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.

The decision by France and the People's Republic of China (PRC) to establish diplomatic relations in late January 1964 has undergone relatively little scrutiny among scholars. Garret Martin's path-breaking article in the Winter 2008 issue of the JCWS is the most important account to date of this episode, but it focuses on the French side of the story. The account here provides a much fuller picture by drawing on declassified records of the PRC Foreign Ministry, official collections of formerly secret CCP documents, and materials from archives in former Soviet-bloc countries. These sources help illuminate two important but hitherto unknown or poorly understood aspects of Sino-French recognition in the period from August 1963 to January 1964: the French and Chinese thinking behind the decision to recognize each other, and the negotiation process itself.

Contrary to later Vietnamese allegations, China did not “sell out” the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) during the last two years of the Paris negotiations (1971–1973). North Vietnamese, Chinese, Soviet, East European, and American sources show that Hanoi could have gotten from Washington an agreement similar to the final Paris Agreement (January 1973) as early as the spring of 1971. Sino-American rapprochement did not help the United States in the negotiations, as claimed by the North Vietnamese, because the Chinese side made no concessions at all on Vietnam. In fact, China increased military aid to the DRV. Similarly, U.S.-Soviet detente did not damage the North Vietnamese effort, although Moscow unsuccessfully tried to mediate between Hanoi and Washington. In the end, U.S. success in rebuffing the DRV's Easter Offensive and Hanoi's miscalculations about U.S. domestic developments in 1972 prolonged the Vietnam War unnecessarily.