information:filtering, linguistic:paraphrasing
Foreign and defense policies

From 1950 to 1953 Khrushchev was well-placed to closely observe and evaluate Stalin's foreign policy. Khrushchev considered the entire Cold War to be a serious mistake on Stalin's part. In the long term, it created an unnecessary and expensive militarized struggle with NATO. It diverted attention away from the neutral developing world, where progress could be made, and it weakened Moscow's relationship with its East European satellites. Basically Khrushchev was much more optimistic about the future than Stalin or Molotov, and was more of an internationalist. He believed the working classes and the common peoples of the world would eventually find their way towards socialism and even communism, and that conflicts like the Cold War diverted their attention from this eventual goal. Peaceful coexistence of the sort that Lenin himself had practiced at first would allow the Soviet Union and its satellite states to build up their economies and their standard of living. Khrushchev decided that Stalin had made a series of mistakes, such as heavy-handed pressure in Turkey and Iran in 1945 and 1946, and especially heavy pressure on Berlin that led to the failed Berlin blockade in 1948. Germany was a major issue for Khrushchev, not because he feared a NATO invasion eastward, but because it weakened the East German regime, which economically paled in comparison to the economic progress of West Germany. Khrushchev blamed Molotov for being unable to resolve the conflict with Yugoslavia, and largely ignoring the needs of the East European communist satellites.

Khrushchev chose Austria as a way to quickly come to agreement with NATO. It became a small neutralized nation economically tied to the West but diplomatically neutral and no threat.

When Khrushchev took control, the outside world still knew little of him, and initially was not impressed by him. Short, heavyset, and wearing ill-fitting suits, he "radiated energy but not intellect", and was dismissed by many as a buffoon who would not last long. British Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan wondered, "How can this fat, vulgar man with his pig eyes and ceaseless flow of talk be the head—the aspirant Tsar for all those millions of people?"

Khrushchev biographer Tompson stated:

He could be charming or vulgar, ebullient or sullen, he was given to public displays of rage (often contrived) and to soaring hyperbole in his rhetoric. But whatever he was, however, he came across, he was more human than his predecessor or even than most of his foreign counterparts, and for much of the world that was enough to make the USSR seem less mysterious or menacing.