On 16 September 1963 the postcolonial state of Malaya joined the British colonies of Singapore, North Borneo, and Sarawak to form Malaysia. It seemed Britain had created a friendly, stable postcolonial state, paving the way for regional military reductions. But the moment of triumph was marred by the knowledge that Sukarno's Indonesia was already “confronting” Malaysia. “Confrontation,” involving pinprick attacks and sustained diplomatic pressure, had won West Papua for Indonesia in 1962–63. Could it also scupper Britain's plans for a Dominion of Southeast Asia?

David Easter tells the resulting story of “Confrontation” from the perspective of British officials, with their interdepartmental debates on how far Britain's Claret raids could secretly patrol into Indonesia to counter Indonesian cross-border strikes, what percentage of the navy to commit, how to sail ships through the Indonesian archipelago without sparking full war, how to coax Australian and New Zealand involvement, and how to retain the American diplomatic support that the Dutch had so disastrously lost over West Papua.

What Easter does well is to meld the complicated layers of events and policy in London, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore. He moves in empirical, chronologically ordered chapters, starting with chapter 1 on the origins of Malaysia and ending with chapter 9 covering up to Confrontation's end in August 1966. He layers each chapter like a repeating Angel cake. He discusses events in Southeast Asia, switches to Whitehall debating the implications for defense policy, turns to relations with Washington, and so on. He repeats these cycles over and again. Anyone who wants a sense of the balancing acts and interdepartmental discussions would do well to start here. The downside is that secondary literature is scarcely debated, and the degree to which wider forces drove events (such as the United States deciding Sukarno was a Trojan horse for communism rather than a figure to be weaned from the left) takes a backseat.

He concludes that Confrontation's success was circumscribed. It cost Britain a lot and accelerated its withdrawal a little. That's tame for what Easter dubs Britain's forgotten war, involving over fifty thousand servicemen and culminating in the overthrow of Sukarno in October 1965. It is tame too for a policy that dumped “trusteeship” in order to propel Borneo tribesmen into a union they were unready for, so as to save Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew from his own radical left. One aches for officials to show more irony and life. But maybe that's the point. Sukarno's games were dangerous. He shredded Indonesia's economy, forced West Papuans into unwanted union, only to end up ousted in 1965 by the army, who then slaughtered five hundred thousand in Indonesia's 1965 “killing fields.” Here Easter becomes more interesting in tracing (in the book and separate articles) how Britain aided Indonesian regional rebels in 1958 and fought a secret war of propaganda, subversion, and raids during Confrontation, leading up to 1965. He is also right to conclude that intelligence helped calibrate British responses, such calibration being essential in a politico-military struggle of this kind.

We should retain skepticism about the efficacy of the murkier parts of the undercover world Easter documents, notably attempts to subvert Sukarno. Easter is balanced on these, which elsewhere are exaggerated by Greg Poulgrain in The Genesis of Konfrontasi: Malaya, Brunei, Indonesia, 1945–1965 (Bathurst: Crawford House, 1998). Easter does not make far-reaching claims for covert operations—often little more than a few weapons for a group or leafleting and black propaganda—though he does join others in showing British callousness. Britain and the United States encouraged anti-Communist and by association anti-Chinese sentiment before the 1965 massacres. Perhaps anti-Sukarno and Communist plotting was inevitable, and the massacres would have come anyway given political tensions in Indonesia. But Britain had no qualms about supporting General Suharto and the army generals afterward (156–73). The Cold War was still war, and authoritarian, antiliberal friends were still friends, if anti-Communist.

Easter sees Confrontation “victory” as due to diplomacy, intelligence, air mobility, and secret cross-border raids, but a Pyrrhic victory, accelerating British withdrawal. The case for the latter can be argued, but it was 1968 before a Labour government gave a 1971 date for final withdrawal, and then only after internal bickering, a pro-European faction's maneuvering (see Jeffrey Pickering, Britain's Withdrawal from East of Suez [Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998]; and Saki Dockrill, Britain's Retreat from East of Suez: The Choice between Europe and the World [Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002]), and balance-of-payments crises. Even then the next, pro-European, Conservative government delayed from 1971 to 1975 and kept a Five Power Defence Arrangement afterward. It would be equally easy to argue that Confrontation delayed withdrawal, and at a few pages the conclusion reflects the book's neglect of the analytical in favor of empirical, chronological, archival labor. To return to the flavor of the book, perhaps the very dullness of Easter's Whitehall mandarins was the key to success, as was the measured response on Borneo's borders. These were real games, well played by Special Air Service teams, helicopter crews, and officials and diplomats, balancing secret actions with overt deterrence in the form of V-bombers, aircraft carriers, and Bloodhound missiles. We forget this war precisely because of the style that won it, just as we remember Suez because of the style that lost it. Readers may also turn to diplomatic accounts in Matthew Jones, Conflict and Confrontation in South East Asia, 1961–1965: Britain, the United States, Indonesia, and the Creation of Malaysia (Cambridge University Press, 2002); or John Subritzky, Confronting Sukarno: British, American, Australian, and New Zealand Diplomacy (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000). These capture the diplomacy vital to “Confrontation.” For official policy on Malaysia, there are A. J. Stockwell's Malaysia (London: HM Stationery Office, 2004) and the companion volume by Louis and Ashton on policy east of Suez (William Roger Louis and S. R. Ashton, East of Suez and the Commonwealth, 1964–1971 [London: HM Stationery Office, 2004]). Easter also has ongoing work in “‘Keep the Indonesian pot boiling’: Western Covert Intervention in Indonesia, October 1965–March 1966” (Cold War History 5, no. 1 [February 2005]: 55–73). In short, David Easter adds a useful “official mind” picture of workings inside Whitehall and British Singapore to a valuable, but too little known, stream of writing on Confrontation.