A Far Greater Prize than Vietnam. U.S. Foreign Policy Towards Indonesia in the Era of Vietnam (1961-1967)

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Chea Goossen

[Datum]

A Far Greater Prize Than Vietnam

U.S. Foreign Policy Towards Indonesia in the Era of Vietnam (1961-1967)

University of Amsterdam

Graduate School of Humanities

Institute for History, Archaeology, and Region Studies

Master Dissertation History of International Relations

June 2015

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A Far Greater Prize Than Vietnam. U.S. Foreign Policy Towards Indonesia in the Era of Vietnam (1961-1967)

Vincent Goossen

© Amsterdam and Deventer, June 2015 / University of Amsterdam / Graduate School of Humanities / Institute for History, Archaeology, and Region Studies / Postgraduate dissertation History of International Relations / Thesis promoter: Beerd Beukenhorst, PhD.

COPYRIGHT

Attention is drawn to the fact that copyright of this thesis rests with its author. This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognize that its copyright rests with its author and that no quotation from the thesis and no information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author.

This thesis may be made available for consultation within the University Library and may be photocopied or lent to other libraries for the purpose of consultation.

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Indonesia is the best thing that’s happened to Uncle Sam since World War Two.

— World Bank official, November 19671

The reversal of the Communist Tide in the great country of Indonesia [is] an event that will probably rank along with the Vietnamese war as perhaps the most historic turning point in Asia of this decade.

— Deputy Undersecretary of State U. Alexis Johnson, October 19662

I have a clear conscience. We knew what we were doing. We did what we were doing because we thought it was the right thing to do, and I sleep easy at night knowing that we played the role that we did.

— National Security Advisor (1961-1966) McGeorge Bundy3

I think [the Indonesian regime change of 1965-1966] was a momentous moment in world affairs, and I don’t think the press and the public has ever seen it that way. And I don’t think I’m saying this simply because I was there at the time: I think that it was true – that here was what is now the fourth largest nation in the world.... the country is very rich in resources, and it stands astride almost all the seaways in that part of the world: the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, where two oceans meet; enormously strategic…it was about to go communist, and almost did.

— U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia Marshall Green (1965-1969), National Security Archive interview, January 15, 19974

1

World Bank official cited in John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World (London: Verso, 2002), 42.

2

U. Alexis Johnson cited in John Roosa, Pretext for mass murder: the 30th September Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’état in

Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 16.

3_{McGeorge Bundy cited in Errol Morris, “The Murders of Gonzago,” Slate, July 10, 2013, available at}

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/history/2013/07/the_act_of_killing_essay_how_indonesia_s_mass_killings_could_have_slowed.sin gle.html (accessed July 11, 2013).

4_{Marshall Green, National Security Archive Interview, January 1, 1997, available at}

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Map of Southeast Asia

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Preface / Voorwoord

Deze scriptie is veel meer dan alleen de afsluiting van mijn Master Geschiedenis aan de Internationale Betrekkingen aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam. Zij is in zekere zin ook de uitkomst en het slotstuk van mijn Bachelor Geschiedenis aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, mijn studieperiode aan de School of Oriental and African Studies in Londen, en mijn stage op de Nederlandse Ambassade in Washington D.C., alwaar ik mij gedurende vier maanden heb mogen bezighouden met de achtergrond, content en implicaties van de Amerikaanse “pivot” naar de Azië-Stille Oceaan regio, welke in het najaar van 2011 door de Obama-administratie werd aangekondigd. Met het afronden van de scriptie gaat ook een wens in vervulling: het binnenhalen van een masterdiploma die mij de mogelijkheid geeft nieuwe uitdagingen aan te gaan.

Het onderwerp van deze scriptie, het Amerikaanse buitenlandbeleid in Indonesië ten tijde van ‘Vietnam’ (1961-1967), kwam beslist niet uit de lucht vallen. Al reeds gedurende mijn tijd in Groningen, en met name na mijn eerste reis door Zuidoost-Azië in de zomer van 2009, raakte ik geïnteresseerd in de geschiedenis en ontwikkeling van deze zo fascinerende, dynamische en cultureel zo gevarieerde regio. Deze interesse heeft mij er rond het jaar 2010 toe gebracht mijn aanvankelijke focus op Duitslandstudies en moderne Europese geschiedenis te verschuiven naar de moderne en contemporaine historie van Zuidoost-Azië, ofwel Zuidoost-Azië studies. De nieuwsgierigheid naar bredere, grensoverschrijdende ontwikkelingen, met name op het vlak van internationale relaties en veiligheid, was er al langere tijd, in ieder geval sinds de middelbare school. De interesse in het Amerikaanse buitenlandbeleid, in het bijzonder in Zuidoost-Azië ten tijde van de Koude Oorlog, werd met name gewekt tijdens mijn perioden in Londen en Amsterdam, alwaar ik colleges volgde over onder meer het Amerikaanse buitenlandbeleid sinds 1776, de rol van de Verenigde Staten in Zuidoost-Azië vanaf de Tweede Wereldoorlog, internationale en regionale perspectieven op de Vietnamoorlogen, en de dieperliggende oorzaken en mogelijke implicaties van de razendsnelle opmars van Azië in zijn geheel.

Tijdens mijn studie en het schrijven van mijn scriptie hebben diverse mensen een belangrijke rol vervuld. Allereerst natuurlijk mijn ouders, Johan en Chea, die mij niet alleen de kans gaven te studeren, maar mij tevens, na verscheidene jaren elders te hebben gewoond, een fijn thuis boden waar ik eindelijk de broodnodige rust en concentratie kon hervinden om het stuk af te schrijven. Daarnaast wil ik mijn broer, Martijn, mijn zus, Marjanne, hun beide partners, Karlijn en Pim, en mijn vrienden, Sven, Alex, Gada, Niek en Anouk, bedanken. Zonder hun aanmoedigingen, interesse, aanvullingen en relativerende woorden was afstuderen ongetwijfeld een lastigere klus geweest. Tot slot wil ik uiteraard mijn

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7 scriptiebegeleider, Dr. Beerd Beukenhorst, bedanken. Zijn tips, feedback, geduld en vertrouwen in het eindresultaat zijn van begin tot eind uitermate waardevol geweest.

Ik wil dit voorwoord graaf afsluiten met een noot over het schrijfproces. Het schrijven van deze scriptie is niet alleen een intellectuele, maar vooral ook persoonlijke uitdaging geweest. Ik ben mijzelf meer dan ooit tevoren meerdere malen tegen gekomen en misschien is het wel om die reden dat het schrijfproces langer heeft geduurd dan aanvankelijk verwacht. Passie voor een bepaald onderwerp, nieuwsgierigheid, perfectionisme, het streven volledig en origineel te zijn: het zijn maar een aantal van de vele belangrijke ingrediënten voor het schrijven van een goed stuk en niet in de laatste plaats voor een scriptie. Echter, zij kunnen op sommige moment even zozeer het schrijfproces in de weg zitten. Misschien is dit wel de belangrijkste les die ik de afgelopen tijd geleerd heb.

