ABSTRACT
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev fueled the fears on January 6, 1961, just two weeks before John F. Kennedy's Inaugural, by announcing open warfare in the Third World through support for a campaign of global "wars of national liberation". Vietnam, the United States believed, was the test case, and failure was not an option. But Vietnam was a revolutionary political conflict in a rural setting which cancelled out superiority in firepower and material. The domination or control of the political institutions of any American state by the international communist movement, extending to this hemisphere the political system of an extra continental power, would constitute a threat to the sovereignty and political independence of the American states, endangering the peace of America. In the beginning years of the Cold War, the United States used its political rhetoric in defense of conceptual doctrines and allied associations, but the threat was always an indirect one.
