Soeharto’s Cold War: Promoting National Resilience in Island Southeast Asia

This paper—based upon never-before-seen documents from the archives of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore—examines the Indonesian New Order regime’s efforts to promote authoritarianism in island Southeast Asia from 1966-1979. It emphasizes the New Order’s security doctrine of ketahanan nasional, or national resilience, which gave rise to an array of novel institutional and ideological formations in Indonesia: a developmentalist government party, a stepwise development program drafted by technocrats, a military whose responsibilities included the preservation of domestic order, a security program that emphasized the mobilization of the citizenry, and an official state ideology interpreted to minimize political contention. Soeharto and his lieutenants nursed concerns about the ability of other Southeast Asian countries to defend themselves against communism, and they therefore evangelized the national resilience doctrine, encouraging other leaders to adopt the methods that secured Soeharto’s authority in Indonesia. This paper traces how the national resilience doctrine percolated through Southeast Asia, via channels as diverse as diplomatic meetings, military exchanges, regional publications, and international organizations. It then charts how, when other Southeast Asian leaders, notably Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and Tunku Abdul Rahman of Malaysia, faced endogenous political shocks that challenged their democratically elected governments, they adopted the Indonesian model to construct and consolidate newly authoritarian regimes. The result was nothing less than the “New Orderization” of island Southeast Asia, a convergence toward Soeharto regime-style institutions and ideologies of authoritarian rule. This paper therefore makes the argument that authoritarianism is best understood as an international and transnational construct.