“Curiously enough,” George F. Kennan told US Secretary of State, George C. Marshall, on December 17, 1948,“the most crucial issue at the moment in our struggle with the Kremlin is probably the problem of Indonesia.”A friendly and independent Indonesia, the powerful director of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department informed Marshall,was vital to US security interests in Asia. Kennan emphasized that America's dilemma in mid-December 1948, was not merely the question of whether the Netherlands or the Indonesian Republic should govern the region and thus control the rich agricultural and mineral resources of the archipelago. Instead, the real issue boiled down to either “Republican sovereignty or chaos,”and he reminded the Secretary of State that it should be obvious that chaos functioned as “an open door to communism.”

In his counsel to President Truman and Secretary Marshall before December 1948, George Kennan had given precedence to the European arena as far as America's confrontation with the Soviet Union was concerned. Until then, he had only sporadically focused his intellectual attention on the nationalist movements in South or Southeast Asia. In fact, due to the political views of his senior foreign policy advisers, among whom Kennan's opinion weighed heavily, Harry Truman considered the anti-colonial upheavals in Asia to be an annoying little “sideshow.” In the immediate post-war years,Kennan and his colleagues on the Policy Planning Staff found it difficult to fathom that political developments in these distant colonial outposts could jeopardize America's preeminence in the world. In some instances,Kennan even displayed a condescending “disregard for the weak and less developed world.” America's showdown with the Soviet Union, he asserted in July 1947,would play itself out primarily in the European Theater, where the dangerous stream of communism threatened to inundate “every nook and cranny… in the basin of world power,”to cite one of the ingenious metaphors he crafted in his essay on “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” His insistence on a US containment policy designed to curb Soviet political machinations in Western Europe earned him the critical designation of “sorcerer's apprentice.” As Kennan personally remembered, it also reduced him on occasion to the role of “court jester” and “intellectual gadfly” within the State Department.