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The Western powers were confused. Their stands ranged from Australia's violent attack on the Dutch to mild censure from the British, to an embarrassed French claim that the Council was not competent to deal with the issue. No one (except Russia's Yakov Malik who had flown in from Berlin) felt happy sitting in judgment over the Dutch, a decent, democratic people and one of the firmest links in Western Europe's common anti-Communist front.
Malik, however, went to town. He attacked everyone—the Dutch for being imperialist, the U.S. and its friends for not being harsh enough with the Dutch, and the Indonesian Republic for being antiCommunist. (Two months ago Premier Hatta's government had put down a Communist-inspired revolt.)
Indonesian Representative Dr. L. N. Palar pleaded with the Council to take steps against the Dutch, who, he said, had perpetrated "a second Pearl Harbor." The Netherlands' case was presented by Jan Herman van Royen, an able Foreign Ministry official, and a Socialist. Said he: "The surprise is not that The Netherlands intervened, but that The Netherlands did not intervene much earlier."
Stripped of diplomatic niceties, the Dutch behind-the-scenes argument ran something like this: "The U.S. got its head out of the sand, took one horrified look at China, and thereupon tried expensively and unsuccessfully to defeat the Communists through Chiang Kaishek. Simply because that method failed does not mean either that you shouldn't try to defeat Communists or that you can't."
Dreadful Pattern. The gloom, doubt and condemnation that greeted the Dutch action was a sample of the West's confusion about its relationship with the "backward" peoples of Asia. In the mid-19th Century, nothing had seemed more certain to the West than the beneficence and high moral purpose of its imperial rule. By the early 20th Century, most right-thinking people in the West were certain that imperialism was oppressive, morally wrong—and probably a waste of money.
Partly because of native pressure and partly because of the trend toward self-sufficiency at home, Great Britain abandoned position after position in the Orient. The U.S. cut loose the Philippines. All the powers gave up their special rights in China. These progressive steps had unexpected results, and a dreadful pattern began to emerge in Asia. Westernization led to anti-Western nationalism which led to independence. Some independent Asiatic governments proved incapable of governing, and fell into chaos. Communist power rushed in to fill the vacuum. There was no reason to suppose that Indonesia would not follow the same pattern.
The U.S., not itself an empire, nevertheless had an enormous stake in the solution of the Asiatic crisis. Unless a new basis for relations between the "forward" and "backward" peoples could be found, the balance of world power in the next generation would be tipped against the coalition of free nations headed by the U.S. The old imperialism had been discarded. Independence was failing in more places than it was succeeding. The U.S. apparently had no ideas of a third formula.