Sukarno annexes East Timor in 1960s

Why on earth were we listening to the yanks for foreign policy related to our region of the world. Menzies should have told him to get stuffed.

The United States ironically "helped" the relatively anti-west Indonesia's Sukarno (or at the end turned up to be anti-west) on at least two occasions, both at the expense of the Netherlands, a western ally. First, the United States pressured the Dutch to leave Indonesia during national revolution. Second, the United States pressured the Dutch again in the 60's to hand over West New Guinea to Indonesia. The former one is quite understandable since the Americans were big on "decolonization". The later one, on the other hand, always baffled me to no end. Yes at the end Sukarno's regime was toppled and replaced by a pro-west one. But at the time of West New Guinea conflict, Indonesia under Sukarno was anti-west.

probably, If done in conjunction with them or someone close in the region I think we could get it done.

To be honest, propaganda aside, I strongly suspect that, despite military posturing on Indonesia's part on the last few years, I really doubt the real combat readiness on Indonesia's part. Take a look on Indonesian language wikipedia's entry of KRI Irian (Sverdlov class cruiser that Indonesia bought) for example. Its not a very reliable source, but it mentioned some very interesting detail, such as KRI Irian broken down in less than a year after it entered service within Indonesian navy and must be send back to Vladivostok for repairing, A destroyer broken down, one submarine's diesel engine broken down because of "hydraulic impact" during surfacing, and "Many equipments" can't functioned properly because of the hot and humid climate. alongside climate, all of this happened because of Indonesia's inexperience on operating such a large and expensive fleet, as Indonesian navy never had such a large fleet before, and resorted to "trial and error" to operate them.

And this is all before we take into account the constant infighting inside Indonesian military and politics that happened during the 60's, and the 100++ percent inflation per annum since early 1960s (it even reach 500 percent per annum in early 1965 and 650 percent in late 1965).

after all, the ability to slaughter more than 500.000 unarmed civilians does not equal combat readiness, but that's a different story, of course.
 
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