then our guys become the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Initially that is okay, because we can still work with the Taliban on pipeline deals. But then, uh oh, suddenly their guests, Al Qaeda, do 9/11, so we’ll call all our enemies Al Qaeda for a bit, strike anywhere we want with a blank check. But we’ll actually partner up with Al Qaeda pretty soon, in Syria, when we want to make an example of Bashar al-Assad. And so it goes.

With our fifth season, it’s the same with the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge were not originally American allies, but once they were useful, the cycle began. They were our band of local fanatics against our enemy Vietnam, we support them as an insurgency, until they are not useful anymore. Then we toss them on their ear and we back the genocide tribunal to make it appear as though the US had always been on the right side of history. That serves another post–Cold War narrative that the US is the force in the world for “human rights.”

So it is a cycle, an endless, bad infinity. And in more recent seasons we’ve opted to make use of the Ouroboros, as a way to express this theme. And as a reference to Metal Gear Solid.

CR: To your point about the US eventually rebranding itself as against the Khmer Rouge’s genocide, it’s so amazing that the era immediately after the US is actively supporting Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, they position themselves as this virtuous leader in global human rights, as this noble nation that is standing up against war crimes. There’s so much fanfare over the US’s leadership in the human rights sphere throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and the history of the Khmer Rouge really highlights how utterly cynical and bogus that framing was (and is still).

NK: Oh, totally. When Pol Pot died, it was like a major media phenomenon, because it was a part of that active ongoing dialogue about war crimes. The fact that, as we say in the show, Pol Pot died in his own bed under house arrest by one of his own generals triggered this discourse about how and why the Khmer Rouge had slipped by. But there was no mainstream discussion of the US’s role in facilitating the Khmer Rouge’s bloodbath.

If there is something that we are demonstrating that is a consistent theme, it is about how often the US choice of clients produces effects that create disastrous and moral catastrophes.

If there is a figurative blowback that we do see, it is that so many of the things we talk about are commonly remembered as disasters: Afghanistan, Iraq, and so on, Korea even. It was not a positively remembered experience. We are not picking on things that were particularly happy memories for the American war machine.