The NAM states and NAM itself did not have the means to join the Vietnam War. NAM could not send its armies to Hanoi, even as the Second NAM Conference in Cairo (1964) had stated that wars of national liberation are defensible, that they are the principal means to fulfill the "natural aspirations" of people being colonized by powers that were loath to transfer sovereignty, and that " the process of liberation is irre­sistible and irreversible." NAM had supported the Algerian struggle in 1961 , and it welcomed the victory of the Algerians in 1962. It also sup­ported the main liberation movements in Portuguese Africa (Mozambique, Angola, and Cabo Verde). It was enough to support wars of national liberation when these were far away and much harder to take a principled position on the armed overthrow of a recognized govern­ment. Many of the NAM states had already begun to experience armed struggle within. The dominant classes of these states held the reins of state power, and wielded it against their internal critics. It was far easier to bemoan U.S. interventions and the ailing Portuguese colonies than to validate the tactic of armed struggle, especially if such struggles had broken out within an NAM state.

[...] For Cabral, like Nkrumah, colonialism and neocolonialism are two forms of imperialism, both of which negate "the historical process of the dominated people by means of violent usurpation of the freedom of development of the national productive forces." "If we accept the principle that the liberation struggle is a revolution and that it does not finish at the moment when the national flag is raised and the national anthem played, we will see that there is not, and cannot be, national liberation without the use of liberating violence by the nationalist forces, to answer the criminal violence of the agents of imperialism." [...]

Who would have thought that by the mid-twentieth century the darker nations would gather in Cuba, once the playground of the plu­tocracy, to celebrate their will to struggle and their will to win? What an audacious thought: that those who had been fated to labor without want, now wanted to labor in their own image! By Havana, all the powers of the old empire had entered into a holy alliance to demolish the virus of anticolonial Third World nationalism; while John Bull and the Gaullists trembled at their fate in a world dominated by those they had once ruled, Uncle Sam lent his shoulders and wiles to keep things as close to the past as possible. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the heirs of Uncle Joe saw promise in the movements of the Third World, and even while they offered assistance to them, they did so with every attempt to steer the ship of history, rather than to share the rudder. Direction was anathema to the darker nations, which had been told what to do for far too long. Time now to deliver oneself to the future.