The aggression of American imperialism against Cambodia extends the Vietnam war to all of Indochina. This new aggression flows from the very purpose of the war: to stop the revolution through direct military intervention. At the same time it is an expression of the bankruptcy of that policy. Washington's intervention in Vietnam could not stop the revolution, which has extended to Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand—which in turn have become subject to U.S. aggression.
The extension of the war to Cambodia, and the renewed bombing and threats to North Vietnam, have utterly exposed Nixon's phoney "Vietnamization" program and promises of gradual disengagement from the war. For the American people especially, it is hard to believe that two weeks after promising new withdrawals of troops, Nixon launched an invasion of Cambodia, carrying out the same kind of genocidal policy Washington has conducted in Vietnam and which has earned the hatred of the Indochinese peoples.
The course of events in Cambodia, where a CIA-engineered coup intensified civil war in that country, threatened the immediate overthrow of the counterrevolutionary regime. The U.S. intervention to save this tottering regime is a repetition of what happened in South Vietnam itself over the last decade. It is a pattern U.S. imperialism will repeat again in many Asian countries, if it is not stopped in time.
Nixon's Cambodian adventure has no more chance of success than the Vietnam war. It will only increase worldwide hostility against U.S. imperialism. It has already produced a massive upsurge of the antiwar movement in the United States itself, causing deep divisions even among the ruling class. The brutal murder of four students in Kent, Ohio, which followed close on the heels of Nixon's violent verbal attacks on antiwar students, is a reminder of the basic truth that those who begin by suppressing and murdering foreign peoples end up by murdering and suppressing their own people.
The Fourth International reiterates its full solidarity with the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian revolutions, and hails the steps taken to extend and coordinate them.
The Fourth International remains convinced that the best defense of the Indochinese revolution is the international extension of the revolution.
The Fourth International calls upon all those opposed to the imperialist aggression to concentrate their immediate efforts on three objectives: building mass actions against the war, especially in the United States itself; attempting to involve parts of the international working class in industrial action against the war such as refusing to transport war materials or to assist the U.S. war machine in any way, following the example of the Australian dock workers; maximum military help to the Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian revolutions.
For this latter objective to be met, it is necessary that there be a united front for that purpose of all the workers states, above all of the Soviet Union and China, and that the Soviet government publicly proclaim its solidarity with the People's Republic of China, in case of any attack against it by imperialism.