The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) tried to transcend the Cold War, but the NAM ended up as one of the Cold War’s chief victims. During the movement’s first dozen years (1961-1973), four Cold War developments shaped its agenda and political orientation. East Germany’s attempt to manipulate it started with the so-called construction of the Berlin Wall less than a month before the first NAM conference in Belgrade. Nuclear disarmament issues imposed themselves the day before that conference, with Nikita Khrushchev’s sudden announcement that the USSR would resume nuclear testing. The war in the Middle East in June 1967 brought the NAM close to an association with the Soviet bloc-at least until the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia the following year. Finally, the overthrow of Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk in 1970 split the movement over the question of that country’s standing. The NAM again moved closer to the Soviet camp once the movement decided in 1972 to award representation both to the exiled Sihanouk, who lived in Communist China and was allied to Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, and to the Communist insurgents in South Vietnam. © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
