Indonesia: Caught in the Great Game

The article interestingly mentioned the Soviet relationship with the Sukarno government but neglects to mention the US role in his overthrow, the anti-communist genocide and the thirty-plus year military dictatorship of Suharto.... a rule wholly supported and in no small part sustained by Washington.

During the 1990's the Western relationship with Suharto began to collapse. This was due in part to the end of the Cold War and what I have often termed as the period of re-calibration. Old allies were in many cases dispensed with and a new order was being imposed.* The US turned on Jakarta when it came to East Timor and eventually Suharto was forced out of office.

And yet Indonesia did not accept the terms of what I have called re-calibration and remained somewhat hostile to Washington. In the wake of 9/11 the US began to make overtures to Jakarta and through the State Department and Pentagon sought to re-establish the old alliance.

But Washington isn't trusted and the Jakarta government continues to vacillate. There's no Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) at present but as the new Cold War develops and the world is separated into blocs, perhaps the occasion will arise.

In the meantime you can be sure Moscow will not stay silent or passive. Indonesia is 'up for grabs' in terms of great power politics and whether Jakarta becomes an ally of Moscow is almost irrelevant. What both Moscow and Beijing don't want to see is an unmitigated appropriation of Indonesia's resources to the Western Empire.

This was an interesting but largely disappointing article.

http://www.atimes.com/article/russia-raises-head-indonesia/

*Not the New World globalist Order feared by American Nationalists, but the New World Order of American Unipolarity in which the US would dominate the international system. That's what George HW Bush was talking about. What Right-wing groups decried as subversive and anti-American globalism was in fact something they should have celebrated... had they understood it.