Vincent Goossen

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Introduction

In the fall 1965, not long after the Johnson administration’s decision to escalate the Vietnam War, a sudden change in political outlook took place in Indonesia. Following an alleged leftist coup-attempt and the murder of six army generals of the Indonesian Army High Command in the early morning of October 1, Commander of the Strategic Reserve (KOSTRAD) General Suharto successfully staged a counter-reaction, crushing the coup-plotters and the Beijing-oriented Communist Party (PKI), the largest communist party outside the “Communist Bloc,” recruited from the world’s fifth largest population, and a formidable but unarmed force in Indonesian politics.5_{In the weeks and months that followed, against} the backdrop of a brutal purge against the PKI and its suspected sympathizers, resulting in the death of “anywhere between 250,000 and perhaps 800,000” and the arrest of 750,000 more, Suharto limited the powers of the left-leaning President Sukarno.6_{On March 12, 1967, having stripped Sukarno of all his} remaining powers, the General was appointed president, completing his creeping coup d’état and consolidating the “New Order” regime with himself and the pro-American Indonesian military in the sole seat of power. Instead of “falling” to communism, Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest and most populous country, rich of natural resources and strategically located in the center of the region, was definitely saved for the “Free World.”7

The Indonesian regime change marks not only a turning point in modern Indonesian history, but also a decisive and often overlooked or underestimated pivotal moment in the international history of the Cold War.8_{A number of its key geopolitical consequences are easily summed up. First, it brought to a close a} decade-long period of intense competition for influence in the “archipelago state,” triggered by Sukarno’s determination to follow a policy of non-alignment in the Cold War, between the United States, the Soviet

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Although the assassination of the generals took place in the early morning of October 1, the affair came to be known as the Gerakan

30 September (“September 30th Movement”) affair, abbreviated as G30S or Gestok. In the propaganda of the “New Order” regime, the

movement was referred to as Gestapu, which implied that the coup-plotters were as dangerous as the secret Nazi police, the Gestapo. In the days and weeks that followed, the movement was linked to the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). It is still a matter of high controversy what exactly happened in the early morning of October 1 and whether the movement indeed intended bring about a regime change. The most recent and careful analysis is from historian John Roosa, who suggested that there was no central “mastermind” behind the coup and that it was organized as a putsch against the Army High Command to forestall an anti-Sukarno coup. Roosa, Pretext for

mass murder, passim. For a treatment of the events of early October 1965, see also chapter 4 of this dissertation.

6

Robert Cribb, “How many deaths? Problems in the statistics of massacre in Indonesia (1965-1966) and East Timor (1975-1980),” in Ingrid Wessel and Georgia Wimhöfer, eds., Violence in Indonesia (Hamburg: Abera, 2001), 92.

7_{The term “Free World” refers to the non-communist countries of the world, and originates in the early Cold War. Ironically, U.S.}

officials considered right-wing authoritarian states, such as Franco’s Spain and Apartheid-South Africa, also as part of the “Free World.” Obviously Indonesia became part of the “Free World” after Suharto’s ascendancy.

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9 Union and, from the early 1960s onwards, the People’s Republic of China (PRC).9_{Second, it put to a halt} Indonesia’s drift leftwards since the outbreak Konfrontasi, Sukarno’s anti-Malaysia campaign, initiated in early 1963. This removed the threat of a possible communist takeover of Indonesia and of “a successful Sino-Indonesian alliance,” which could have created “a great communist pincer in Southeast Asia, with the largest and fifth-largest countries of the world enclosing not only Vietnam but also vulnerable countries of mainland Southeast Asia.”10_{Third, the regime change led to a cessation of Konfrontasi, a} conflict that, as one scholar reminded us, had the potential to escalate into “another “Vietnam War” had it not been for the annihilation of the PKI.” This stabilized the Cold War in what the British Foreign Office used to call the “lower arc” of Southeast Asia.11_{Fourth, the regime change paved the way for a} period of rapid economic development and increased political cooperation in the region, symbolized most profoundly by the formation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in August 1967.

To be sure, the impact of the Indonesian turnaround was different on each nation involved. For the Soviet Union and the PRC it was, as historian Odd Arne Westad observed, “perhaps the greatest setback…in the Third World in the 1960s.” It not only undermined their geopolitical strength and credibility as revolutionary powers, but also increased their need to hold firm to Vietnam.12_{For Indonesia} itself, the consequences were at best mixed. On the one hand, due to Suharto’s embrace of a free market economy, millions and millions of Indonesians were able to escape poverty in the years and decades that followed.13_{On the other hand, his ascendancy also meant the beginning of a thirty-year long dictatorship} during which freedom of speech was continuously curtailed, human rights were routinely violated, and any political opposition brutally suppressed. We can now conclude that few regimes in the twentieth century were as brutal as Suharto’s New Order regime, not only at the time of the Indonesian “Killing Fields” of 1965-1966, but also in the years and decades thereafter, for example during the East Timor invasions in the mid-1970s and early 1990s.14_{For the United States, then, the regime change was a more} than welcome development. Having just reached a “point of no return” elsewhere in Southeast Asia, it significantly eased American concerns of a communist takeover in the region, allowing U.S. officials to focus their attention entirely on the escalated war in Vietnam. Moreover, the regime change shifted the balance of power in the East Asia in Washington’s favor and realized a scenario that it had long

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Indonesian leaders often referred to their country as the “archipelago state,” which implied that the sea lanes between the more than 3,000 islands of the archipelago were an integral part of Indonesian territory.

10

Marshall Green, Indonesia: Crisis and Transformation: 1965-1968 (Washington, DC: Howells House, 1990), 150.

11_{Ang Cheng Guan, “The Johnson Administration and ‘Confrontation,’” Cold War History 2, no. 3 (April 2002), 111-128; Albert Lau,}

“Introduction. Southeast Asia and the Cold War,” in Albert Lau, ed., Southeast Asia and the Cold War (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 1.

12_{Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: The Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge}

University Press, 2005), 185.

13

Pilger, The New Rulers of the World 17; Roel van der Veen, Waarom Azië Rijk en Machtig Wordt [Why Asia will become rich and powerful] (Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2010), 339.

14_{The phrase “Indonesian Killing Fields” is from Dutch journalist Step Vaessen. See “Indonesia’s Killing Fields,” prod Al Jazeera,}

December 21, 2012, http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/101east/2012/12/2012121874846805636.html. The recent opening of discussion on the regime’s committed crimes reveals moreover that many Indonesians still suffer immensely from them. See Annie Pohlman, “Telling Stories about Torture in Indonesia: Managing Risk in a Culture of Impunity,” Oral History Forum d’histore orale 33, special issue “Confronting Mass Atrocities,” (2013), http://www.oralhistoryforum.ca/index.php/ohf/article/view/529/607.

