DISCUSIÓN Y CONCLUSIONES Discusión

The Opening Phases, 1945-1949

In a speech on 6 March 1946 in the small Missouri town of Fulton, wartime British prime minister Winston Churchill, then out of office, warned of an “Iron Curtain” descending across Central Europe dividing the continent into communist and non-communist blocs.2 Several events in the ensuing three years – the christening of the emerging conflict as the Cold War in April 1947, the Soviet blockade of Berlin in June 1948, the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in April 1949, and the detonation of the first Soviet nuclear weapon in August 1949 – would make that description prophetic.3

Although the main arena for conflict was Europe, East Asia too quickly became of increasing importance to the global struggle. The Second World War had shattered the image of invincibility that had shrouded the European colonial powers, breathing new life into old nationalist ambitions. The Germans had overrun the metropolitan centres of the French, Dutch and Belgian empires in Europe; the Japanese had defeated and imprisoned the colonial overseers of the British, French, Dutch and even Americans in Asia. The inexorable process of decolonisation unleashed by the war’s end, as former subject peoples resisted the reimposition of the pre-war order, was bound to draw in the USA and Soviet Union, the main Cold War protagonists. The superiority of power that European colonial powers still exercised in comparison to the ill-equipped forces of revolution, even after the devastation of the war, meant nationalists would look to one or both of the dominant global powers for relief. In the flush of allied victory, the USA and the Soviet Union still espoused ideologies of liberation and anti-imperialism.

High-minded ideology was one thing; the power calculus of the Cold War was another. While the USA and Soviet Union rejected imperialism rhetorically, neither wanted to see liberation from colonialism come at the cost of ceding a relative advantage to the opposing side. The US diplomat, George Kennan, in a famous “Long Telegram” sent from Moscow in February 1946, foresaw the coming struggle for influence in the colonial world. He warned Washington:

2 _{Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography, New York: Plume (2001), pp. 810-813.}

3 _{For a comprehensive account of the Cold War’s origins from a US perspective, see John Lewis Gaddis,} The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, New York: Colombia University Press (1972).

On [an] unofficial plane particularly violent efforts will be made to weaken [the] power and influence of Western Powers [on] colonial backward, or dependent peoples. On this level, no holds will be barred. Mistakes and weaknesses of western colonial administration will be mercilessly exposed and exploited. Liberal opinion in Western countries will be mobilized to weaken colonial policies. Resentment among dependent peoples will be stimulated. And while [the] latter are being encouraged to seek independence of Western Powers, Soviet dominated puppet political machines will be undergoing preparation to take over domestic power in respective colonial areas when independence is achieved.4

The broad thrust of Kennan’s analysis – that a winner-take-all contest was brewing with the Soviet Union and needed to be challenged on multiple fronts – proved enormously influential in determining US Cold War policy. Less well known is the Soviet reply to Kennan – both Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, were among the readers of the supposedly top-secret Kennan telegram. An assessment of US strategic ambitions sent in September 1946 by the Soviet ambassador to Washington, Nicolai Novikov, argued a strategy of dividing East Asia between the USA and Britain was already evident in Indonesia where “the United States facilitated this British imperialist policy, handing over American weapons and equipment to the English and Dutch troops in Indonesia” and helping the deployment back to Indonesia of Dutch naval personnel from the United States.5

Fears that colonised and decolonising countries would become early battlegrounds in the Cold War grew out of a mix of great power policy and of events on the ground. In early 1946, the Netherlands had taken advantage of the cover of British occupation to return troops to Indonesia. The French followed suit with the official outbreak of the first Indochina War in December against the Viet Minh (the League for the Independence of Vietnam). British, French and Dutch attempts to resume authority over pre-war colonies in Southeast Asia lost to the Japanese presented the USA with a dilemma. It contradicted America’s publicly-stated principles. In March 1947, in response to the Greek civil war and Britain’s withdrawal from

4 _{The Chargé in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State, FRUS, Vol. VI, 1946, document}

475.

