“there are only two ways,” said nikita khrushchev to the delegates, “either peaceful coexistence or the most destructive war in history. There is no third way.” Speaking to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February 1956, Khrushchev was announcing the new foreign policy line that the Soviet Union would pursue, by and large, until Khrushchev's exit in 1964. The policy of peaceful coexistence, part of a sweeping repudiation of Stalinism, rejected the old notion that defeating capitalism required international confrontation and war. Because nuclear weapons had convinced both sides that a war of the superpowers would mean suicide, Khrushchev, like Eisenhower, had come to the conclusion that the struggle between socialism and capitalism would be resolved by peaceful competition in the economic sphere. “Our certainty of the victory of communism is based on the fact that the socialist mode of production possesses decisive advantages over the capitalist mode of production,” Khrushchev explained in his speech. Khrushchev's desire for peace among the major powers did not, however, translate into a desire for peace within countries. Although the working class in some capitalist countries could take power peacefully, through the electoral process, Khrushchev believed that the working class in other countries would have to rise up and destroy the capitalist government by force.

In accordance with the new policy of peaceful coexistence, the Soviets told the North Vietnamese that they should not take up arms against South Vietnam.