The United States and the Neutralists: A Decade in Perspective

Abstract

When nonalignment first began to attract global attention during the 1950's, the initial reaction of American policy-makers was one of anxiety and skepticism—not to say outright hostility. For several years, American officials de manded that nonaligned nations "choose" the side they really supported in the Cold War. Legislative and public reactions to nonalignment were, and tended for a longer period to remain, highly critical. Gradually, executive policy-makers began to modify their assessment of nonalignment. From an early stage of apprehension, they moved to a stage of limited co-operation with neutralist countries to achieve common goals. And from that stage, by the early 1960's, they had gone on to endorse the basic idea of diplomatic nonalignment and to hold it out as the ultimate goal of countries like South Vietnam. This change did not, of course, signify official approval of all policies and activities of particular neutralist countries. But the over-all transition in American policy occurred for a number of reasons, not the least of which was realization in Washington that non alignment had become an influential and growing movement, attracting the vast majority of new states in the Afro-Asian world. In addition, several nations once closely allied diplo matically with the West also showed signs of assuming a de facto position of neutralism. If the public and Congress did not always fully comprehend these facts, executive officials real ized that opposition to nonalignment, and noncollaboration with its exponents, could not serve as the basis of effective na tional policy in a global setting characterized by growing "poly centricity" and by a gradual erosion of rigid diplomatic pos tures on both sides of the Iron Curtain.