The Guided Democracy years coincided with a rollercoaster in relations between the capitalist and communist blocs. Fears of a violent showdown were interspersed with glimmers of hope as the great powers toyed with détente. But the general trends were adverse at both the global and regional levels. Arsenals of nuclear weapons grew in destructive capability and sophistication as the USA and Soviet Union added to their stockpiles and new states joined the nuclear club.1 In Europe, the shooting down of a US spy plane over the Soviet Union in May 1960 became emblematic of the distrust on both sides, wrecking a planned East-West summit. A year later, the Iron Curtin went from being metaphoric to material with the construction of the Berlin Wall. In the Western hemisphere, the Cold War came closer to the USA with the Cuban revolution of 1959.2 The USA plotted the removal of revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, leading to the disaster of the Bay of Pigs, when an invasion of Cuba in April 1961 by US- sponsored Cuban exiles and mercenaries was repulsed. The stationing of US intermediate range nuclear missiles within striking distance of Moscow and the subsequent standoff between
1 In 1960, France tested its first atomic bomb in the Algerian desert. A year later, the Soviet Union
tested the biggest thermonuclear bomb. The People’s Republic of China tested its first bomb in October 1964.
2 For a summary of the events of this period see Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy, New York: Touchstone
the USA and Soviet Union over the stationing of Soviet nuclear missiles on Cuba brought the two superpowers closer than they had ever been to war in October 1962.3
In this climate of suspicion and anxiety, Southeast Asia loomed as one of the major ideological and, potentially violent, battlegrounds. For both Cold War camps, no state in the region would be more important, or elusive, a partner than Indonesia. The awareness of Indonesia’s key role as a swing state – one whose disposition could determine the balance of power in the entire region - was underscored as the US administration contemplated the expensive military scenarios of defeating communism on the ground. There was a widespread view in Washington that a war in Vietnam would be a sideshow if Indonesia went communist and the USA was drawn into a civil war there.4
But under Dwight D. Eisenhower, the USA was wary of committing troops to the fight against communism in Southeast Asia. Although determined to stop the dominos of non- communist states falling from Indochina to the Malay Archipelago, he preferred funding allies or using air and sea power to sending land forces to fight in the jungles and rice paddies. If China did launch into war alongside the Viet Minh and push on through Indochina, the US military high command estimated the size of forces required for a static line of defence in Thailand and the Malay Peninsula would be prohibitive. For this reason, the preference from Eisenhower down had been to strike blows at mainland China itself to blunt its offensive capability. A 2 June 1954 meeting in the Oval Office was illustrative of the high stakes on the table. Eisenhower warned overt aggression by China in support of the Viet Minh would require him to declare “a state of war” in which the air force and navy would have to “go in with full power, using new weapons”, presumably a euphemism for nuclear strikes.5
Despite wariness over deploying ground forces to Southeast Asia, Eisenhower believed he could not stay on the sidelines in the conflicts sparked by decolonisation there, especially in Indochina. He had popularised the idea of the Domino Theory – the spectre of Asian states falling from Japan to Indonesia if communism prevailed in Indochina. Consequently, the USA had poured USD 1 billion into South Vietnam and deployed a growing number of military advisers by the end of the Eisenhower years. But this commitment was inimical to America’s
3 A thorough account of the crisis from both sides is found in Alexsandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali,
‘One Hell of a Gamble’: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-1964, New York: Norton (1997).
4 Secretary of State Dean Rusk was to voice this view some years later as the conflict in Vietnam grew
in parallel with heightening tensions between communists and non-communists in Indonesia. Summary Record of the 521st National Security Council Meeting, 7 January 1964, FRUS, Vol. XXVI, 1964-1968, document 8.
5 Memorandum by Robert Cutler, Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, to
self-perceptions and would taint the US image across the region. Where the US saw a communist threat, Indonesians saw a war of nationalist liberation. In 1954, Eisenhower had told an NSC meeting he did not want “the United States to stand alone before the world as an arbitrary power supporting colonialism in Asia”.6 But in Asian eyes, this is precisely how the US presence was frequently seen.
The reluctance to commit large numbers of ground troops was overcome during the administrations of John F. Kennedy (1961-1963) and Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969). The pair took the USA into the quagmire of Vietnam in a series of fateful and tragic escalations, each logically compelled by its predecessor. The USA thus built from the advisory role in Vietnam from 900 personnel when Kennedy took office in 1961 to 16,263 at the time he was assassinated on 22 November 1963.7 After the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, the speed of the US military build-up accelerated. Under Johnson, the number of soldiers in Vietnam would rise to more than half a million by 1965.8 These administrations presided at a time when the USA was bluffed into believing the capitalist West was losing the contest of power, ideas and production against communism.9 The effect was to in heighten concern in
Washington over the strategic consequences of any significant defection to communism in the region, especially a state as important as Indonesia. Sukarno was to prove adept at exploiting those US anxieties.