5 _{The full text of the Novikov telegram is printed in Kenneth M. Jensen (Ed.), Origins of the Cold War:} Novikov, Kennan, and Roberts Long Telegrams of 1946, Washington: United States of Institute of Peace Press (1993).

that theatre, President Harry S. Truman had pledged a new doctrine to “support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures”.6 But the re-occupation of colonial possessions increasingly became seen as a necessary bulwark against communist takeover and an indispensable foundation for responsible (pro-Western) statehood. The launch of the Truman Doctrine had followed the grant of independence to America’s Pacific colony, the Philippines, in July 1946. Yet, elsewhere in Asia, as Secretary of State, George Marshall, admitted, the USA was “in the same boat” as the European colonial powers. In a telegram to several Asian ambassadors, he wrote:

Following [the] relaxation [of] European controls, internal racial, religious, and national differences could plunge new nations into violent discord, or already apparent anti-Western Pan-Asiatic tendencies could become [the] dominant political force, or communists could capture control. We consider as best safeguard against these eventualities a continued close association between newly autonomous peoples and powers which have long been responsible [for] their welfare.7

These were prescient, but fraught observations. US fears of the regional encroachment of communism would grow in tandem with the success of communist movements in Vietnam and China. At the end of a bitter civil war, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would seize power in October 1949. The idea that China had been “lost” to the USA would haunt American policymakers for decades to come.

Elsewhere in the developing world, the Soviet Union perceived an opportunity to force the USA to choose between its European allies and the movements for decolonisation. This was manifest in the official Soviet policy of dividing the world into “two camps” – a progressive one headed by the Soviet Union and an imperialist one headed by the USA. The influential CPSU secretary for ideological affairs, A.A. Zhdanov, in enunciating this policy in Poland on 22 September 1947 specifically mentioned Indonesia and Vietnam. One consequence of the two-camp doctrine was to relegate for a time the idea of creating united fronts against imperialism embracing national bourgeoisie, workers and the peasantry in the

6 _{Special Message to the Congress on Greece and Turkey: The Truman Doctrine, 12 March 1947, The} American Presidency Project, University of California Santa Barbara, accessed at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=12846.

7 _{Telegram George Marshall, 13 May 1947, Pentagon Papers, Justification of the War, The Truman} Administration Book I, 1945-1949, Washington DC: NARA. p. 100.

decolonising states.8 Instead, national communists and left-wing sympathisers were directed to take charge of liberation movements. Another consequence was to encourage the resort to violence. The targets were not just the colonial powers, but ‘bourgeois’ nationalists who were leading independence revolutions.

Containment in Action in Southeast Asia, 1950-1958

By the start of the new decade, as the lines of hostility hardened across Europe, Asia became the feared battleground for the Cold War rivalry. In June 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea. In November, communist Chinese forces entered the conflict on the side of the North. On the orders of Stalin, Soviets pilots secretly started flying combat sorties under Chinese and North Korean markings.9 US-led forces of the United Nations, fighting to defend South Korea, would face the first serious armed test against the communist powers. Elsewhere in Asia, the atmosphere of crisis grew as the remnants of the nationalist Kuomintang forces fled communist-controlled China to Taiwan and to northern Burma, from where they conducted periodic incursions back into the mainland. Indigenous communist movements rose across Southeast Asia, especially in Indochina, stoking fears that communism was on the march in the region.

But even before the Cold War took on the menacing complexion of the 1950s, the USA was envisaging strategies to confront the global challenge posed by its new post-war enemy. In 1947, Kennan, writing anonymously in the journal Foreign Affairs, christened a policy that would become the cornerstone of American efforts to defend the “free world” from feared communist expansion. “Containment”, or the “adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to shifts and manoeuvres of Soviet policy”, would endure for decades, but at a price.10 It would cast US policy in Manichean terms, evoking deep suspicion of regimes that appeared to vacillate in the face of Washington’s absolutism.

8 _{R.A. Longmire, Soviet Relations with South-East Asia, London: Kegan Paul International (1989), pp.}

32-33.

9 _{Zhang Xiaoming, “China, the Soviet Union and the Korean War: From an Abortive Air War Plan to}

a Wartime Relationship”, The Journal of Conflict Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1 (2002), accessed at https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/JCS/article/view/368/583.

