1 Regimes in motion: the Kennedy administration and Indonesia’s New Frontier, 1960-62 David Webster, Bishop’s University,
[email protected] Published as David Webster, “Regimes in Motion: The Kennedy Administration and Indonesia’s New Frontier, 1960-1962,” Diplomatic History 33 no. 1 (January 2009): 92-123. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.2008.00748. During its first two years in office, President John F. Kennedy’s administration had to direct more sustained crisis management attention to Indonesia than to Vietnam. Alongside the mounting Indochina conflict, policymakers also had to face the threat of a war for control of the western half of the island of New Guinea (also known as Papua and West Irian).1 Kennedy’s foreign policy toward Southeast Asia has been hotly disputed, but even the harshest assessments hail his government’s mediation of the West New Guinea dispute as a success.2 The Netherlands had retained West New Guinea as a colony when it recognized Indonesian independence in 1949; Indonesia demanded the territory be “returned to the fold of the motherland” and threatened an irredentist war. By pressuring both sides into an American-authored agreement, the Kennedy administration felt it had managed to avoid a Dutch-Indonesian clash that would have benefited only the Soviet Union, and also hoped to maintain stability in Southeast Asia at a time when it was increasing American commitments in the region. American involvement in the dispute ignored the local population entirely. Yet West New Guinea remains in dispute between the Indonesian government and a nationalist movement among the indigenous Papuan population, a conflict rooted in the aborted decolonization process.