But in the view of many, the US had failed to grasp what motivated Asian politics or the best means of countering communism. Indonesians saw the Viet Minh as anti-colonial and nationalist, rather than as an agent for the territorial expansion of communism. Sukarno believed that using force to deny the legitimate aspirations of the Viet Minh would only alienate other Asians and send them into the arms of communists. In 1965, he expressed this sentiment in a rhetorical question to an international audience: “We ask ourselves today: would the vicious bombing raids now being perpetrated against the Vietnamese people twenty years after the end of the Second War, ever be launched if the nation being attacked were not of Asia, or Africa or Latin America?”10
6 Meeting of the National Security Council, 3 June 1954, FRUS, Vol. XII, 1952-1954, p. 533.
7 “The Advisory Build-Up 1961-1967” in Evolution of the War, Counterinsurgency: The Kennedy
Commitments, 1961-1963, Pentagon Papers, Washington DC: NARA, p. 51.
8 “Phase I in the Build-Up for US Forces, March-July 1965” in Evolution of the War, Direct Action:
The Johnson Commitments, 1964-1968, Pentagon Papers, Washington DC: NARA, p. 10.
9 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: 1914-1991, London: Abacus (1994), p. 243.
The US military build-up in Vietnam ran counter to the trend of European countries liquidating their Asian and African empires. Notably, Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s continued its retreat from the Far East with moves to grant independence to its Malay, Singapore and Borneo colonies. This was also mirrored in Britain’s growing wariness of military commitments in East Asia, which eventually resulted in a withdrawal east of Suez. Debilitated by the Second World War, Britain recognised the military and financial costs of empire were too great. In contrast, critics could paint the Dutch, clinging to the territory of West New Guinea, and the Portuguese, ensconced in East Timor, as stubborn adherents to an antique idea.
But even as colonial rulers were chased out or packed up and left, the realities of the Cold War ensured Southeast Asia remained central to the strategic game of the great powers. The main patterns and themes of international politics were still largely dictated by the great old states. Sukarno and several like-minded leaders in Asia, Africa and the Middle East hoped for a new international order in which the new states had a stronger voice in global governance and greater opportunities to share in global wealth – an approach they had foreshadowed at Bandung. Among the early concrete products of this thinking was the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which held its founding meeting in Belgrade in 1961. But the promise of Bandung also dissipated with the reality that “peaceful coexistence” was easier to put into conference resolutions than political practice. China’s attack against India in the Himalayas in September 1962, pitting the two star players of Bandung against each other, proved threats could be posed as easily by the new states as the extra regional great powers. India, the voice of moderation within the non-aligned world, displayed its own appetite for military decision with the invasion in December 1961 of the enclaves of Portuguese Goa, Daman and Diu on the Arabian Sea. It was an act not lost on other countries with territorial claims they portrayed as irredentist, including Indonesia.
Nonetheless, there was some truth to a charge made by Sukarno that the bombs usually only fell on states on the periphery of power. The great power antagonisms that defined world politics had a disproportionate impact on the underdeveloped, weak, and newly decolonised or decolonising states. The Cold War produced a “zone of stability” in North America and Europe, but elsewhere conflict raged. The Soviet Union under Khrushchev paid lip service to the cause of anti-imperialism in the Third World11, but strategically was far more concerned
11 As it was coined in 1952, the term Third World denoted states that were neither part of the Western
capitalist nor Communist blocs. But it is used here with the contemporary meaning of the developing countries of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific and Latin America.
about the status quo in Europe. By some estimates, four out of five casualties were civilians and most of them in Asia.12 The northern zone of stability owed itself in part to the character of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, an “admirable rough diamond” who was dismissed and underestimated by many of his contemporaries in the West.13
In his early days, Khrushchev was known for thundering bombast about burying the West. He had rejected Eisenhower’s “Open Skies” policy in 1955 to allow freedom of flight for reconnaissance aircraft as a confidence building measure and issued an ultimatum in November 1958 for the Western powers to evacuate Berlin, precipitating the second Berlin crisis and the construction of the wall. A brief glimmer of détente in the promise of a Paris Summit between the leaders of the USA, Britain, France and the Soviet Union was abruptly cut short when Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane was shot down in May 1960. Yet Khrushchev eventually did take steps towards peace with the West and contributed to the creation of “a relatively stabilised international system” in the last two years of his rule.14 After the crises over Cuba and Berlin, attempts at détente were revived and reached a peak in July-August 1963 with the establishment of a hot line between the Oval Office and the Kremlin and the signing of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty between the USA, Britain and the Soviet Union.15
This did not entirely alleviate the competition for influence in the Third World. The
impression of stability achieved in the global north during this time comes from the benefit of hindsight. It was barely perceived at the time and cannot be applied to conditions in large parts of Asia. Western, especially American, fears of communism were acute, the USA fretted that it was losing ground to the Soviet Union militarily and technologically, and states in Asia that were bystanders to their ideological struggle held legitimate concerns they would be the battleground should the Cold War turn hot. In Southeast Asia, strategic vulnerability prompted a range of security solutions. States maintained formal or informal alliances with extra-
12 Clive Ponting, The 20th Century: A World History, New York: Henry Holt and Co., (1998), p. 287.
13 Hobsbawm, op. cit., p. 242. An alternative appraisal was offered by British Prime Minister Harold
Macmillan, who expressed wonder that this “fat, vulgar man” could really lead millions of people in a vast country. Taubman, op. cit., p. 352.
