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This chapter examines the Sino-Soviet split and its implications for the United States' policies in Asia, Europe, and the Americas during the period 1956–1964. Coordination and comity in the communist camp peaked between 1953 and 1957, but alliance between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China (PRC) was relatively short-lived. This was caused by ideological differences, distrust, and jealous rivalries for international leadership between Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Zedong. The chapter explains what caused the strain in Sino-Soviet relations, and especially the collapse of Sino-Soviet military and economic cooperation. It also considers the effects of the Sino-Soviet disputes on third-party communists in Asia, China's foreign policy activism, and the catalytic effect of the Sino-Soviet split on Soviet foreign policy.

This introductory chapter briefly examines the clash of two revolutionary programs—the anti-imperialist revolution and the anti-capitalist one—at the height of the Cold War and decolonization via the conflict known as the Sino–Soviet split. It argues that the clash should be viewed as the geopolitical mechanism by which the demands, ideas, and interests of the newly decolonized states challenged and ultimately came to shape the revolutionary agenda of the global Left centered on the international communist movement. Despite claiming to be “Marxist–Leninist” parties, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) pursued different agendas. Unlike the Chinese Revolution with its nationalist emphasis and rhetoric, Vladimir Lenin made demolishing Russian nationalism one of the regime's early political objectives. The chapter describes these differences in ideology which led to the split.

This chapter takes up the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, which delivered a major blow to the idea of a unified socialist world. The Chinese challenge to the Soviet leadership created an opportunity for the unreconstructed party in Albania: retain the essential features of Stalinism, but switch from Moscow to Beijing. What happened to Soviet and Eastern bloc borrowings after this dramatic split? What about all the Soviet-trained cadres, who now seemed like a liability? The chapter shows that the same exchange mechanisms established with Moscow and the Eastern bloc had to be retooled to conform to a new geopolitical reality. State officials approached Beijing for factories, loans, weapons, and engineers. They also looked to Cuba, North Korea, and newly independent African countries for cooperation. The chapter concludes with an analysis of how China’s Cultural Revolution created opportunities for Albanian subjects to make their own global claims.

Chapter 7 explains Mao’s Cold War theory, in which a clash between China and the United States would inevitably occur sooner or later. The Chinese military should thus have its priorities and preparations established prior to this inevitable conflict. After the Indochina Settlement was signed at Geneva in July 1954, China continued to provide weaponry, equipment, and military training to North Vietnam. This chapter points out that, in June 1965, China began to send its troops to the Vietnam War. Between 1965 and 1968, China sent twenty-three divisions to Vietnam, including ninety-five regiments, totaling some 320,000 troops. Beginning in 1968, China also sent 110,000 troops to Laos to provide air defense, construct and repair highways, and maintain transportation and communication along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Nevertheless, the Vietnam War seriously tested the limits of the Communist alliance. Rather than improving Sino-Soviet relations, aid to North Vietnam created a new competition as each superpower attempted to control Southeast Asian Communist movements.

This chapter examines the Third World’s efforts to resist two competing forms of globalization—Western and communist—that threaten to subvert postcolonial nation-state projects. Algiers was the epicenter of the Third World in the mid-1960s, chosen to host the sequel to the acclaimed Bandung Afro-Asian Summit of 1955. Multiple contentions bedeviled preparations for “Bandung 2,” including Sino-Soviet competition, Sino-Indian animosity, Indonesian-Malaysian animosity, and major Western governments’ distrust of the Afro-Asian movement and the Third Worldist economic agenda. Within Algeria, political elites pursued a socialist evolution to resist the capitalist world system, while conservative social factions expressed their antipathy toward leftist ideologies and the foreigners bringing them into the country. Despite the Ben Bellist regime’s foreign policy successes—such as the triangular nonalignment that exploited Franco-American-Soviet rivalries—preparations for Bandung 2 proved too much to bear. A coup d’état deposed the Algerian president days before the conference was scheduled to begin.

This chapter explores the link between security assurances and North Korean nuclear decision-making by concentrating on four key areas. The first analysis presented here is an evaluation of key geopolitical shocks that had a major effect on the North Korean regime. The second is an analysis of the main sources of security assurances for North Korea over its history. Thirdly, hypotheses on security assurances based on how North Korea reacted to geopolitical shocks are explored. The chapter finally investigates the conditions under which security assurances may be most efficient in dealing with North Korea in the future. The four key waves that have hit North Korea include the Sino-Soviet split and rivalry, Nordpolitik of South Korea, the collapse of the Agreed Framework, and the advent of the Bush Doctrine. North Korea's nuclear policy responded to these waves to assure short-term survival. Creativity in adapting a security assurance to North Korea is a major determinant of the reclusive country's receptivity and reciprocity.

