The Impacts of Indonesia's Civil War and the US–Soviet Tug of War over Indonesia on Australia's Diplomacy Towards West New Guinea

Abstract

From 1958 onwards, the Amsterdam–Jakarta dispute on the determination of sovereignty over the western half of New Guinea began to be affected by the developments of Indonesia's civil war and the tug of war between the US and the Soviet Union over Indonesia. This paper explains how this influenced Australia's WNG diplomacy. P. Gifford, ‘The Cold War across Asia’, in David Goldsworthy (ed.), Facing North: a century of Australian engagement with Asia, Vol. I (Melbourne 2001), 213; and C. Penders, West New Guinea Debacle: Dutch decolonisation and Indonesia, 1945–1962 (Hawaii 2002), 316–26. It argues that the major impact of Indonesia's internal war and of the US–Russian tug of war was that they destroyed Australia's assumption that the Dutch would maintain its presence in the Pacific permanently. The second principal impact was that Indonesia's internal war and the Washington–Moscow tug of war urged Canberra to set another new objective in relation to the WNG dispute, and produced a new policy for the achievement of this objective. With the outbreak of an Indonesian–Dutch war over Netherlands New Guinea becoming a real possibility, Australia set the avoidance of the war and the prevention of Indonesia falling into the communist orbit as another new objective. In order to keep a war from occurring in the Southwest Pacific, Canberra developed a policy of appeasing Jakarta.