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10 envisioned: defeat for Sukarno and the PKI, and a swing to the right of the Indonesian government under a pro-American military modernizing elite that secured the so-called “island defense chain” and integrated the archipelago state into the global economy on terms “exceptionally favorable” to the United States and the West.15

Noting that until October 1, 1965 the continuation of U.S.-Indonesia relations had been all but certain as Sukarno moved increasingly towards the PKI and the PRC, U.S. policymakers and commentators greeted the regime change with euphoria. Downplaying the massacres, which, according to a CIA study, “in terms of numbers killed,” rank as “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century along with the Soviet purges of the 1930's, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, and the Maoist blood bath of the early 1950s,” they viewed Suharto’s ascendancy and anti-PKI campaign exclusively in terms of new economic advantages and as victory over communism.16_{James Reston, renowned columnist of}

The New York Times, reported the political turnaround and “staggering mass slaughter of Communists

and pro-Communists” in Indonesia as a “gleam of light in Asia.” Time, in a July 1966 cover story under the heading “Vengeance with a Smile,” cheered Suharto’s rise to power and “boiling bloodbath that almost unnoticed took 400,000 lives” as “the West’s best news for years in Asia.” “No one cared,” Howard Federspiel, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) staffer for Indonesia, recalled, “as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered.”17

Curiously, there were many officials and commentators who saw the events in Indonesia as closely intertwined with developments in Vietnam. For those individuals, Suharto’s rise to power was a demonstration that the Vietnam War was “the Right War at the Right Time.”18_{President Lyndon B.} Johnson, speaking to his troops in Korea in late 1966, explained that the American intervention in Vietnam made possible that “in Indonesia there are 100 million people that enjoy a measure of freedom today that they didn’t enjoy yesterday.” The eminent Washington-based think tank Freedom House, in a statement signed by “145 distinguished Americans” in November 1966, justified the war for having “provided a shield for the sharp reversal of Indonesia’s shift toward Communism.”19_{Richard Nixon, who} in 1965 had argued in favor of bombing North Vietnam to protect Indonesia’s “immense mineral potential,” argued that it was due to Washington’s presence in Vietnam that the Indonesian military had “found the courage and the capacity to stage their counter-coup and, at the final moment, rescue its country from the Chinese orbit.” Implying that the U.S. war effort on the Southeast Asian mainland was

15_{Phrase in Fortune magazine article of 1973, cited in Lisa Pease, “JFK, Indonesia, CIA & Freeport Sulphur,” originally published in}

Probe 4, no. 3 (May-June 1996), available at http://www.realhistoryarchives.com/collections/hidden/freeport-indonesia.htm (accessed

March 28, 2014).

16_{Central Intelligence Agency, Directorate of Intelligence, Intelligence Report: Indonesia-1965, The Coup that Backfired (Washington}

DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 1968), 71.

17

James Reston, “Washington: A Gleam of Light in Asia,” New York Times, June 19, 1966; “Indonesia: Vengeance with a smile,” Time, July 15, 1966; Howard Federspiel cited in Kathy Kadane, “U.S. Officials' List Aided Indonesian Bloodbath in `60s,” The Washington

Post, May 21, 1990.

18_{“Vietnam: The Right War at the Right Time,” Time, May 14, 1965.}

19_{Lyndon B. Johnson, Remarks to American and Korean Serviceman at Camp Stanley, Korea, November 1, 1966. Available at The}

American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=27974; Noam Chomsky, Year 501: The Conquest Continues

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11 for the sake of the whole region, Nixon claimed that “without the American commitment in Viet Nam Asia would be a far different place today.”20

This dissertation delves into the logic of those American officials and commentators who claimed that events in Indonesia were decisively influenced by the U.S. war effort in Vietnam. It will do so by investigating how it was possible that the archipelago state, since its independence in 1949 determined to follow a neutral path in the Cold War, and by early 1965 in the process of becoming, as Secretary of State Dean Rusk described it, “for all practical purposes a Communist dictatorship,” in less than two years transformed into a right-wing military dictatorship, or to use Richard Nixon’s phrase, America’s “greatest prize in the Southeast Asian area.”21_{Was this sudden transformation, as some scholars have claimed, a} matter of “bloody good luck,” resulting from “developments of essentially Indonesian origin?”22_{Or was} there more to it and was the United States, as others have argued, indeed an “important and witting accomplice?”23_{Assuming that the United States was no “silent bystander,” how deeply was the United} States involved in Indonesian politics during the 1960s, how did it develop over time, and in what way was it connected to Washington’s regional policies? Moreover, to what extent can the United States be held responsible for the dramatic and bloody political turnaround in Indonesia? In order to answer these questions, this study analyses the means and objectives of U.S. Indonesia-policy, its imperatives and constraints, its continuities and discontinuities, and its links with Washington’s priorities elsewhere in Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam, during the turbulent 1961-1967 years.

The Importance of Indonesia to U.S. Foreign Policy (1961-1967)

Largely due to ignorance or lack of interest, the general impression in the United States of Indonesia in the 1960s was of “just another of the Balkanlike countries of Southeast Asia blowing its big trumpet.” Most Americans knew little about Indonesia, and for those who shared a little concern, Laos and Vietnam were better known. Illustrative is in this regard is an anecdote of Howard Jones, the U.S. Ambassador to

20_{Richard Nixon cited in Peter Dale Scott, "Exporting Military-Economic Development: America and the Overthrow of Sukarno” in}

Malcolm Caldwell, ed., Ten Years’ Military Terror in Indonesia (Nottingham: Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation for Spokesman Books, 1975), 241; Richard Nixon, “Asia After Vietnam,” Foreign Affairs (October 1967), 111.

21_{Dean Rusk cited in H.W. Brands, “The Limits of Manipulation: How the United States Didn’t Topple Sukarno,” The Journal of}

American History 76, no.3 (December 1989), 798; Nixon, “Asia after Vietnam,” 111.

22

“Bloody good luck” is the title of chapter 6 in H.W. Brands, The Wages of Globalism. Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of American

Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 155-182. The chapter is a slightly revised version of the above cited article “The Limits

of Manipulation,” in which Brands claims that Sukarno’s overthrow “had little to do with American machinations” and “resulted from developments of essentially Indonesian origin. Numerous other contributions have followed this line of argumentation, including Robert J. McMahon, The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia since World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 120; B. Hugh Tovar, “The Indonesian Crisis of 1965-1966: A Retrospective.” International Journal of Intelligence and

Counterintelligence 7, no. 3 (1994), 313-338; Matthew Jones, Conflict and confrontation in South East Asia, 1961-1965: Britain, the United States, Indonesia and the creation of Malaysia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 277.

23

Frederick Bunnell, “American “Low Posture” Policy toward Indonesia in the Months Leading up to the 1965 “Coup,”” Indonesia 50 (October 1990), 60. See also Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967.” Pacific Affairs 58, no. 2 (Summer 1985), 239-264; David Easter, “‘Keep the Indonesian Pot Boiling’: Western Covert Intervention in Indonesia, October 1965– March 1966,” Cold War History 5, no. 1 (February 2005), 55-73; Mark Curtis, “US and British Complicity in the 1965 slaughters in Indonesia,” Third World Resurgence 137 (2002), available at http://markcurtis.wordpress.com/2007/02/01/us-and-british-complicity-in-the-1965-slaughters-in-indonesia/ (accessed March 28, 2014).

