| Abstract: | Abstract“Indonesia is] endowed … with what is probably the most strategically authoritative geographic location on earth …” So wrote Lawrence Griswold in Sea Power, the official journal of the Navy League of the United States in 1973. A nation so located, and with 130 million people, some of the world's richest deposits of oil, tin, bauxite, rubber, forestry reserves, and many other natural resources, is surely a place of major concern to the imperialist powers at a time when their empires are so rapidly shrinking. Particularly for the U.S. since the victory of the Vietnamese revolution, the vast resources and critical location at the juncture of the Pacific and Indian Oceans have likely made Indonesia, along with Iran and Brazil, a major lynchpin “of a new pro-U.S. constellation of power in the Third World.” There was no slip of the tongue when Richard M. Nixon referred to Indonesia as the “greatest prize in the Southeast Asian area.” Earlier some commentators had suggested plausibly that the massive American war effort in Vietnam after 1965 was linked intimately with the successful right-wing military takeover in October of that year in Indonesia, a takeover followed by one of the largest massacres in modern times and the establishment of a military dictatorship which has ruled the country for more than 11 years. During those years, the natural resources and large potential supply of cheap labor have motivated several multinational corporations to invest in Indonesia, and the profits from their operations have flowed to Japan, West Germany, and the U.S. |
