The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China saw decolonization as a long-awaited opportunity to overturn the imperialist-dominated world order. Both countries saw themselves as bearing no guilt for the crimes of imperialism and the underdeveloped state of newly independent countries. Rather, they saw themselves to varying degrees as victims of imperialism and natural allies for Asia, Africa, and Latin America. However, the advent of attempts to give political structure to the developing world raised the specter of a “Third World” not necessarily aligned with Moscow or Beijing. For the Soviets, the very notion of a “Third World” was a non-starter, a political and ideological dead-end that would deflect the revolutionary energies of the people. For the Chinese, the unwillingness of many in the developing countries to accept Chinese leadership kept this constituency beyond China’s reach. Consequently, the rhetoric of support for anti-imperialism and alliance between the “international communist movement” and the “national liberation movement” masked a much more complex, manipulative, and often antagonistic relationship between the “Second World” and the “Third.”

The chapter examines US officials’ views of and responses to the Tricontinental Conference and the OSPAAAL organization from 1965 through 1968. Using declassified US government archival documents, it argues that the US government saw the Tricontinental as both a revolutionary threat and a counterrevolutionary opportunity. The Johnson administration and the State Department responded to the conference and the OSPAAAL organization through a vigorous but largely behind-the-scenes diplomatic effort to meet the challenge and exploit the opportunities it presented. The core of this strategy was to exacerbate and exploit, largely indirectly and by proxy, the political and ideological divisions among the organizations represented at Havana, in order to undermine the tricontinental solidarity project and divide, isolate, and harass Washington’s enemies, especially the Cuban government. Through its diplomatic, economic, and intelligence and security counteroffensive, the US government largely validated the Tricontinental critique of the US role in the Third World.