U.S. Relations with Indonesia, the Kennedy-Johnson Transition, and the Vietnam Connection, 1963–1965

Extract

In the first two decades of the Cold War in Asia, the sprawling archipelago of Indonesia, because of its physical size, large population, strategic location, and valuable natural resources, occupied an important place in the calculations of U.S. policymakers. Indonesian alignment with the so-called communist bloc, it was often feared, could outflank the line of containment that ran through mainland Southeast Asia in Indochina and Thailand and deny to the West access to vital commodities such as oil and rubber.1 Alongside evaluations of Indonesia's value in geopolitical terms lay considerable American commercial interests, the most significant of which by the early 1960s were the $300 million worth of private investment held by U.S. oil companies.2 Any increase in communist influence in the country, either through the development of contacts and receipt of aid from the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China (PRC) or through the growing domestic strength of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), sent ripples of concern flowing through Washington at the thought that another of the key dominoes in the Southeast Asia region might fall under the sway of one of its chief adversaries. Under the Indonesian system of “guided democracy” established in 1959, where Western forms of parliamentary and party-based government were superseded, President Sukarno increasingly sustained his executive functions through a delicate balancing act, where nationalist agitation and the mass base of the PKI were used to offset the potential power of the Indonesian Army.3