Rethinking “Cold” Diplomacy

This article reinterprets Indonesia–Soviet relations (1966–1991) through a discourse-historical lens, examining how the Suharto regime linguistically constructed its foreign policy during the Cold War. Rather than treating “cold” diplomacy as a mere empirical condition, the study reads it as a historically produced way of seeing, enacted through six presidential speeches delivered at the receptions of Soviet ambassadors between 1969 and 1990. Integrating Ruth Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) with Mariana Imaz-Sheinbaum’s theory of historical aspects, the analysis reveals how language functioned as both archive and agent of history, stabilizing the moral-technocratic ideology that defined the New Order’s international persona. Through systematic application of DHA’s five discursive strategies—nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivation, and mitigation—the study traces how Suharto’s rhetoric shifted from cautious post-rupture normalization in 1969 to confident moral-technocratic diplomacy by 1984 and teleological accommodation by 1990. It uncovers the rhetorical strategies, intertextual continuities, and ideological tensions through which Suharto transformed suspicion into moral pragmatism and sovereignty into developmental diplomacy. By demonstrating how historical meaning is linguistically organized, the article contributes to an aspectual historiography of diplomatic language and to broader debates on the epistemology of applied historical interpretation.