Conflict and Confrontation in South East Asia, 1961–1965 Britain, the United States, Indonesia and the Creation of Malaysia

In the early 1960s, Britain and the United States were still trying to come to terms with the powerful forces of indigenous nationalism unleashed by the Second World War. The Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation - a crisis which was, as Macmillan remarked to Kennedy, 'as dangerous a situation in Southeast Asia as we have seen since the war' - was a complex test of Anglo-American relations. As American commitment to Vietnam accelerated under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Britain was involving herself in an 'end-of-empire' exercise in state-building which had important military and political implications for both nations. In this book Matthew Jones provides a detailed insight into the origins, outbreak and development of this important episode in international history; using a large range of previously unavailable archival sources, he illuminates the formation of the Malaysian federation, Indonesia's violent opposition to the state and the Western Powers' attempts to deal with the resulting conflict.

List of maps; Preface and acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Introduction: Britain, the United States and the South East Asia setting; Part I. Build-up: 1. The Kennedy Administration, Indonesia and the resolution of the West Irian crisis, 1961–2; 2. The Greater Malaysia scheme I: the move toward merger; 3. The Greater Malaysia scheme II: the Cobbold Commission and the Borneo territories; 4. Britain, Indonesia and Malaya: from West Irian to the Brunei revolt; Part II. Outbreak: 5. The emergence of confrontation, January–May 1963; 6. The path to the Manila Summit, May–July 1963; 7. From the Manila Summit to the creation of Malaysia, August–September 1963; 8. Avoiding escalation, September–December 1963; Part III. Denouement: 9. The diplomacy of confrontation, Anglo-American relations and the Vietnam War, January–June 1964; 10. Escalation, upheaval and reappraisal, July 1964–October 1965; Conclusion: the Western presence in South East Asia by the 1960s; Bibliography; Index.