Indonesia’s free and active drift

Jakarta has no plan to explain how far to lean each side, leaving a gap others fill with their own story.

Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat

13 August 20264 min read

Indonesia calls its foreign policy “free and active”. The idea is simple: Indonesia does not join any bloc, does not pick a permanent side, and stays open and friendly with every major power on its own terms. This idea has served Indonesia well for decades.

But being free and active still needs to be accompanied by a plan, a sense of how far to go with one side before stopping to think about what the other side will think. Without that plan, free and active turns into something looser: leaning hard toward the United States and just as hard toward China at once, with no clear line telling either side, or Indonesia itself, when to stop. That is free and active without a strategy.

The unfolding story about what navy drills Indonesia might be about to undertake with China in waters near Taiwan shows this clearly.

China’s defence ministry has said (Opens in new window) its navy will train with an Indonesian ship in mid-August, in the ocean east of Taiwan. Taiwan’s government has answered fast. Its main office for China matters called the drill a “military provocation” and said Beijing wanted to make the world believe China controls those waters. A Taiwanese intelligence officer later told lawmakers (Opens in new window) the drill would not hurt Taiwan militarily, but it still mattered politically. Taiwan’s foreign ministry has asked Jakarta (Opens in new window) to explain why its ship is joining.

The Indonesian Navy has since answered, though only after Taiwan raised the question first. Indonesia said (Opens in new window) this was never a special exercise set up with China, but a routine passing exercise, known as Passex. The ship involved, the KRI I Gusti Ngurah Rai-332, was already sailing home after a separate exercise with the Russian Navy, ORRUDA 2026, held from 23 to 28 July in Vladivostok. A friendly stop with a foreign ship it happens to pass on the way home, the Navy said, is normal practice, one of several it can do along the route. A goodwill visit, not a combat drill, part of a long tradition of friendship between navies – and linked to Indonesia’s free and active policy, saying Indonesia is free to work with any country this way.

Indonesian Navy ship KRI I Gusti Ngurah Rai-332 had participated in the Russian Navy exercise ORRUDA 2026 (Elizabeth Grubbs/Wikimedia Commons)

That explanation may well be true, and a friendly stop on the way home is indeed a normal thing for any navy to do. But it still came after the fact, once Taiwan had already gone public and asked hard questions, not before. A country with a real plan would have thought through how a friendly stop with a Chinese ship, so close to Taiwan, might look to outside observers, and said so from the start.

The explanation only arrived once the story had already become a diplomatic problem.

The lean toward China is easy to see because Taiwan spoke up about it. The lean toward the United States is quieter, but may be just as strong. In February, Indonesia signed the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade (Opens in new window), known as the ART, with the United States. Indonesia agreed to remove tariffs on almost all US goods and to buy set amounts of American farm products every year. In return, the United States kept a 19% tariff on most Indonesian goods. Legal experts who studied the text (Opens in new window) found that Indonesia carries a firm duty more than 200 times in the text, while the United States carries one only nine times, a gap that shows how one-sided the deal is.

Put next to the navy stop with China, the trade deal with Washington shows the same pattern: a full lean toward one power, with no clear explanation of how it fits beside an equally full lean toward the other.

A country that walks into Washington and Beijing without its own plan does not stay neutral between them.

This pattern is bigger than one drill or one trade deal. Under President Prabowo Subianto, Jakarta has grown closer to the United States on defence (Opens in new window), most recently through talks with a visiting US defence official this same week, while also growing closer to China on investment, infrastructure money, and now naval contact, too. Neither move is wrong by itself. What is missing is anything that connects the two, a clear sense of how far each relationship should go and where Indonesia draws its own lines. Without that, other countries fill the gap with guesses of their own.

This is the real cost of engaging with everyone but planning with no one. Indonesia does not lose friends this way. It loses the power to explain itself. A country that walks into Washington and Beijing without its own plan does not stay neutral between them. It becomes a small piece of whichever story each side wants to tell.

China can point to the navy stop as proof a major Southeast Asian navy will work with it near Taiwan, whether or not Jakarta meant it that way. The United States can point to the trade deal as proof Indonesia will accept an unfair deal just to stay close to Washington. Indonesia ends up inside two stories at once, and writes neither of them.

None of this means Indonesia should stop being free and active. That habit has served the country well for a long time. What Indonesia needs is a plan behind it, a clear internal process that checks any military exercise or major deal against one question, how will this look to the other side, before the announcement goes out, not after. It also needs to speak up fast when questions come in, instead of letting silence hand the story to whoever asks first. Without that, Jakarta will keep finding itself in other countries’ headlines about its own choices.

About the author

Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat

Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat Director of China-Indonesia Desk at Center of Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS) in Jakarta.

Topics

Indonesia China United States Taiwan Defence & security