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12 Indonesia from February 1958 to May 1965: “when I was first assigned there one of my Washington friends who should have known better asked me whether I spoke French well enough to handle that assignment.”24_{Among those who were not directly involved in the making of U.S. foreign policy towards} Indonesia, or towards the Far East in general, there were few who did not share the general sceptic or hostile attitude towards the archipelago state. This was particularly the case in the American press and on Capitol Hill, where Washington’s Indonesia-policy, and Sukarno’s actions in particular, continuously provoked harsh criticism and opposition.

However, as often the case with U.S. foreign policy, there was a huge difference in views and opinions between those in power and those outside the government. Accordingly, a different view on Indonesia was held by policymakers directly responsible for U.S. foreign policy towards the archipelago state, and/or the Far East in general. Predominately active in the White House National Security Council (NSC), the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JSC), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the State Department’s Office of Southwest Pacific Affairs, Far East Bureau, and Indonesia desk, and, of course, the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, these officials accorded a tremendous strategic value to the archipelago state. Although not on the frontline like the countries of Indochina, Indonesia was considered by many policymakers as the largest and most important “domino” of Southeast Asia. In fact, as historian William S. Borden has stressed until at least the mid-1960s most policymakers considered Indonesia even “of far greater importance than Laos and Vietnam.”25_{Borden’s argument is perhaps best exemplified by quoting Dean} Rusk, who was Secretary of State under both Kennedy and Johnson. Discussing U.S. Indonesia-policy during a NSC-meeting in early 1964, Rusk stated that “more is involved in Indonesia with its 100 million people, than is at stake in Vietnam.”26

That U.S. policymakers attached so much importance to the archipelago state was no surprise. With its one hundred million inhabitants and a horizontal sweep larger than that of the United States, Indonesia was not only the fifth most populous nation in the world, but also by far the largest country of Southeast Asia.27_{With its vast tropical forest lands and abundance of natural resources, including oil, rubber and} tin, the country also had a tremendous economic value. Until the late 1950s, these resources were considered key to the post-war economic recovery and stability of Western Europe and Japan in particular. From early on, however, the country’s economic value was also regularly explained in terms of its links to the health of the American economy. There was a lot of stake for the United States in in this regard. Large American multinationals, such as Caltex, Stanvac, Goodyear, and U.S. Rubber, largely

24_{Howard Jones, Indonesia: The Possible Dream (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 202; Roger Hilsman, To Move a}

Nation (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967), 376.

25

William S. Borden, The Pacific Alliance: United States foreign economic policy and Japanese trade recovery, 1947-1955 (Madison 1984) 194.

26

Summary Record of the 521st National Security Council Meeting, January 7, 1964, in: U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations

of the United States, 1961-1963, Volume XXIII, Southeast Asia; hereafter cited as FRUS (2001), 198 (the numbers given in citations of FRUS refer to document numbers, not pages).

27_{The World Bank stated that Indonesia had a population of approximately 92 million in 1960. In 1970, its population had grown to}

more than 118 million. In 2010, Indonesia’s population exceeded 242 million, which makes it the world’s fourth most populous country after China, India and the United States.

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13 controlled Indonesia’s petroleum and rubber productions, and U.S. Steel and Freeport Sulfur had mining concessions in West New Guinea. “Losing” Indonesia to a hostile power would thus also mean losing vast sums of corporate investments. Further adding to Indonesia’s importance was its key strategic location. The country was located in the middle of Southeast Asia, on a vital maritime passage between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. That this location mattered tremendously is illustrated by the U.S. Navy’s assessment that “whoever controlled the archipelago, controlled the entrance to the Indian Ocean from the Pacific.”28_{Lastly, Indonesia was of great political value. It was the world’s largest} Muslim-majority country and with India and Egypt one of the frontrunners of the non-aligned movement that emerged in the 1950s. When by the end of that decade the Soviet Union became an important competitor for influence in Indonesia, and the Third World in general, Jakarta’s leading role in the non-aligned movement became an increasingly important factor in Washington’s strategic considerations. In other words, as former U.S. ambassador to Indonesia Marshall Green put it in early 1967, Indonesia was “a vitally important “swing” country in Asia.”29

U.S. policymakers assessed that, due to its size, resources, location and political outlook, Indonesia could have a profound effect on the politico-economic orientation of the rest of Southeast Asia, other non-aligned states in the world, and the oil-rich Islamic countries in the Middle East.30_{The installment} of a pro-western government in Jakarta was therefore considered vital to secure what George Kennan had called the “anchor in that chain of islands stretching from Hokkaido to Sumatra” and to develop in the region a “new Pacific Community” of “free” non-communist states.31_{Contrariwise, U.S. officials} considered the “loss” of the archipelago state to the “Communist Bloc” or any other power that would restrict Washington’s access to Indonesia’s strategic position and rich national resources, a doom scenario that “could be as significant as the loss of mainland Southeast Asia.” Such a scenario, they assessed, would certainly make “the defense of the latter considerably more difficult.” Eventually, it could even

28

Harry Felt quoted in Stig Aga Aandstad, “Surrendering to Symbols. United States Policy Towards Indonesia 1961-1965,” PhD dissertation University of Oslo (1999), 5.

29_{Memorandum From the President’s Special Assistant (Rostow) to President Johnson, February 21, 1967, FRUS, 1964-1968, v. 26,}

231. Today, Indonesia is still considered one of the world’s key swing states, see Daniel M. Kliman and Richard Fontaine, “Global Swing States: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkey and the Future of the International Order,” report of the Center for a New American Security and the German Marshall Fund of the United States (November 2012), available at http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_GlobalSwingStates_KlimanFontaine.pdf.

30

See Richard Mason, “Containment and the Challenge of Non-Alignment: The Cold War and U.S. Policy toward Indonesia, 1950-1952,” in: Christopher E. Goscha and Christian F. Ostermann, eds., Connecting Histories: Decolonization and the Cold War in

Southeast Asia, 1945-1962 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 39-67.

31_{For Kennan’s quote, see Gouda, American Visions of the Netherlands East Indies/Indonesia, 142. The “new Pacific community” is}

described in Timothy P. Maga, “The New Frontier vs. Guided Democracy: JKF, Sukarno, and Indonesia, 1961-1963,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 20, no. 1 (Winter 1990), 91-102, and more extensively in his book, John F. Kennedy and the New Pacific Community,

1961–63 (London: Macmillan, 1990). The term is still relevant. In July 1993, President Bill Clinton spoke the need for the United States

“to join with Japan and others in this region to create a new Pacific community.” More recently, President Obama announced the U.S. strategic “pivot” to Asia to upgrade its regional alliances with Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and the nations of Southeast Asia. There can be little doubt that the “pivot” is designed to keep the region America-oriented, one of Washington’s biggest challenges the coming decades in light of the economic and military rise of China. See President Bill Clinton, “Building A New Pacific Community.” Address to the students and faculty at Waseda University, Tokyo, July 7, 1993, available at http://www.state.gov/1997-2001-NOPDFS/regions/eap/930707.html; President Barack Obama, Remarks By President Obama to the Australian Parliament, Canberra, November 27, 2011, available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/11/17/remarks-president-obama-australian-parliament.

