“A Special Form of Making Foreign Policy by the Threat of War to Imperialists”. A Case Study of Military-Political Activity of Central Committee Presidium under N.S. Khrushchev, 1954–1964. Part 1

Abstract

Khrushchev’s foreign policy (1953–1964) that characterized by the strategy of “balancing on the edge” is usually recognized as erroneous. Immediately after Stalin’s death, his successors initially feared a nuclear attack from the United States, which their own Air Force and Air Defense were unable to repel or to retaliate. Therefore, in 1954–1955, the Soviet leader attempted to create a buffer zone of neutral states along the perimeter of the USSR’s borders: he stopped the Korean War, proposed the mutual withdrawal of troops from Europe, etc. After the 1955 Geneva Conference, Khrushchev began to act more courageously, because he saw that the U.S. were afraid of the USSR too and didn’t want to attack it first. Trying to use the opportunities of the European colonial empires’ disintegration, the USSR provided to the newly independent states in Asia and Africa a large-scale economic, military, technical, and political support, and first of all, to Egypt and Indonesia, which controlled the Suez Canal and the Strait of Malacca – key areas on the sea route from Europe to the Far East. The negotiations between Mao Tse Tung and Khrushchev in 1957–1958 reveals their intention to shake up the military blocs created by the Americans near the borders of the socialist camp (NATO, SEATO, the Baghdad Pact). The Soviet leader initiated a series of political crises as interconnected stages of geopolitical offensive against the US position: the Suez (1956), the Syrian (1957), the Middle East (1958), the 2nd Berlin (1958), the Caribbean (1962), etc., which brought the USSR to the brink of war.