The sense of relief that the course of the Bandung Conference and its immediate aftermath induced in the Eisenhower administration was relatively short-lived. Bandung may have failed to add momentum to any nascent ‘Asia for the Asians’ movement, generated no overriding current of anti-Western sentiment, and helped to reveal some of the tensions between India and the PRC over who should hold the limelight, but at the same time it had served to underline that there was an attractive path of neutrality open to newly independent states. The conference ‘above all marked the watershed between neutralism as a negative refusal to take sides and a positive policy’. The non-aligned movement, as it could now be termed, threatened to disrupt the close embrace with the West and rejection of contacts with the Communist world favoured by Washington; it also helped to mobilize a wide current of opinion behind an agenda that included both the principle of racial equality and opposition to nuclear testing. What most disturbed the Americans was the concern that home-grown Asian drives for independence and national self-assertion might be exploited by forces originating from outside the area. Therefore, it was especially worrying when, at the end of 1955, the Soviet Union embarked on a major effort to cultivate influence in the developing countries of Asia. Before this period, Moscow had shown little interest in taking direct initiatives in this part of the world, but now it seemed ready to offer generous amounts of economic aid, alongside its own model of state-led development for emulation.