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14 “threaten the security of the rest of Asia” and “menace” all U.S. influence in the Far East, endangering the position of the entire “Free World.”32

Whether the strategic assessments of U.S. policymakers, and the political, economic, and psychological concerns that underpinned them, were exaggerated or not, they illustrate that the archipelago state ranked among Washington’s highest post-war “planning priorities.”33 _{In line with the} dominant theories on falling domino’s, credibility and (military) modernization, U.S. officials did everything in their power to prevent Indonesian from falling to communism and to turn it instead towards the West.34_{Until at least the mid-1960s, U.S. attention for Indonesia was extensive, sometimes even far} more extensive than U.S. attention for Vietnam and Laos, and in particular at moments of crisis. As Benedict Anderson, one of the leading American Indonesia specialists, rightfully observed: “with the exception of Vietnam, no country in Southeast Asia caused more annoyance and anxiety to American specialists or more trouble to American policymakers” than Indonesia in the first half of the 1960s.35 Historiography

Despite the tremendous importance and attention that U.S. policymakers attached to Indonesia in their post-war strategic considerations, the topic of U.S. Indonesia-policy is still one that lacks scrutiny. For many years, Cold War and U.S. foreign relations scholars accorded, to phrase historian Bradley Simpson, “scant attention” to the archipelago state, leaving the field instead to political scientists, anthropologists,

32

Memorandum From Robert H. Johnson of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy), FRUS, 1961–1963, v. 23, 15; Felt quoted in Aandstad, “Surrendering to Symbols,” 5.

33_{The question whether U.S. officials exaggerated the communist is beyond the scope of this dissertation. It is worth stressing however}

that Robert H. Johnson himself later admitted that the Soviet threat was greatly exaggerated, see Robert H. Johnson, Improbable

Dangers: U.S. Conceptions of Threat in the Cold War and After (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994). On Indonesia as a “planning

priority,” see Bradley Simpson, Economists with guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 53.

34

On the domino theory, see Ang Cheng Guan, “Southeast Asian Perceptions of the Domino Theory,” in Christopher E. Goscha and Christian F. Ostermann, eds., Connecting Histories: Decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, 1945-1962 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 301-334, and R.B. Smith, An International History of the Vietnam War. Volume III: The Making of a Limited

War, 1965-1966 (London: The Macmillan Press, 1991), 14. Curiously, in a June 1964 memo, the CIA stated that “We do not believe

that the loss of South Vietnam and Laos would be followed by the rapid, successive communization of the other states of the Far East,” and that “with the possible exception of Cambodia, it is likely that no nation in the area would quickly succumb to communism as a result of the fall of Laos and South Vietnam.” See Memorandum From the Board of National Estimates to the Director of Central Intelligence (McCone), June 9, 1964, FRUS, 1964-1968, v. 1, 209. I think it makes sense to say that by 1964, and perhaps already by the early 1960s, it were primarily credibility concerns that kept the United States militarily engaged in Indochina. As Kennedy said during his inaugural speech: the United States had to live up to its commitment “to pay any price and bear any burden” to ensure the “survival of liberty.” See Theodore C. Sorensen, ed., Let the Word Go Forth: The Speeches, Statements and Writings of John F. Kennedy,

1947-1963 (New York: Laurel, 1988), 11-15. On the “doctrine of credibility,” or “psychological domino theory,” see Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War. Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 113, and

Jonathan Schell, The Time of Illusion (New York: Knopf, 1976), 9-10.

35

Benedict Anderson, “Perspective and Method in American Research on Indonesia,” in: Benedict R. O’G. Anderson and Audrey Kahin, eds., Interpreting Indonesian Politics: Thirteen Contributions to the Debate (Ithaca: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1982), 125. Anderson is not the only scholar who pressed this point. Timothy P. Maga observed that “in terms of official visits, negotiations, length of cabinet discussions, and stacks of policy papers, Indonesia occupied more of [President Kennedy’s] time than Vietnam.” See Maga, “The New Frontier,” 91. Similarly, David Webster noted that “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.” David Webster, “Regimes in Motion: The Kennedy Administration and Indonesia’s New Frontier, 1960-1962,” Diplomatic

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15 and leftist historians, who focused predominately on Indonesia’s domestic affairs.36_{Since the mid-1990s,} the situation has improved somehow due to the availability of a larger number of Western and “Communist Bloc” sources and the subsequent “internationalization” of Cold War history. To be sure, we can now no longer speak of a “relative scholarly neglect of nearly all parts of the region outside Indochina,” as historian Robert J. McMahon did in 1995. However, the historiography United States-Indonesia relations remains by no means voluminous, especially when compared to the extensive scholarship conducted on Vietnam.37

Before turning to a more description of the recent and current trajectories in Cold War and U.S. foreign relations research from where this dissertation takes its viewpoint, it makes sense to briefly explain why the topic of U.S. foreign policy towards Indonesia, and Southeast Asia in general, has long been neglected. Apart from a lack of sources on Washington’s foreign policy, the initial lack of attention stemmed predominately from the traditional assumption that in order to understand the dynamics of the conflict one had to study the roles and perspectives of the superpowers. Although “orthodox” and “revisionist” historians had different views on who was to blame for bringing about the Cold War, their approach was similar in one important respect: they both paid scarce attention to the nations of the Third World. Instead, these nations were considered as little more than “pawns” or “victims” in what was then solely seen as an East-West conflict.38_{Notwithstanding the contributions from a small number of leftist historians in} the 1970s and 1980s, this view remained largely intact until fall of the Berlin Wall.39

In the years thereafter, the research field changed dramatically. When in the early 1990s, government documents were released in Russia, the PRC and Vietnam, scholars were, for the first time in history, able to study the roles and perspectives of the “Communist Bloc” countries. The research on the “other” side in the Cold War soon resulted in a number of important new insights. It appeared, for example, that Stalin’s role and ambitions in the Third World were more modest than previously assumed. Also, it turned out that indigenous actors, in this case the North Vietnamese, were considerably more inclined to follow

36

Curiously, attention from anthropologists, and political scientists, and area specialists, such as Benedict Anderson, Clifford Geertz, J.A.C. Mackie, Rex Mortimer, Ruth McVey, Harold Crouch and Harry J. Benda was far more extensive than from historians. The latter wrote in 1964 that “no country in Southeast Asia has in postwar years received greater attention, institutional support, and dedicated individual scholarship than Indonesia.” See Harry J. Benda, “Democracy in Indonesia,” in: Benedict Anderson and Audrey Kahin, eds.,

Interpreting Indonesian Politics: Thirteen Contributions to the Debate (Ithaca 1982) 13. For Simpson’s remarks on the historiography

of U.S.-Indonesia relations, see Economists with Guns, 4.