14 Ibid. p. 243. See also “Discussion between N.S. Khrushchev and Mao Zedong”, 2 October 1959,
Wilson Center Digital Archive, accessed at http://digitalarchive. wilsoncenter.org/document/112088.
In this discussion Khrushchev repeatedly states his desire to avoid war with the USA, including through escalation of conflict in Southeast Asia – a position with which Mao was largely in accord.
15 The series of initiatives in the second half of 1963 represented a distinct relaxation of tensions
between Washington and Moscow, but in Rusk’s view did not amount to a “détente”. See, Address by
Secretary Rusk, Foreign Policy and the American Citizen, The Department of State Bulletin, Vol. XLIX,
regional powers in both the Western and Communist camps. Some, like Indonesia, tried to tread the tightrope of non-alignment.
The major Cold War protagonists strenuously competed for allies and defended the line against the expansion of the opposing camp. Starting in the mid-1950s under Khrushchev, the Soviet Union had been a major source of civil and military aid to developing states, mostly in the form of concessional loans. The theory was that this would influence the path of political and economic development in countries that had been captured by neither the Communist bloc
nor the West.16 Consequently, aid acted as an inducement to discourage Third World countries
from becoming entangled with the USA. After the emergence of détente between Moscow and Washington, Khrushchev was anxious to avoid the competition for influence in the Third World dragging the great powers into a proxy war and he was increasingly dissatisfied with the geopolitical returns from Soviet largesse. The spirit of “gradualism and moderation” continued after the ousting of Khrushchev in October 1964 in the foreign policies of Leonid Brezhnev, the new General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU),
and Alexei Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers.17 The Brezhnev and Kosygin
Kremlin was even more inclined to question the efficacy of the aid program as a means of
securing allies in the Third World.18 But the Soviet Union was not prepared to sacrifice its
influence in the Third World or to vacate the field to rivals, which increasingly included its erstwhile friend, the People’s Republic of China.
The Sino-Soviet split, a combination of disagreements over ideology and foreign policy priorities, started tentatively in 1956 and steadily widened during the 1960s. One of the critical points of difference between Moscow and Beijing was how to manage the confrontation with the West. Among numerous disputes, Soviet prudence conflicted with
Chinese boldness in calling for revolutionary liberation movements in the Third World.19 The
import for leftist or non-aligned states was that it further complicated their great power
balancing act. Indonesia’s PKI, like communist parties in other non-communist states, faced
16 Ragna Boden, “Cold War Economics: Soviet Aid to Indonesia”, Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol.
10 No. 3, (2008), p. 125.
17 Philip E. Mosley, “The Kremlin and the Third World”, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 64 (1967-68), p. 75.
18 Bilveer Singh, “Soviet-Indonesian Relations, 1945-1968”, unpublished PhD dissertation, (1986), pp.
228-229
19 The record of discussion of a meeting between high Soviet and Chinese officials in Beijing in 1959
provides a stark record of the extent of difference and the hostile tone of relations. “Discussion between N.S. Khrushchev and Mao Zedong”, 2 October 1959, Wilson Center Digital Archive, accessed at
an invidious choice between the Moscow and Beijing lines. Sukarno too had to weigh the attraction of China’s crusading opposition to imperialism against the Soviet Union’s greater conservatism, but bigger resources. The contest between the two biggest communist states would add another important dynamic to the game of alignment.
But the years from 1959 to 1966 in Southeast Asia also are noteworthy for the continuing evolution of a community of independent states. This was not a smooth process, exposing conflicts over ideology, ethnicity and nationalism, which in many cases provoked civil violence, regime repression, cross border disputes and open warfare. The regimes that took over in the new states were often fragile and at risk of falling to internal strife. The danger to civilian governments everywhere in the developing world was underscored by a series of military coups in 1958 that toppled governments in Burma, Iraq, Pakistan, Thailand and Sudan. Foreign intervention remained an abiding concern too, as with the overthrow of the government of João Goulart in Brazil in 1964, in which a US role was again suspected. After the experience of the regional rebellions and standoffs with the army in the 1950s, Indonesian politicians could not assume they were immune from further such action. In the midst of attempts at nation building, post-colonial governments had to contend with manifold threats that required hard choices about the right security partners and how to position themselves in the Cold War. Sukarno’s Balancing Act: Controlling the Army and Communist Party, 1959-1966
While Southeast Asia was wracked by upheaval, Indonesia experienced an internal reckoning of its own. The course of politics from 1959 was fundamentally altered by the bitter experience of the regional rebellions. After large scale hostilities ended in 1958, guerrilla warfare persisted, but it posed no serious threat to Jakarta’s authority. The outcome produced immediate winners and losers in the contest for national power. The army, under Nasution, emerged with enhanced prestige and influence over national policy, underpinned by the continued state of martial law imposed at the outset of the rebellion. The PKI too, as one of the most ardent supporters of the government’s suppression of the rebels, won kudos and continued to entrench its position as the strongest and best-organised political party.