10 _{“X” (George F. Kennan), “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 25, No. 4 (1947),}

p. 576. For Kennan’s so-called “Long Telegram” see, Telegram from the Charge in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State, 22 February 1946, FRUS, Vol. VI, 1946, pp. 696-709.

Containment began to take shape as official policy in the late 1940s and early 1950s in a steady stream of memoranda, studies and presidential directives, which circulated inside the national security establishment. Typical of the thinking in Washington was NSC-68, sent to Truman in April 1950 just weeks before the outbreak of the Korean War. Portraying the Soviet Union as a “despotic oligarchy” bent on the “complete subversion or forcible destruction” of government and society in the non-communist world, it endorsed a policy of containment with four dimensions: block further expansion of Soviet power; expose the falseness of Soviet doctrines; induce a retraction of the control and influence of the Kremlin; and “foster the seeds of destruction within the Soviet system”.11 The aim to achieve this by “all means short of war” created the conditions for a long era of security-centred aid programs and covert intelligence interventions in third states that would lead the USA into numerous tactical disasters in the field and into moral ambiguities. 12

As Asia was then populated by new states, weak states and states in the grip of anti- colonial struggle, it was viewed as particularly vulnerable to communist influence. NSC 48/1, which apprised the President of the US position in Asia, warned nationalist tumult and revolution made the dangers of communist expansion and Soviet influence there especially acute.13 Containment took on increasing urgency as the war in Korea headed for stalemate and armistice in July 1953. Any sacrifice of territory to communism was viewed as unacceptable because of the principle at stake, the material losses entailed, and the risks that the fall of any one state could precipitate the fall of a succession of others. The next front in this campaign of ideological attrition would be Southeast Asia.

In December 1946, a communist Viet Minh army had launched a rebellion against colonial French Union forces in Tonkin, one of three French-ruled protectorates making up modern Vietnam. Within four years, insurgency escalated into conventional war. Despite no appetite for committing troops, the USA did a great deal to bolster the French position.14 In the process, American aid to France sacrificed one principle to promote another. For the USA, this first Indochina war was about resisting communism; for the French, it was about rescuing

11 _{A Report to the National Security Council by the Executive Secretary (Lay), NSC-68, United States}

Objectives and Programs for National Security, 14 April 1950, FRUS, Vol. I, 1950, pp. 234-306.

12 _{Ibid., p. 241.}

13 _{NSC 48/1, “The Position of the United States with Respect to Asia”, 23 December 1949, Pentagon} Papers, Book I 1945-1949, “Justification of the War – Internal Commitments, The Truman Administration 1945-1952”, Washington DC: NARA, pp. 225-272.

14 _{NSC 124/2 “United States Objectives and Courses of Action with Respect to Southeast Asia”,} Pentagon Papers, Book II, “Justification of the War – Internal Commitments, The Truman Administration 1945-1952”, pp. 530-531.

a crumbling colonial empire, something inimical to US post-war idealism. The higher priority placed on fighting communism was not lost on newly-decolonised or decolonising states.

Although Indonesia was distant from the conflict, the NSC feared “relatively swift submission or an alignment with communism” there, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, should Vietnam fall to the Viet Minh.15 The loss of British-ruled Malaya and Indonesia to communism would deny the West “the principle source of natural rubber and tin, and a producer of petroleum and other strategically important commodities”.16 Reverberations would spread. First, economic and political pressure in Japan would make it hard for Tokyo to avoid an accommodation to communism. Second, America’s primary defensive line along the offshore Pacific island chain would be rendered precarious. But the policies the administration crafted to stem this feared wave of communist takeover carried the risk of losing the people the USA was trying to save. They included strengthening propaganda and cultural activities, supplying aid and technical assistance to support non-communist regimes, engaging in covert operations, encouraging overseas Chinese communities to “organise and activate anti-communist” fronts, and bolstering a “spirit of resistance” among regional governments.17 _{They would have direct} consequences for Indonesia throughout the Sukarno years.

