Indonesia, explained.
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto at the Elysee Presidential Palace in Paris, France, 14 April 2026 (Mustafa Yalcin/Anadolu via Getty Images)
After a week hedging in all directions, the limits on Prabowo’s approach are becoming clear.
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Indonesia can’t keep rowing between reefsIndonesia can’t keep rowing between reefs
On 13 April, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto spent five hours with Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin discussing energy cooperation and oil purchases. On the same day, his Defence Minister Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin signed a “Major Defence Cooperation Partnership” (MDCP) with US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon. The following morning, Prabowo was at the Élysée Palace in Paris, embracing Emmanuel Macron before a tête-à-tête on bilateral ties and global dynamics.
Moscow, Washington, Paris in 36 hours. The standard reading of this frenzy is admiring. Indonesia is hedging. Prabowo is playing all sides. Jakarta’s “free and active” doctrine is alive and thriving.
But this reading, while not entirely wrong, is too comfortable. This last week actually revealed something less reassuring – that the conditions enabling Indonesia’s multi-directional diplomacy are becoming precisely the conditions that make it unsustainable.
Each leg of Prabowo’s week had a clear material rationale.
The Moscow visit was driven by the ongoing disruption to energy markets caused by the war against Iran and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Indonesia, a net energy importer with limited fiscal space, needed alternative supply. Prabowo said it plainly, that he was travelling to secure oil. The outcome included negotiations for Russian crude oil and LPG purchases, alongside longer-term energy cooperation.
Prabowo Subianto this week with Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin (@prabowo/X)
The Pentagon deal was equally concrete. The MDCP formalises defence ties across three pillars – military modernisation, professional training, and operational exercises – building on more than 170 joint drills already conducted annually. For Jakarta, this means access to advanced capabilities in maritime, subsurface and autonomous systems. For Washington, it deepens Indonesia’s integration into the Indo-Pacific security architecture without requiring permanent basing.
And Paris offered both diplomatic visibility and substantive engagement on defence procurement, energy transition and Indonesia’s positioning on the Iran conflict.
Taken separately, each move is rational. Taken together, they form a pattern that is increasingly difficult to maintain with coherence.
The hedging is real. But the autonomy it supposedly represents is thinner than it appears.
The clearest evidence of this is the controversy that erupted in parallel with the MDCP signing. A leaked classified US document titled “Operationalising U.S. Overflight” revealed that Washington had proposed blanket access for American military aircraft through Indonesian airspace, a move that would place Indonesia alongside Australia, Japan, and the Philippines in the US military mobility network across the Indo-Pacific. Prabowo reportedly approved this in principle during his February meeting with Donald Trump.
But Indonesia’s Foreign Ministry sent an urgent and confidential letter to the Defence Ministry in early April, warning that such access risked creating the perception that Jakarta was entering an alliance, and, more critically, would make Indonesia “a potential target in a regional conflict situation”. The letter also noted 18 instances of US military surveillance flights over the South China Sea between 2024 and 2025 that had gone unanswered despite Indonesian protests.
This is not bureaucratic friction but a tension within the Indonesian state about what “free and active” actually means in practice when the choices become harder. The Defence Ministry sees deeper US ties as modernisation and deterrence. The Foreign Ministry sees them as entanglement and risk. Both are right, which is precisely the problem.
The deeper issue is that Indonesia’s hedging strategy works best when great power competition remains at a low boil, when Jakarta can take from all sides without any side demanding exclusivity. But that is not the current environment. The Iran war has weaponised energy chokepoints. US-China tensions over the South China Sea are intensifying. Washington is building an increasingly interconnected basing and overflight network, and Beijing will read any Indonesian participation in that network as a signal, regardless of Jakarta’s non-aligned rhetoric.
In this context, the celebrated metaphor of “rowing between two reefs” begins to look less like autonomy in decision-making and more like a description of a structural constraint. Indonesia hedges not primarily because it wants to, but because its position in the global political economy – too large to be ignored, too dependent to dictate terms, too exposed to energy shocks to refuse any supplier – leaves it with no other option. The hedging is real. But the autonomy it supposedly represents is thinner than it appears.
Prabowo’s week was impressive as diplomacy. Three capitals, three major powers, three concrete outcomes. But what happens when the cost of maintaining equidistance begins to exceed the cost of choosing? When Moscow expects energy ties to carry strategic weight? When Washington expects the MDCP to translate into operational access? When Beijing watches both and recalibrates its own approach to the Natunas?
Indonesia’s foreign policy establishment is clearly aware of these tensions, the Foreign Ministry’s letter proves as much. The real test is whether awareness translates into a deliberative process capable of setting limits before they are set from the outside. Because in an international order where chokepoints are closing and alignment pressures rising, the space for rowing between reefs does not expand indefinitely. At some point, the reefs move closer.
About the author
Aniello Iannone
Aniello Iannone is a lecturer in Indonesian and Southeast Asian Politics at the Department of Political Science and Government at Diponegoro University.
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