How ASB is it for De Geer to move to the Dutch East Indies and establish another Dutch government-in-exile?
I can’t really speak with authority on naval deployments in South East Asia at the time but I will say that this premise severely overestimates the infrastructural power Europeans had in their Asian colonies. The Dutch administrators simply settled as an extra layer of authority on top of existing Javanese power structures. Dutch rule was no way as salient or intrusive as the British rule across the Straits of Malacca and it was maintained more by compromise with local elites than with military force. This is why most European garrisons in Asia were little more than colonial police, the Dutch even more so.
The idea that a European power could set up a government-in-exile in one of their Asian colonies, whether British, Dutch or French, is completely ASB because their social, political and cultural footprint was so tiny, notwithstanding their complete control over the economy. Singapore experienced one of the most long-lasting and profound European influence in South East Asia but up until 1941 none of its inhabitants, bar a tiny clique of Straits Chinese businessmen, remotely identified with the British state. If Britain had fallen to the unspeakable sea mammal, the government and royal family would evacuate to Canada or one of their several “settler colonies”, not to somewhere like India or Singapore. After the loss of South Africa, the Dutch had no settler colonies, the Dutch East Indies was very much a commercial enterprise that had minimal affiliation with the Dutch state.
I hope I’m not being presumptuous here but I find that some posters have this notion that non-white colonials would automatically acquiesce to continued or even deepened rule by our imperial masters with absolutely no social or political repercussions. I’m not exactly sure what the historical evidence for this is. Even Lee Kuan Yew, with his pragmatism regarding Western military presence in South East Asia, certainly did not want the British to stay for a minute longer than they had to.