Indonesia's Response to Changing Big Power Alignments

Abstract

I NDONESIA, like other Asian Third World States, has been confronted with many new problems arising from the rapidly changing policies of, and relations between the major powers.* These shifts, essentially representing a transformation of the international system, began in i969 and have accelerated since i971. They began with the receding of China's Cultural Revolution in i968-69 (marked by the Chinese Communist Party's Ninth Congress in April i969) and a return to a more active and moderate foreign policy on Peking's part. The border clashes of i969 brought Sino-Soviet relations to a new nadir and soon led to intensified competition in Southeast Asia and elsewhere between these two powers. During the same period, the role of the United States in Asia was being drastically revised: both the gradual de-escalation in Vietnam and the announcement of the Nixon Doctrine seemed to indicate a significantly lowered American posture in the area. In perhaps the most far-reaching of all the changes, there emerged a rapprochement between the U. S. and China, dramatically altering a twenty-year hostile relationship. Along with this came a substantial warming-especially in the areas of strategic arms limitations and trade-in U. S.-Soviet relations as well. Finally, predating the period under consideration but accelerating during it, was the fact of Japan's increasing role as an aspiring regional (if not global) power. This article examines how and how far Indonesia has responded to these changes. Like other lesser powers, Indonesia has had to assess the meaning of these complex and still ongoing realignments for the protection and advancement of its own interests. This is not to say that Indonesian foreign policy has simply reacted to external variables; indeed, a major theme of the article is that the alterations in Indonesia's foreign policy as a response to these changes have been within the framework of domestic, political and economic forces, and that the internal issues have had primacy. Moreover, such alterations as have occurred have been carried out in a most Javanese manner, with extreme caution, indirection, and subtlety. One is struck by the analogy between the contemporary foreign policy