Despite the massive flow of US funding, materiel and technical assistance, the French position in Tonkin proved untenable. Accords signed in Geneva in July 1954 temporarily demarcated Vietnam along the 17th parallel and allowed France to exit. But the peace required the unpalatable acceptance for the USA of communist control of the north and sowed the seeds for future US intervention. As the inevitable French defeat loomed in Vietnam, Dwight D. Eisenhower, elected to the presidency in 1952, drew a fateful line on the map. In a seminal public comment on the American strategic rationale in East Asia, Eisenhower warned a press conference on 7 April 1954 that further losses to communism in Indochina would create a “falling domino”.18 To Winston Churchill, three days earlier, he wrote: “It is difficult to see

15 _{Ibid., p. 522.}

16 _{Ibid., p. 523. The fears of communism sweeping across Southeast Asia were compounded by the rise}

of a communist insurgency in Malaya. The Malayan Emergency was waged between mid 1948 and 1960. See, R.W. Komer, “The Malayan Emergency in Retrospect: Organisation of a Successful Counterinsurgency Effort”, Advanced Research Projects Agency, R-957, Santa Monica, CA: Rand (1972).

17 _{NSC 124/2, “United States Objectives”, op. cit.., pp. 526-527.}

how Thailand, Burma and Indonesia could be kept out of Communist hands” if Indochina were lost.19

The perceived gravity of the situation led the USA to contemplate measures that had previously been considered too hard or undesirable, including the creation of a collective security arrangement in Southeast Asia and the commitment of substantial ground forces in the region’s defence. It invested considerable energy in negotiating the Southeast Asia Collective Defence Treaty, which eight states signed in Manila on 8 September 1954.20 Yet the founders of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) included only two Southeast Asian states – the Philippines and Thailand. Burma and Indonesia, the other sovereign states in the region, clung to neutralism and branded SEATO neo-colonialist. It underscored the American dilemma as it tried to resist communism. The establishment of independent, democratic governments was seen as a vital component of resistance. But the USA supposed it needed the support of the fading colonial powers in SEATO to avoid communist China sweeping into Vietnam and onwards through Southeast Asia.

The irony of American anxiety over communism in Southeast Asia was that the region was not a great priority for the Soviet Union until at least the second half of the 1950s, and China lacked the offensive power to act as anything more than an ideological beacon for indigenous communist movements. Certainly, neither the Soviet Union nor China valued the conquest of communism in the region enough to risk provoking war, contrary to US fears.21

If Southeast Asia as a whole was a low priority for the Soviet Union, Indonesia in its early independence period barely registered. “During my many years of interaction with Stalin, I don’t remember a single conversation about Indonesia, not even one reference to it,” Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev recalled in his memoirs.22 Under Stalin, the strategy originally had been to “provoke communist uprisings” in the Third World.23 But several failures, including the collapse of a communist rebellion in Indonesia in 1948, prompted a reassessment of the viability of violent confrontation. When Khrushchev assumed the leadership after the death of

19 _{Peter Boyle, The Churchill Eisenhower Correspondence, 1953-1955, University of North Carolina}

Press (1990), p. 136.

20 _{The parties to the Manila Pact included the USA, Great Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, the}

Philippines, Thailand and Pakistan.

21 _{“Discussion between N.S. Khrushchev and Mao Zedong”, 2 October 1959, Wilson Center Digital}

Archive, accessed at http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/112088. See also, Leszek Buszynski, Soviet Foreign Policy and Southeast Asia, London: Croom Helm (1986), p. 1.

22 _{Sergei Khrushchev (ed.), Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, Vol. 3, Statesman, 1953-1964, Pennsylvania}

University State Press (2007), p. 785. Khrushchev’s official titles were First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Chairman of the Council of Ministers.

Stalin in 1953, he confirmed a trend already in motion to a less doctrinaire interpretation of the two-camp thesis. Khrushchev recalled it was not until 1955 that Indonesia was first discussed at the level of the Central Committee Presidium.24 This coincided with a conference of Asian and African states in the West Java mountain city of Bandung.25

Soon after, a rift emerged between the Soviet Union and China over Khrushchev’s conduct of the CPSU’s twentieth party congress in 1956. In his official report to the party, Khrushchev proclaimed a desire for “cooperation” with Western social-democrats and “friendship” with the USA in the interests of preventing war.26 _{Then, in secret session,} Khrushchev launched an extraordinary attack on the “cult” of personality that had enveloped