37

Robert J. McMahon, “The Cold War in Asia: The Elusive Synthesis,” in Michael J. Hogan, ed., America in the World: The

Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 524. Perhaps illustrative

for the scant attention for Indonesia is that country’s absence in what is perhaps the best and most comprehensive Vietnam War bibliography compiled by Clemson University’s Dr. Edwin E. Moïse at http://www.vietvet.org/edsbib.htm (accessed March 1, 2015).

38_{A great example of this narrow-minded view is the following quote from Henry Kissinger. During a conversation with the Chilean}

Foreign Minister Gabriel Valdes in 1969, the Secretary of State stated that the developing world, or Global South, was “not important” because “history has never been produced in the South.” According to Kissinger, “the axes of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens to the South is of no importance.” Kissinger cited in Seymour Hersh, “The Price of Power. Kissinger, Nixon, and Chile,” The Atlantic (December 1982), http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/12/the-price-of-power/376309/ (accessed March 1, 2015). For an excellent and critical treatment of the traditional Cold War paradigm, see Immanuel Wallerstein, “What Cold War in Asia? An Interpretative Essay,” in: Zheng Yangwen, Hong Liu and Michael Szonyi, eds., The Cold War in Asia: The Battle for Hearts and Minds (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010) 15-24.

39_{Exceptions include Akira Iriye, The Cold War in Asia: A Historical Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), and}

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16 their own nationalist agenda than those of Moscow and Beijing.40_{Ultimately, these discoveries} culminated into a challenge from a group of scholars, headed by John Lewis Gaddis, to many of the traditional paradigms. Although Gaddis and his followers again picked up the old questions of blame and inevitability, they also concluded that the Cold War had been more than a conflict between only the superpowers; at times, smaller and medium powers in the Third World, or “periphery,” played a crucial role as well.41

The “new” or post-Cold War historians left the genie out of the bottle. For this dissertation it is important to stress that their observation that Ho Chi Minh and his comrades had played a much more independent role in the Cold War than previously assumed also held significant implications for the study of the roles and perspectives of other actors in the Third World, including Indonesia. As a result, in the second half of the 1990s, following another phase of government documents declassification in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia, more and more scholars began to study and reevaluate the dynamics of the Cold War and U.S. foreign policy in the Third World. With regard to Southeast Asia, this led to contributions on long neglected topics, varying from the Malayan Emergency and the “Secret War” in Laos to U.S. foreign policy towards “other” Southeast Asian states.42_{With regard to Indonesia, this} resulted in Audrey R. Kahin’s and George McT. Kahin’s authoritative work on Washington’s failed attempt to topple Sukarno during the Outer Island Rebellion in 1957-1958, Subversion as a Foreign

Policy: the secret Eisenhower and Dulles debacle in Indonesia (1995), and Paul Gardner’s Shared Hopes and Separate Fears: Fifty Years of U.S. Indonesian Relations (1997), still the only extensive recollection

of United States-Indonesia relations through the entire period since the latter’s independence in 1949.43

40_{See, for example, Ilya V. Gaiduk, “Soviet Cold War Strategy and Prospects of Revolution in South and Southeast Asia” (chapter 5)}

in: Christopher E. Goscha and Christian F. Ostermann, eds., Connecting Histories: decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia,

1945-1962 (Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Press, 2009) 123-136; Ilya V. Gaiduk, “The Second Front of the Cold War: Asia in the

System of Moscow’s Foreign Policy Priorities, 1956” (chapter 2) in: Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, ed., The Cold War in East Asia

1945-1991 (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2011), 63-80; Qiang Zhai, China & the Vietnam Wars, 1950-1975 (Chapel Hill: University

of North Carolina Press, 2000; Marc Jason Gilbert, ed., Why the North won the Vietnam War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

41

Gaddis characterized the “new” Cold War history by the centrality of “ideas, ideologies, and morality” and the employment of multi-archives in an attempt to go beyond “America centrism.” At the same time, he shifted the primary responsibility for the Cold War back to the Soviet Union, whose “fundamental expansionism the U.S. had sought to contain.” See John Lewis Gaddis, We now know.

Rethinking Cold War history (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 281-295.

42_{With “other” Southeast Asian countries, I refer to all countries in the region except Vietnam, but including Laos and Cambodia.}

Examples of such studies are Daniel Fineman, A Special Relationship: The United States and Military Government in Thailand,

1947-1958 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997); Robert M. Blackburn, Mercenaries & Lyndon Johnson’s “More Flags”: The Hiring of Korean, Filipino and Thai Soldiers in the Vietnam War (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994); Arne Kislenko, “Bamboo in

the Shadows: Relations between the United States and Thailand during the Vietnam War” in: Andreas W. Daum, Lloyd C. Gardner, and Wilfried Mausbach, eds., America, the Vietnam War and the World: Comparative & International Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Robert Jackson, The Malayan Emergency: The Commonwealth’s War (New York: Routledge, 1991); Paul Ham, Vietnam: The Australian War (Sydney: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007).

43_{Audrey Kahin and George McT. Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia}

(Washington, DC: University of Washington Press, 1997); Paul F. Garnder, Shared Hopes, Separate Fears: Fifty Years of

U.S.-Indonesian Relations (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997). Kahin & Kahin and Gardner were trendsetters. In the early 2000s, various

authors began to focus on U.S. foreign policy towards Indonesia, both during the 1950s and 1960s. See for example John Subritzky,

Confronting Sukarno: British, American, Australian and New Zealand diplomacy in the Malaysian-Indonesian confrontation, 1961-65

(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Andrew Roadknight, United States policy towards Indonesia in the Truman and Eisenhower

years (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Matthew Jones, Conflict and confrontation in South East Asia, 1961-1965: Britain, the United States, Indonesia and the creation of Malaysia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Frances Gouda and Thijs

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1920-17 Although still largely focusing on Western roles and perspectives, the research of the second half of the 1990s contributed to a further broadening of horizons of Cold War and U.S. foreign history. This trend continued and accelerated in the twenty-first century.

