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Edward Aspinall, Bradley R. Simpson. Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 2008. Pp. viii, 367. $60.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Pages 860–861, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.860
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In this important book Bradley R. Simpson charts efforts by the United States to mold the course of events in one of the key arenas of the Cold War, but also one that has been most neglected in scholarly analysis. During the early and mid-1960s, U.S. policy makers viewed Indonesia as being at least as important as Vietnam to their attempt to contain the global spread of communism. Indonesia's Communist Party was rapidly expanding in size and influence, the country was confronting colonial powers in West New Guinea and Malaysia, and the Indonesian president, Sukarno, was pursuing an increasingly leftist posture both at home and abroad. At the same time, this was “one of the few countries in the world where U.S. and Soviet officials competed directly for influence with military, economic, and technical assistance” (p. 9).
Drawing mostly on newly declassified archival material, Simpson examines changes in U.S. policy toward Indonesia during this period and illuminates in striking detail the internal debates among foreign policy and security planners—and the intellectuals who advised them—as they struggled for influence among Indonesian civilian technocrats and military officers and became increasingly desperate about the country's leftward course. Despite the sometimes bitter debates among U.S. policy makers about tactics, they shared a “long-range developmental vision” that “held out for Indonesia a military-dominated, development-oriented regime integrated into the regional economy and bound to multilateral institutions” (p. 5).
