The Indo-Asian Bloodbaths of the Middle Cold War, 1960–1979

Meanwhile, Mao and his comrades stressed the symbolic importance of the Chinese Revolution for fighters throughout Africa and Asia in a bid to seize the mantle of leadership from Khrushchev. The growing rift between Beijing and Moscow fostered fierce competition in the developing world. Bruised by his showdown with the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Khrushchev faced the need to restore Moscow’s credibility with Third World allies by taking a more activist Soviet stance in the postcolonial world. Meanwhile, Chinese leaders hoped to put the disastrous experience of the Great Leap Forward behind them and to bolster their claims to the leadership of the Third World revolutionary project. As the new decade of the 1960s began, both Beijing and Moscow jockeyed to bolster their standing in the non-Western world. Both would find ideal opportunities to do so in Southeast Asia, which perched on the brink of a new round of revolutionary violence. In January 1961, Khrushchev announced the Kremlin’s support for wars of national liberation. The Soviet leader praised revolutionaries in Algeria, Cuba, and Vietnam and promised to aid movements struggling against the forces of colonialism and oppression.

American leaders saw the full transcript of Khrushchev’s address on January 18, 1961, only two days before John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. Despite warnings from U.S. intelligence officials that Khrushchev was merely responding to Chinese criticisms, the incoming administration took the premier’s words at face value. Kennedy and his advisors feared that the signals out of Moscow and Beijing represented the beginning of a new Communist offensive in the Third World. Responding in his inaugural address, Kennedy called upon Americans to “pay any price” to “assure the survival and the success of liberty” throughout the world. He continued: “To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe . . . we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves.” Kennedy’s words marked the beginning of a new American campaign to win the Cold War in the Third World.²

In the coming months, the United States launched a series of initiatives to contest left-wing revolutions around the world. U.S. military forces would act as military advisors to local forces waging counterinsurgencies in a frontal assault on liberation fighters around the Third World. At the same time, American social scientists, engineers, and economists staged development projects designed to modernize traditional societies and ameliorate the poverty, inequality, and hardship that served as recruiting tools for Communist parties. In this way, U.S. officials would spread what one historian has called “the right kind of revolution.” They would deploy American military, scientific, and economic power to foster the development of modern, prosperous, and pro-Western states throughout the Third World. A 1962 paper titled “U.S. Overseas Internal Defense Policy” laid out a more detailed schematic for this campaign. The paper argued that the war against Communist revolutionaries must “be joined in the villages which normally represent the critical social and political organizational level.” In this type of conflict, a battle for the hearts and minds of the developing world, “the ultimate and decisive target is the people [emphasis in original]. Society itself is at war and the resources, motives and targets of the struggle are found almost wholly within the population.” Using this rationale, the United States embarked upon a series of counterinsurgencies concentrated in Southeast Asia.³

Cold War rivalries shaped local violence in multiple ways. The Sino-Soviet competition for influence in the Third World had already begun fueling a number of conflicts in Southeast Asia. Communist leaders in Hanoi, partially restrained by Chinese and Soviet support for the Geneva Accords, recognized an opportunity to renew their battle to liberate South Vietnam as the tentative alliance between Moscow and Beijing collapsed. Communist forces in neighboring Cambodia used the escalating war in Vietnam to launch their own bid for power. To the south, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) used increased support from Beijing to expand its influence in the region’s largest country. Meanwhile, increased U.S. support to right-wing military forces in South Vietnam and Indonesia spurred leaders in Saigon and Jakarta to crack down on moderates and left-wing movements. And in less than a decade, an unlikely spirit of cooperation between Beijing and Washington, spurred on by deadly border clashes between Chinese and Soviet soldiers, would swing U.S. and Chinese support behind Pakistani forces waging genocide in Bangladesh. As a result, through the middle decades of the Cold War, societies in the developing world sat at the center of a three-way competition between the Great Powers. The societies around the monsoon lands of South and Southeast Asia were about to enter the bloodiest stage of the Cold War. The Indo-Asian bloodbaths would tear the Communist world apart at the same time as ethnic and sectarian warfare resurged in the postcolonial world.