When looking back at the contributions of the last ten to fifteen years or so, we can identify a number of distinct, but overlapping trajectories that have truly “internationalized” the Cold War and U.S. foreign relations research field. Three of these trajectories, which greatly influenced this dissertation, will be briefly addressed here. First, while the focus has long been on the European theater of the Cold War, there is now an equal amount of attention for the dynamics of the Cold War and Washington’s policies in other continents. This has added to the Cold War an important North-South dimension and makes it that the conflict is no longer seen as solely a bipolar struggle between Washington and Moscow. It has also led to a recognition of the fact that American and Russian might had its limits – not only in Cuba, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, but also elsewhere – and that indigenous actors often played a crucial role too. As Karl Hack and Geoff Wade have observed, by “drawing on outside factors for their own material and ideological purposes,” local forces turned the Cold War at times considerably “hot.” This was perhaps nowhere more true than in Southeast Asia.44

Second, instead of looking at the dynamics and impact of the Cold War and of U.S. foreign policy in only one nation, as has long been the standard method of research, an increasing number of scholars now apply a regionalist, trans-nationalist, or internationalist approach. By doing so, they try to investigate how regional, transnational, and international developments affected local events and vice versa and in what way the Cold War intersected with other longue durée developments of the twentieth century, such as decolonization, modernization, and globalization. It is worth emphasizing that in this process of “internationalizing” the Cold War, non-western scholars are playing an important role. Though still limited by a lack of sources – most Southeast Asian archives remain closed to scholars – they have brought in valuable new insights on the roles and perspectives of indigenous actors, revealing, among other things, how these actors experienced the Cold War and where, when, and if the conflict became more important than, for example, the remnants of colonialism in shaping their view on themselves and their place in the world.45

1949 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002); Robert J. McMahon, “The Point of No Return: The Eisenhower Administration

and Indonesia, 1953-1960,” in Kathryn C. Statler and Andrew L. Johns, eds., The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the

Globalization of the Cold War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 75-100; David F. Schmitz, The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1965-1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), especially chapter 2, “Degrading Freedom;” Roosa, Pretext for mass murder; and Simpson’s Economist with Guns.

44_{Karl Hack and Geoff Wade, “The Origins of the Southeast Asian Cold War,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 40, no. 3 (October}

2009), 443. See also Westad, The Global Cold War, 396. It should be stressed here that the Cold War was not only hot in Korea and Indochina, but also in Malaysia (during the “Emergency” of the 1950s and Konfrontasi in the 1960s), the Philippines (during the

Hukbalahap Rebellion in the 1940s and 1950s), Thailand (during the numerous military coup attempts throughout the entire Cold War

and the brutal suppression of leftist student demonstrators in Bangkok in the 1970s), and of course in Indonesia (during the PPRI/Permesta Rebellion in the late 1950s, the West New Guinea crisis in 1961-962, Konfrontasi, and the anti-PKI massacre of 1965-1966).

45_{Ang Cheng Guan noted that “there is still no sign that Southeast Asian governments are considering making documents of the Cold}

War years accessible to scholars, except perhaps in some cases on a very selective basis.” Ang Cheng Guan, Southeast Asia and the

Vietnam War (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 1. Important non-western contributions include Tuong Vu and Wasana

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18 Third, Cold War and U.S. foreign relations scholars have finally begun to move beyond the questions of inevitability and guilt to focus on other important factors that shaped the conflict, such as economics, culture, ideology, science and technology. With regard to U.S. Cold War policies, this trend has led to a growing number of studies on Washington’s relations with Third World countries, non-aligned states, and Asian nations that stood, to borrow a phrase from Timothy Castle, “in the shadow of Vietnam.”46 Moreover, it has contributed to a fresh interest in the impact of development concerns and modernization theory on the views and policies of U.S. officials, particularly those of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.47_{As historian David Schmitz observed, modernization theory implied that economic} development had followed unique paths in Western Europe and the United States, and that these paths, including the value systems and political and economic institutions that underpinned them, could be transferred to other countries, including those in the Third World. The theory allowed policymakers not only to rank nations “in terms of their “objective” developmental status, political systems, and cultural institutions” and “determine their needs and problems,” but also to assume a leading role in shaping a new economic world order. Modernization theory clearly reflected the racist ideas that were prominent in Western thinking during much of the nineteenth and twentieth century. In Washington’s case, it also echoed the notion of “American exceptionalism,” which can be traced back to at least the writings of Alexander the Tocqueville in the early nineteenth century.48

In the past ten to fifteen years, scholars have unquestionably expanded our knowledge of the Cold War and of U.S. foreign policy during the conflict since the whole topic is now studied from a wide range of regional and international perspectives and with various thematic approaches. Though some scholars consider current “international” Cold War history nearly indistinguishable from “global history,” we cannot deny the positive fact that historians have finally begun to move beyond the long-time dominant Eurocentric approach to pay equal attention to the “hot” and often bloody dynamics of the conflict and of U.S. policy in other parts of the world, from Africa to Latin America and from Asia to the Middle East.49_{To be sure, it goes too far to embrace Westad’s conclusion that “the most important aspects of the} Cold War were neither military nor strategic, nor Europe-centered, but connected to political and social development in the Third World,” for it leaves out, for example, the importance of the nuclear arsenal on

Yangweng Zheng, Michael Szonyi and Hong Liu, eds., The Cold War in Asia: the Battle for Hearts and Minds (Leiden: Brill, 2010); and the earlier cited Zhai, China & the Vietnam Wars, 1950-1975.

46

This is the title of Timothy N. Castle’s book, At War in the Shadow of Vietnam: U.S. Military Aid to the Royal Lao Government,

1955-1975 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

47_{See Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel}

Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000); David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction

of an American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Corinna R. Unger and David C. Engerman, “Modernization

as a Global Project: American, Soviet, and European Approaches,” prepared for conference on “Modernization as a Global Project” at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, March 28-29, 2008, available at http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=2083; Daniel Immerwahr, “Modernization and Development in U.S. Foreign Relations,” Passport 43, no. 2 (September 2012), 22-25.

48_{Schmitz, The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 11-12; James W. Ceaser, “The Origins and Character of American}

Exceptionalism,” American Political Thought: A Journal of Ideas, Institutions, and Culture 1 (Spring 2012), 1-25.

49_{Odd Arne Westad, “The New International History of the Cold War: Three (Possible) Paradigms,” Diplomatic History 24, no. 4 (Fall}

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19 the European continent, the role played by politicians such as Charles de Gaulle and Willy Brandt, and the large impact that the Cuban Missile Crisis had on the conflict. However, based on what we now know, we can say that the suggestion of Tuong Vu and Wasana Wongsurawat to re-conceptualize the Cold War as “an intercontinental synchronization of hostilities” in which Asian actors shared equal responsibilities with Western and Soviet actors in the spread of conflict, certainly makes sense.50

Having said this, there are still important gaps in our knowledge of the Cold War and of U.S. foreign policy, in particular in Indonesia and in Southeast Asia more generally, that remain to be filled. First, when looking at the historiography of U.S. Cold War policies in Southeast Asia, one has to conclude that there is still an over-fixation on Vietnam. Certainly, this is understandable because the Vietnam War was, as George C. Herring has taught us, “America’s longest war,” with a socio-political impact that exceeded that of any other conflict the United States fought since World War II.51_{However, by focusing so} exclusively on Vietnam “historians have generally neglected the crucial importance of [Indonesia] to overall American strategy in the region.”52_{Until at least the mid-1960s, U.S. officials considered the} strategic and economic importance of Indonesia at least on par with Vietnam if not with the whole of Indochina, and for this reason the archipelago state equaled Vietnam in dedicated time and worry. Due to their preoccupation with Vietnam, scholars have also failed to appreciate the earlier outlined geopolitical consequences of the Indonesian regime change and wholesale annihilation of the PKI in 1965-1966.53 This is a remarkable neglect given the fact that the Johnson almost immediately administration praised the “reversal of the Communist Tide in the great country of Indonesia an event that will probably rank along with the Vietnamese war as perhaps the most historic turning point of Asia in this decade.”54 Without exaggeration, one can conclude that the Indonesian turnaround was a decisive pivotal moment in the history of the Cold War, perhaps even equal in importance to the détente in relations between the United States and China in the 1970s, which allowed the Washington to shift its focus from East to West Asia and the Middle East. In this sense, there is much to say for the argument put forward by Noam

50

Westad, The Global Cold War, 396; Tuong Vu and Wasana Wongsurawat, Dynamics of the Cold War, 3.

