Talk:Landing at Kesang River

Awkward sentence
"This was meant to signal his intent upon intensifying the ongoing confrontation with Malaysia by toeing the line of a powerful Anglo-Malaysian military response."

I do not understand the previous sentence. Did Sukarno intend to provoke or avoid a powerful response? It's not clear to me what is meant by "toeing the line". Please clarify. Thanks. Djmaschek (talk) 21:33, 4 March 2017 (UTC)


 * I'll change the sentence to something a little more intelligible, but the basic meaning was to 'be as aggressive as possible without provoking a British response.' Thank you for pointing this out, I used this figure of speech incorrectly. Indonesia, in this case, was attempting to see what they could get away with that still fell short of a British military response to try to A) Scare the Malaysians and B) put political pressure on Britain to act over a relatively small affair, causing a large amount of stress for a cabinet that had no intention of allowing the confrontation to escalate into an all-out war. I thought 'toeing the line' meant 'almost crossing over but not quite,' but I looked it up and my definition was incorrect. HerodotusTheFraud (talk) 17:35, 5 March 2017 (UTC)