If we choose to regard Sino-Soviet cooperation primarily as an antisystemic alliance directed against the United States and its hegemony in global politics, we need to explain why the alliance broke down just as Washington was solidifying its control of the Asia-Pacific region. How much did U.S. pressure on China contribute to the breakdown? And how did the prospect of conflict with the United States influence the allies' perceptions of each other?
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In answering these questions, we need to look more closely at the changing images of U.S. power and intentions within the Soviet and Chinese leaderships. Often these images were very different from Western depictions of its own position and capabilities, and frequently the dominant understandings in Moscow and Beijing were at odds with each other. Although both sets of leaders understood U.S. power within a Marxist framework, they frequently disagreed in their conclusions. Reading through their policy papers, we could easily argue that the limited amount of concrete evidence available in Beijing or Moscow on production, market, and class straggle in the United States, on intercapitalist rival-ties, and on the relationship between American capital and the capital of other imperialist countries contributed strongly to these differences.
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But the narrow categories for understanding developments in the West did not prevent the two leaderships from constructing broad interpretations regarding the course of American power. On the Soviet side, the Khrushchev leadership from 1957 to 1958 on, under the impression of the integration of West Germany into Western markets and into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the cautious American response to the 1956-1957 unrest in Eastern Europe, had come to believe that the United States was consolidating its position of dominance in Europe. Contrary to what some scholars have believed, the Soviet sense of its own achievements in the late 1950s was not accompanied by an increased sense of security. Although stressing the deepening impotence of U.S. power outside Europe, Nikita Khrushchev feared that as the domestic successes of socialism grew, American imperialism would become increasingly aggressive and concentrate its main efforts against the Soviet Union and its allies, and even threaten to obliterate the socialist achievements through war. His détente policies were the direct results of this perception.
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The Chinese leadership's views of the United States were also uncertain and fluctuating. But in contrast to Khrushchev, Mao Zedong in the late 1950s started to underline American vulnerability, even in military terms. The chairman's reading of the world, especially after the second Taiwan Straits crisis in mid-1958, was that the American position had been undermined by the other main capitalist countries and by nationalist regimes in Asia and Africa. Together with the reignited campaigns for socialism in China, the consolidation of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and the perceived domestic economic prob-
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