THE SEVEN YEARS BETWEEN 1954 AND 1961 WITNESSED A sharp drop in the overall level of global violence. Yearly war deaths, which had peaked in 1950 at nearly six hundred thousand, fell to less than fifty thousand in 1955. But the second half of the decade was marked by numerous crises and one pivotal anticolonial war. In November 1956, Soviet troops stormed into Hungary to crush a rebellion against the Soviet puppet regime in Budapest. This rebellion, the first major revolt in a Soviet satellite country, might have been a major propaganda coup for the Western bloc, but the world’s attention was fixed not on Eastern Europe but on the Middle East. There, British, French, and Israeli forces staged the last great military expedition of the colonial era when they attacked Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt in a failed bid to wrest control of the Suez Canal from the nationalist leader. The Suez Crisis signaled the end of the colonial era and prompted the United States to assume Britain’s role as the key Western power in the region. Two years later, in 1958, U.S. forces mounted their first military intervention in the Middle East when U.S. Marines entered Lebanon to shore up the faltering Maronite Christian regime in Beirut. That same year, an artillery duel between China and Taiwan brought the two nations to the brink of open war. While dramatic, none of these events generated the massive casualties seen during the wars in China, Korea, and French Indochina.

The largest conflict of the late 1950s, the Algerian War of Independence, became emblematic of the global struggle for decolonization. Between 1954 and 1962, French military forces fought a bloody war against Algerian revolutionaries in a doomed bid to preserve French colonialism in North Africa. Some half a million people were killed in the brutal colonial war that resulted in the final death of French imperialism. In the process, the Algerian fighters became international celebrities and postcolonial issues assumed a more prominent role in international politics. As the 1960s began, the victories of the Algerian revolution, the proliferation of new nation-states in Africa, and the success of the Non-Aligned Movement pushed postcolonial nations into the spotlight in international forums such as the United Nations. Third World revolutionaries assumed ever more visible roles as guerrilla leaders such as Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Yasser Arafat became household names. At the same time, Washington, Moscow, and Beijing all moved to expand their influence in the Third World.

As the forces of revolution surged forward, the comparative lull in global violence came to an end and the Cold War entered a new era. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, the changing balance of power among the United States, the Soviet Union, and China fueled a new round of deadly wars along the shores of the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. Deteriorating relations between Moscow and Beijing helped generate competition for influence in the postcolonial world after Chinese leaders began attacking Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev for his failure to provide sufficient support for wars of national liberation. Khrushchev responded by trumpeting the Kremlin’s support for Third World revolutionaries and beefing up foreign aid to progressive states in the developing world. Likewise, Soviet social scientists focused their energies on revamping their socialist development models in the hope of staging modernization projects in postcolonial countries. If Moscow’s experience of rapid, state-based industrialization could be replicated in the developing nations of Asia and Africa, the Soviet system and claims to world leadership would be vindicated.¹