51_{George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950 – 1975 (New York: John Wiley, 1979). Vietnam}

was the first war to be televised, enabling millions of people to witness from their living room the horrors of a conflict fought on the other side of the globe. It was also the first war in which the United States suffered a clear defeat. (Ironically, the United States realized its larger objectives in the region despite this defeat, see the conclusion of my thesis). Despite having an army of over half a million soldiers, backed from the sky by the world’s most powerful and sophisticated air force, the Americans were unable to crush the attempts of the North Vietnamese revolutionaries to overthrow the government in Saigon and reunite the country. By 1973, American troops had gone home, and in 1975, the North Vietnamese army conquered the South. Almost fifty years after the outbreak of the war, Vietnam still serves a warning for U.S. policymakers, see for example Ed Hornick, “Afghanistan haunted by ghost of Vietnam,” CNN, October 27, 2009, http://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/10/27/afghanistan.vietnam/index.html?iref=24hours (accessed March 1, 2015). The impact of the war was felt globally, of course particularly in Asia itself, but also in Western Europe. See Leopoldo Nuti, “Transatlantic relations in the era of Vietnam: Western Europe and the Escalation of the War, 1965-1968.” Paper presented at the conference “NATO, the Warsaw Pact and the Rise of Détente, 1965-1972,” Dobbiaco, Italy, September 22-28, 2002; and Rimko van der Maar, Welterusten,

mijnheer de president (Amsterdam: Boom 2007).

52

Subritzky, Confronting Sukarno, 187.

53

To mention one – otherwise very good – account of U.S. foreign policy, the coup is not even mentioned in George C. Herring’s From

Colony to Superpower: U.S. foreign relations since 1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Praised by Diplomatic History

as “the standard master narrative of the history of U.S. diplomacy,” the book in fact barely mentions Indonesia at all. This point is not stressed however in the following review: Robert D. Schulzinger, “The Master Narrative of U.S. Foreign Relations” (book review),

Diplomatic History 33, no. 5 (November 2009), 959-962.

54

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20 Chomsky that by the time that Suharto consolidated power, the United States had actually “won the war” in Southeast Asia.55_{Ironically, U.S. officials failed to recognize themselves that “fewer dominoes now} existed, and [that] they seemed much less likely to fall.”56

Second, while scholars have increasingly looked at the Cold War from a regional and/or international perspective, they have paid only limited attention to the links between U.S. foreign policy towards Indonesia and Washington’s priorities elsewhere in the region, particularly in Vietnam. Former National Security Advisor and modernization theorist Walt Whitman Rostow recalled that from 1965 onwards, American policymakers and commentators had a tendency to discuss the war in Vietnam without reference to Southeast Asia.57_{In recent years, scholars have done a great deal to redress this by exploring} the dynamics of the war in other parts of the region. However, in doing so they have dealt predominately with the countries that belonged to the “upper arc” of Southeast Asia. “The southernmost states in the region,” including Indonesia, have thus “not received as much attention.”58_{This is curious because U.S.} policymakers believed that “what happened in the north [of Southeast Asia] affected what happened in the south,” and vice versa. Moreover, they framed the importance of Indonesia like any other Southeast Asian country “squarely in regional terms.” This way of framing stemmed from Washington’s commitment in the late 1940s and early 1950s to seek the reconstruction of Japan, regional economic integration, and the containment of communism throughout East and Southeast Asia.59

Third, when looking at the historiography of U.S.-Indonesia relations, we can conclude that there are still various episodes and aspects that deserve more scholastic attention. In the past two decades, considerable attention has been paid to the Eisenhower administration’s dramatic intervention in Indonesia during the Outer Island Rebellion in 1957-1958 and the same counts for the CIA’s activities in

55_{Chomsky admitted that it was a “partial victory,” for Washington did not achieve its maximal objectives. It did not succeed in}

establishing a pro-American regime in Vietnam, nor in Laos and Cambodia, but it had achieved its “major objectives” of defeating communism in most of the region, maintaining access to the region’s natural resources (particularly those in Indonesia), and creating the climate for increased cooperation among the nations of the region along the lines that would follow the natural flow of economic utility. Various officials, including Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, later came to similar conclusions. See McNamara, In Retrospect, 214-215; Mueller, “Reassessment of American Policy,” 52; Green, Indonesia, 152-153. For Chomsky’s claims, see Kevin Hewison, “Noam Chomsky on Indochina and Iraq: an Interview,” Journal of Contemporary

Asia 37, no. 4 (November 2007), 1-13.

56_{As McNamara observed, “the largest and most populous nation in Southeast Asia had reversed course and now lay in the hands of}

independent nationalists led by Suharto,” while “China, which had expected a tremendous victory, instead suffered a permanent setback.” Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Times Books, 1995), 214-215. McGeorge Bundy also affirmed later that Vietnam was no longer of vital interest “at least from the time of the anti-Communist revolution in Indonesia.” See John Mueller, “Reassessment of American Policy,” in Harrison E. Salisbury, ed., Vietnam Reconsidered:

Lessons from a War (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 52.

57_{Walt W. Rostow, “The Strategic significance of Vietnam and Southeast Asia” in: James F. Veninga and Harry A. Wilmer, eds.,}

Vietnam in Remission (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1985) 33-53. Obviously, by the mid-1960s, the war “had come

to acquire a logic of its own, divorced from the domino theory,” which had been an important theoretical underpinning for years. See Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder, 15.

58

Lau, “Southeast Asia and the Cold War,” 1. The “upper arc” of Southeast Asia consists of the countries of Indochina, Thailand, the Philippines and Burma. The “lower arc” consists of Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam, and, since 1999, East Timor (which was brutally annexed by Indonesia in 1975). Initially, the region also included India and Ceylon and excluded the Philippines. On the “birth” of Southeast Asia as a geographically unified region, see Donald K. Emmerson, ““Southeast Asia:” What’s in a Name?,”

Journal of Southeast Asia Studies 15, no. 1 (1984) 1-21.

59_{Dewi Fortuna Anwar, “The Cold War and its impact on Indonesia. Domestic Politics and foreign policy,” in Albert Lau, ed., Southeast}

Asia and the Cold War (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 133-150; Simpson, Economists with Guns, 16; McMahon, The Limits of Intervention, 44.