SAVING INDONESIA: Comparative American, British, and Canadian Policy Toward Indonesia, 1961-1965
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UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCE TRN419 SAVING INDONESIA: Comparative American, British, and Canadian Policy Toward Indonesia, 1961-1965 Maria Monica Layarda Supervised by Professor Robert Bothwell & Julie Gilmour 2017 TRN419|Saving Indonesia, 1961-1965 *The author is grateful for the guidance, encouragement, and inspiration from her course instructors, Professor Robert Bothwell and Julie Gilmour, throughout the writing of this paper. A special thanks is due to historian David Webster who answered this author’s substantive and research methods queries in writing (on Dec 6-7, 2016) and via Skype interview (on March 21, 2017) and to Dr. Dirks who diligently provided help to navigate various archival databases, especially in requesting documents through the rather complex Canadian national archive. The author is also indebted to Trinity and Robarts librarians who provided general research help and advice. 2 Maria Monica Layarda The geographical broadening of the academic world and waves of archival opening throughout the 1990s have led to the globalization of Cold War narrative.1 While Cold War historians—orthodox and revisionist alike—were once focused on the American-Soviet rivalry on the European theatre, Cold War narrative has expanded to encompass the periphery. The ensuing growth of Third World historiography has also largely revised the conventional portrayal of the Third World actors from being “victims” into active players who influenced and constrained the principal belligerents. In many cases, these “alleged puppets were less victims than puppeteers”.2 This was especially true in Asia where local agency was responsible for turning the cold hostility into a hot conflict, bringing the lead actors into the Asian theatre. Along with this broader progression, Cold War scholarship on Southeast Asia has grown correspondingly, albeit with a premium placed on Vietnam. Indonesia, once the largest domino in the region and home to the world’s third largest communist movement after that of China and the Soviet Union has curiously escaped much historical scrutiny.3 Despite representing Asia’s most momentous shift in the Cold War balance of power since China turned communist in 1949, the swift downfall of Indonesia’s communist movement in 1965 was quickly overshadowed by the broadening of Western involvement in Vietnam. The state of scholarly research on Indonesia has also continued to lag under the shadow of Vietnam, leaving much room for further inquiry. This essay aims to bridge the gap within the existing Cold War scholarship on Indonesia by analyzing the evolution of American, British, and Canadian policy towards Indonesia in the turbulent mid- 1960s beginning with John F. Kennedy’s inauguration as the new American president up to the 1965 military coup, which brought a country of a hundred million people into the Western orbit under the staunchly anti-communist military dictatorship of General Suharto. A comparative approach to the topic provides a particularly valuable window into the complexities of the Western alliance during the Cold 1 See for instance Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 2 See Pierre Grosser, “Looking for the core of the Cold War, and finding a mirage?” Cold War History, Vol.15, No. 2 (2015), 245-252. 3 Surveys of bibliographical compilations reveals this. See for instance, Robert L Beisner, American Foreign Relations Since 1600: A Guide to the Literature, Vol. 1 (CA: the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, 2003). 3 TRN419|Saving Indonesia, 1961-1965 War. Despite belonging to the same anti-communist Western alliance and sharing similar Cold War assumptions and objectives, the three countries had prima facie different experiences with Indonesia shaped by their unique international positions, national circumstances, and not least, individual leaders. The US saw Indonesia mostly through a binary Cold War prism as a key domino whose collapse would jeopardize American containment efforts in the Pacific. To Kennedy and Johnson, preventing the fall of Indonesia into the Soviet or Chinese Communist camps, as would be the case in Vietnam, was necessary to American credibility and security and this priority agenda would not be compromised by any other considerations—including the core interests of its closest allies. This obsessive fear of communism, especially of growingly assertive China, persistently underlay US policies, whether the soft developmental approach or the hard-line subversive strategy. Britain, in contrast, placed Indonesia within the context of decolonization. Sukarno’s opposition to Malaysia (known as Konfrontasi campaign) was seen as a grave threat to Whitehall’s attempt to balance its ambition to maintain its global influence and perpetuate its informal empire in the age of national self-determination. Finally, Canada became involved with Indonesia by virtue of its alliance to Britain and the US despite its relative geographical and political isolation from the Pacific affairs. Throughout the first half of the 1960s, Canada found itself between two quarreling allies as the White House and Downing Street developed divergent Indonesia-policies during the WNG crisis and Konfrontasi. In response, Canada opted for the safest middle path of avoidance and disengagement, rather than Suez-style constructive engagement. Section I briefly charts the gravitational shift of the East-West struggle into the Third World and situates Indonesia within this context. Section II, III, and IV analyze the evolution of respectively American, British, and Canadian policy toward Indonesia. Using Waltz’s multi-level analytical framework, these sections analyze the interactions of international environments, national features, and personalities in determining foreign policy. Section V concludes. 4 Maria Monica Layarda I. COLD WAR IN THE AGE OF DECOLONIZATION By the 1950s, no longer was there any dispute as to whether the Cold War had begun. The iron curtain had clearly descended and various political, security, and socioeconomic institutions crystallized the separation between the East and West in Europe. Both camps believed in their superiority and vowed to create a world in their self-image. What started as an ideological struggle between the American-led democratic capitalist states and the Soviet-led Eastern communist states soon led to its first bloodbath in Korea. It was into this bipolar world that the newly-decolonized states across Africa, Asia, and Latin America were born in 1950s-60s. Given that their political allegiance was yet to be decided, they provided a fertile battleground for the two superpowers to expand their geopolitical flout and “prove the universal 4 applicability of their ideologies”. The Korean War marked a decisive shift in the focal point of the Cold War outside of the primary European theatre. While both sides had conceded to the uneasy status quo in vital areas of Europe in the 1960s, the Third World began to be a prominent agenda in American and Soviet foreign policies. In the USSR, Khruschev’s rise to power in 1953 inaugurated a significant revision of Soviet Cold War strategy. Khrushchev not only rejected Stalinism and embraced a “peaceful coexistence” with the West, he also revived Soviet commitment to international socialism. With decolonization unraveling in the background, Khrushchev specifically adopted a revolutionary, anti-imperialist agenda and pledged to support “wars of national liberation”. The Third World, most of whose members were either still fighting for independence or had recently come out of these bitter struggles, became the Soviets’ most logical targets. The USSR 5 subsequently expanded its economic and technical assistance beyond the communist bloc to these states. To this new Communist challenge, subsequent US presidents from Eisenhower to Johnson pledged a firm American response though each relied on different means. 4 Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3-4. 5 Khrushchev speech in 1961 cited in Lezek Buszynski, “Soviet Foreign Policy and Southeast Asia”. (London: Routledge, 2013). 5 TRN419|Saving Indonesia, 1961-1965 While the Communist powers were especially well-placed to exploit the nationalist, anti-imperial sentiment that ran high across the newly-independent former colonies, the opposite held true for the Western camp comprised of former colonial masters. The tensions between containment efforts and decolonization dynamics came head-to-head in Indonesia where the two major international crises in the country implicated issues of colonialism. The first crisis emerged over West New Guinea (WNG), the Netherlands’ most far eastern colony that remained under Dutch sovereignty after the Dutch government formally recognized Indonesian sovereignty in 1949. Since then, Indonesia pursued unsuccessful diplomatic bilateral negotiations to obtain sovereignty over WNG before raising its territorial claims at the UN. Given its diplomatic lack of success, beginning in 1960, Indonesia pursued a confrontational policy combining diplomatic and political pressures with limited military force to forcefully seize the territory. In 1962, US-brokered peace oversaw the transfer of WNG to Indonesia. Soon after, the second