At the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961, the United States Ambassador to Indonesia, supported by the White House National Security Council, proposed a seven-point plan "to prevent Indonesia from falling under communist control and to win it over to the west", which included promising Indonesia reunion with West New Guinea. The Government's Bureau of European Affairs, Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk opposed the plan, both because of hostility towards the Indonesian President Sukarno, who had collaborated with the Japanese, and support for the Netherlands, a NATO ally. The Dutch position argued that the native Papuan people were racially different from Indonesia, that incorporation into Indonesia would be "substitution of brown colonialism for white colonialism", and that the "backward" Papuans were not ready for independence; while the Indonesian position argued that Indonesia was already ethnically diverse, that Indonesia wanted to reunite territories separated by colonialism, and that Dutch arguments about democracy were "a trick" to create "at the doorstep of Indonesia a puppet state... under Dutch tutelage".