A Theoretical And Practical Analysis Of The U.S.-Indonesia Relations In The Post-cold War Era

Will the U.S. always show a hostile attitude towards and even overthrow all the non-western dictatorships as it just did to Saddam's regime? Under numerous and complicated phenomena, do U.S. policies toward non-western countries and even all the countries operate on the same principle so as to offer us some regularity? The former Suharto regime of Indonesia was a dictatorship, and Indonesia's human rights records remains bad (as that in the East Timor issue), but the U.S.-Indonesia relations has kept comparatively stable and friendly in principle. Why the U.S. implements completely different policies toward Iraq and Indonesia, though both of these two countries had kept bad human rights records? Does this mean there is no rule to follow in the U.S. foreign policy-making process? And the author's inspiration for this dissertation is just out of the above questions.This dissertation is focused on the exploration of the preference of interests, basis of policy-making and rules of operation in the development and maintenance of U.S.-Indonesia relations. The train of thought and research methods are as follows: General theoretical analysis is presented first, initiating the analysis from the very basic theories of International Relations, and the author reviews the various interests types given priority by different schools. Then, the author makes a specific study on the levels of all these preferred interests and set the sequential order of their influences in the U.S. foreign policy-making process, from which the hypothesis of U.S.-Indonesia relations is deduced. The principle of U.S.-Indonesia relations' general stability and maintenance is that they both do not malice each other and even they can satisfy one and another's security interests as a precondition. On the basis of mutual understanding in the domain of security, they establish close economic relations for mutual benefits, which serves as a strong tie in their bilateral relations and further eases the tension of conflicts and discords owing to the differences of human rights levels and ideologies.In the following part of practical analysis, the author examined the rationality of the hypothesis with cases in U.S.-Indonesia relations, and for further applicability, he also examined it with cases in U.S.-Iraq relations.