The OP asked for what would have happened, had Pol Pot not messed with Vietnam.
The KR enjoyed some degree of external support BECAUSE OF their anti-Vietnamese stance. If they decide to go soft on the Vietnamese, they`ll lose this support base, which means that a foreign intervention (whether orchestrated by Western power and e.g. their Thai allies, or orchestrated by China) in the 1980s becomes likely if the insanities continue.
On the other hand, there`s no safe way of knowing. On one side, we have Mao´s Cultural Revolution, Stalin`s purges and the mass murders committed by Franco`s, Pinochet`s and Varela`s regimes etc., which all finally subsided after a certain period, giving way to authoritarian or totalitarian, unfree and oppressive systems, where internment camps and the execution of political prisoners still exists, but industrial-style killings have stopped. On the other hand, we have the Nazi holocaust which continued until the liberation. Difficult to say which path the KR would have taken. Their regime had little in common with any of the above, I know. Once again, that makes their case all the more unpredictable.
Isn`t the Continuation Fallacy one of the major discoveries Alternate History has given us: that, given one reason which IOTL led to the end of an abrupt change to a situation, is removed, we tend to overstate the continuities and assume that the situation just continues as it was prior to OTL´s change?
There´s even a cognitive psychological explanation for this:
We have schemata and episodic memory about the situation which existed prior to the change (just like we have such knowledge structures about the changes which occurred IOTL) - regardless of whether we`ve actually lived through the times or not, they`re almost always conveyed via media/histories/sources anyway -, but we can`t have schemata and episodic memory about something that didn`t exist. Given the task to imagine an alternate path of history, it is just so much simpler for our brain to dwell within the frames of the (comparatively detail-rich and concrete) schemata and episodic memories of what existed prior IOTL, then to construct an imagined scenario from mere theoretical and comparatively abstract considerations.
Perhaps this is why so many people assume the KR would just continue the 1975-79 phase into the 1980s?
The KR enjoyed some degree of external support BECAUSE OF their anti-Vietnamese stance. If they decide to go soft on the Vietnamese, they`ll lose this support base, which means that a foreign intervention (whether orchestrated by Western power and e.g. their Thai allies, or orchestrated by China) in the 1980s becomes likely if the insanities continue.
On the other hand, there`s no safe way of knowing. On one side, we have Mao´s Cultural Revolution, Stalin`s purges and the mass murders committed by Franco`s, Pinochet`s and Varela`s regimes etc., which all finally subsided after a certain period, giving way to authoritarian or totalitarian, unfree and oppressive systems, where internment camps and the execution of political prisoners still exists, but industrial-style killings have stopped. On the other hand, we have the Nazi holocaust which continued until the liberation. Difficult to say which path the KR would have taken. Their regime had little in common with any of the above, I know. Once again, that makes their case all the more unpredictable.
Isn`t the Continuation Fallacy one of the major discoveries Alternate History has given us: that, given one reason which IOTL led to the end of an abrupt change to a situation, is removed, we tend to overstate the continuities and assume that the situation just continues as it was prior to OTL´s change?
There´s even a cognitive psychological explanation for this:
We have schemata and episodic memory about the situation which existed prior to the change (just like we have such knowledge structures about the changes which occurred IOTL) - regardless of whether we`ve actually lived through the times or not, they`re almost always conveyed via media/histories/sources anyway -, but we can`t have schemata and episodic memory about something that didn`t exist. Given the task to imagine an alternate path of history, it is just so much simpler for our brain to dwell within the frames of the (comparatively detail-rich and concrete) schemata and episodic memories of what existed prior IOTL, then to construct an imagined scenario from mere theoretical and comparatively abstract considerations.
Perhaps this is why so many people assume the KR would just continue the 1975-79 phase into the 1980s?