Bandung Conference - a conference of newly independent states seeking neutrality during the cold-war - non-alignment (apr 18, 1955 – apr 24, 1955)

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"Tito, Nehru, and Zhou convene[d] the first conference of non-aligned nations at Bandung in Indonesia, in April 1955: its purpose was to expand autonomy by encouraging neutrality in the Cold War.
Colonel Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Most skillful of all the practitioners of non-alignment. Egypt had never formally been a colony, but Great Britain had controlled it since the 1880: the Suez Canal, which lay wholly within Egyptian territory, was a critical link to the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia." (Gaddis 2006, p. 126)
"Nasser…persuaded the Americans to fund the construction, on the Nile, of the Aswan High Dam, a project crucial to Egyptian economic development. He also decided, though, to buy arms from Czechoslovakia. These two decisions set off the first great Middle East crisis of the Cold War." (Gaddis 2006, p. 127)

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