This chapter considers American policies towards the Soviet Union and communist China, examining among other things the impact of the Sino-Soviet ‘split’. Despite the Vietnam War, the failure to initiate arms control talks and the fact that Johnson focused on the relationship with the Soviet Union only sporadically, his Presidency proved to be a constructive period for the Soviet-American relationship, as was shown by a range of accords. The relationship with the People's Republic of China (PRC) saw less tangible progress. China had become communist when Mao Zedong secured power in 1949 after years of civil war in which Washington had supported the Nationalists. The so-called ‘loss’ of China was seen as a profound setback for American Cold War interests. The US government refused to extend diplomatic recognition to the regime in Beijing, instead backing the Chinese Nationalist government based on the island of Taiwan.

This chapter argues that during the 1950s, Stalin's image continued to be manipulated, and even after the 22nd Congress, both in order to regulate de-Stalinization's unintended consequences and in order to instrumentalize the Stalin question to pursue domestic and foreign policy objectives, the latter dominated in the early 1960s by the worsening Sino-Soviet split and the abrupt rises and falls in Cold War tensions. The chapter explores the effects on commemoration of Stalin of the shift from anti-revisionism to ideological relaunch during the end of the Khrushchev era.

The lofty production targets of the People's Republic of China's First Five Year Plan (1953-1957) created a desperate need for raw materials like petroleum, and various minerals like beryllium, lithium, and tantalum niobium, among others. Increasingly in the 1950s, this demand pushed exploratory efforts in Xinjiang. These efforts, driven by the earlier layers lain around Dushanzi and in the Altay Mountains, led to the discovery of oil at Karamay and new efforts to exploit the high value nonferrous metal ores in northern Xinjiang in particular. The state investments into resource-sites in this region helped transform it into a hub of state power and authority. While the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) led to the aggressive surveying and exploitation of the region, the larger priorities of the state stayed tied to those regions prioritized for production by Soviet state planners and their provincial counterparts in the 1930s.

The afterword takes the story of socialism through the 1970s and 1980s, to show how socialist globalization ended up enforcing geopolitical isolation. It also addresses the fate of some of the protagonists mentioned in earlier chapters. Some of them went on to have long careers; others faced banishment, prison sentences, or death. This history might seem remote, but the afterword shows how some of these material legacies can be seen even today in the Balkans.

The Mao-Nixon summit was the first time that an American president had set foot in communist China. It followed twenty-two years of hostilities and confrontation between the two states and was a result of a radically changed international situation, following the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s. Mao adjusted his foreign policy in an attempt to join forces with the United States against the Soviet Union, while Nixon pursued a new strategy by achieving a rapprochement with China that none of his predecessors even attempted. With Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai as essential intermediaries, he engaged Mao in a discussion that ended the PRC’s isolation from the West and America’s estrangement from China, while also opening up new avenues for what the Americans called ‘triangular diplomacy’.

Kennedy, reluctantly concluding that Souvanna Phouma was the only hope for a negotiated solution in Laos, authorized W. Averell Harriman to convey conditional US support to the neutralist leader. The chief US negotiator in Geneva, Harriman was convinced that the Eisenhower administration had been wrong in supporting the right-wing faction in Laos, against the advice of the French and British. Based on his long experience in Soviet affairs, Harriman viewed the Kremlin as the key to a diplomatic solution in Laos. Harriman reached a key agreement with Georgi M. Pushkin, his Soviet counterpart at Geneva: The Soviet Union would “police the commitments made by the Communist signatories not to interfere in the internal affairs of Laos nor to use the country as a corridor into South Viet-Nam.” Harriman considered this Soviet obligation the “single most important” outcome of the Geneva conference. Despite a growing understanding of the Sino-Soviet split, and of the diverse national interests within the communist world, Kennedy's policy decisions on Laos were largely based on the cold war stereotype of a monolithic conspiracy, efficiently directed by Moscow and obediently executed by its wholly owned subsidiaries in Beijing and Hanoi.