Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and Glossary
- Introduction
- Chapter One American Foreign Policy and the End of Dutch Colonial Rule in Southeast Asia: An Overview
- Chapter Two “It’s 1776 in Indonesia”
- Chapter Three The United States and the Dutch East Indies: the Celebration of Capitalism in West and East during the 1920’s
- Chapter Four American Visions of Colonial Indonesia from the Great Depression to the Growing Fear of Japan,1930-1938
- Chapter Five The Specter of Japan and America’s Recognition of the Indonesian Archipelago’s Strategic Importance,1938-1945
- Chapter Six The Politics of Independence in the Republik Indonesia and International Reactions,1945-1949
- Chapter Seven The Emerging Cold War and American Perspectives on Decolonization in Southeast Asia in the Postwar Era
- Chapter Eight Indonesia’s Struggle for Independence and the Outside World: England, Australia, and the United States in Search of a Peaceful Solution
- Chapter Nine Armed Conflict,the United Nations’Good Offices Committee, and the Renville Agreement: America’s Involvement in Trying to Reach a Settlement
- Chapter Ten Soviet Strategies in Southeast Asia and Indonesian Politics:US Foreign Policy Adrift during the Course of 1948
- Chapter Eleven Rescuing the Republic’s Moderates from Soviet Communism: Washington’s Conversion to Unequivocal Support of Indonesia’s Independence
- Epilogue
- Archival Sources and Selective Bibliography
- Sources of Illustrations
- Notes
- Index
Chapter Seven - The Emerging Cold War and American Perspectives on Decolonization in Southeast Asia in the Postwar Era
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and Glossary
- Introduction
- Chapter One American Foreign Policy and the End of Dutch Colonial Rule in Southeast Asia: An Overview
- Chapter Two “It’s 1776 in Indonesia”
- Chapter Three The United States and the Dutch East Indies: the Celebration of Capitalism in West and East during the 1920’s
- Chapter Four American Visions of Colonial Indonesia from the Great Depression to the Growing Fear of Japan,1930-1938
- Chapter Five The Specter of Japan and America’s Recognition of the Indonesian Archipelago’s Strategic Importance,1938-1945
- Chapter Six The Politics of Independence in the Republik Indonesia and International Reactions,1945-1949
- Chapter Seven The Emerging Cold War and American Perspectives on Decolonization in Southeast Asia in the Postwar Era
- Chapter Eight Indonesia’s Struggle for Independence and the Outside World: England, Australia, and the United States in Search of a Peaceful Solution
- Chapter Nine Armed Conflict,the United Nations’Good Offices Committee, and the Renville Agreement: America’s Involvement in Trying to Reach a Settlement
- Chapter Ten Soviet Strategies in Southeast Asia and Indonesian Politics:US Foreign Policy Adrift during the Course of 1948
- Chapter Eleven Rescuing the Republic’s Moderates from Soviet Communism: Washington’s Conversion to Unequivocal Support of Indonesia’s Independence
- Epilogue
- Archival Sources and Selective Bibliography
- Sources of Illustrations
- Notes
- Index
Summary
On December 1, 1945, the US ambassador in The Hague, China specialist Stanley K.Hornbeck,sent a confidential telegram addressed to President Truman and the US Secretary of State, James Byrnes. In his lengthy cable,Hornbeck speculated about the ways in which developments in the Netherlands East Indies might negatively affect America's interests. He thought that if Dutch political influence in the region were to become even more “tenuous” or vanish altogether, and if there was not an “adequately compensating substitution” of either British or American political power, then a political vacuum might very well emerge.Such a void, in turn, could easily invite an influx of political forces from a variety of “other quarters.” Hornbeck predicted that these new political incursions would emanate from an Eastern rather than a Western corner of the world – he mentioned the possibility of both China and Japan, in this context – but it was far from inconceivable, he added, that there might also be a “Soviet contribution.”
Hornbeck proceeded to paint a gloomy picture of a bifurcated world community in the near future. He divided the globe into two hostile blocks, thus anticipating Winston Churchill's “Sinews of Peace” speech in Fulton, Missouri, when he coined the phrase “iron curtain.” In his address at Westminster College on March 5,1946,where he received an honorary degree,Churchill concluded that the wartime anti-Hitler coalition forged between the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union had irrevocably fallen apart; he proposed that in the future, a rigid barrier would separate the democratic West from the Sovietdominated world.Three months earlier, Hornbeck imagined a similar ironclad divide between an alliance of white-skinned “people of the occident, together with those ‘colored’peoples in various parts of the world who remain under their influence and partake in their ways of thinking.”In the opposing camp,he placed all the defiant indigenous populations striving to be delivered from the command of “the ‘white’ and occidental peoples who entertain and commit to concepts contrary thereto…”
If the world were to split apart into two feuding coalitions, Hornbeck made the forecast that Soviet infiltration into Southeast Asia would figure on a par with the renewed evil that either Japan or China might perpetrate.
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- American Visions of the Netherlands East Indies/IndonesiaUS Foreign Policy and Indonesian Nationalism 1920–1949, pp. 142 - 164Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2002