On December 1, 1945, the US ambassador in The Hague, China specialist Stanley K.Hornbeck,sent a confidential telegram addressed to President Truman and the US Secretary of State, James Byrnes. In his lengthy cable,Hornbeck speculated about the ways in which developments in the Netherlands East Indies might negatively affect America's interests. He thought that if Dutch political influence in the region were to become even more “tenuous” or vanish altogether, and if there was not an “adequately compensating substitution” of either British or American political power, then a political vacuum might very well emerge.Such a void, in turn, could easily invite an influx of political forces from a variety of “other quarters.” Hornbeck predicted that these new political incursions would emanate from an Eastern rather than a Western corner of the world – he mentioned the possibility of both China and Japan, in this context – but it was far from inconceivable, he added, that there might also be a “Soviet contribution.”

Hornbeck proceeded to paint a gloomy picture of a bifurcated world community in the near future. He divided the globe into two hostile blocks, thus anticipating Winston Churchill's “Sinews of Peace” speech in Fulton, Missouri, when he coined the phrase “iron curtain.” In his address at Westminster College on March 5,1946,where he received an honorary degree,Churchill concluded that the wartime anti-Hitler coalition forged between the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union had irrevocably fallen apart; he proposed that in the future, a rigid barrier would separate the democratic West from the Sovietdominated world.Three months earlier, Hornbeck imagined a similar ironclad divide between an alliance of white-skinned “people of the occident, together with those ‘colored’peoples in various parts of the world who remain under their influence and partake in their ways of thinking.”In the opposing camp,he placed all the defiant indigenous populations striving to be delivered from the command of “the ‘white’ and occidental peoples who entertain and commit to concepts contrary thereto…”

If the world were to split apart into two feuding coalitions, Hornbeck made the forecast that Soviet infiltration into Southeast Asia would figure on a par with the renewed evil that either Japan or China might perpetrate.