June 13, 2024
JAKARTA – When Prabowo Subianto takes over as Indonesia’s eighth president in October, we can look forward to a leader who is going to be much more active and engaged in foreign policy, one who will find the time and take the trouble to attend major international summits and conferences, and one who will travel the world over not only representing the country but also in pursuit of national interests through international engagements.
The man he replaces, Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, president since 2014, has been more focused on the domestic agenda and has shunned many international conferences. He never once attended the United Nations General Assembly, though he once addressed it online, and never traveled to Davos, Switzerland, for the annual World Economic Forum, a prestigious annual event that gives world leaders the chance to present their economic vision and policies. Jokowi failed to seize these opportunities to project himself as leader of an aspiring middle power.
Prabowo has been traveling around the world since after the Feb. 14 presidential election, starting even before his victory was confirmed by the General Elections Commission in May. Although he traveled in his capacity as Jokowi’s defense minister, he has been presented and welcomed in these foreign capitals as Indonesia’s president-elect. The host leaders were also able to get a sense of what Prabowo’s foreign policy would look like.
The host nations, and definitely their media, treated him as the incoming leader of the world’s fourth-largest nation whose international profile has been rising in the last 20 years, even during Jokowi’s reign.
Indonesia’s other international accolades as a middle power include the world’s third-largest democracy, the largest democracy among Muslim-majority countries, the largest economy in Southeast Asia, and a member of the Group of 20 (G20) of the world’s wealthiest nations, ranking 16th largest, but by most independent predictions, it is well on the way to becoming one of the top five by the middle of the century.
Former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) praised Prabowo for his active participation in international events and for paying attention to international relations even before the inauguration, describing his speech at the Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore this month as “strong and beautiful” for addressing international conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine.
“Pak Prabowo, ‘you are on the right track’ and you have become a ‘foreign policy president’. Good luck and carry on,” SBY posted on his X (formerly Twitter) account. SBY was also considered a foreign policy president during his tenure in 2004-2014 preceding Jokowi.
This is not to take away from the foreign policy achievements Jokowi made in the last 10 years. They include Indonesia’s chairmanship of the G20 in 2022 and of ASEAN last year, and many other Indonesian initiatives on Indo-Pacific and ASEAN, but these are thanks largely to the strong and effective support of the Foreign Ministry. Given Jokowi’s penchant for avoiding international travels and summits, Retno LP Marsudi, his foreign minister since 2014, has become the public face of Indonesia on the global stage.
In his first term in 2014-2019, Jokowi delegated the job of attending many of the conferences and summits to vice-president Jusuf Kalla, who traveled to the UN General Assembly several times. In the second term, Vice President Ma’ruf Amin has been even less familiar than him about foreign policy and he was never assigned to take his place at an international forum.
Vice president-elect Gibran Rakabuming Raka will be even less familiar with the complexities and intricacies of foreign policy, given his young age of 36. Gibran is going be more like his father Jokowi, focusing on domestic issues when he takes office.
Given his military background and education partly abroad, and his role as defense minister in the last five years, Prabowo should be far more familiar and ready to take on the challenges of foreign policy facing any incoming Indonesian president.
Prabowo may be the right choice for president for Indonesia compared with the other two candidates he beat in February, given the increasing challenges from the rapidly changing geopolitical landscape. Former Central Java governor Ganjar Pranowo would be more like Jokowi in focusing on domestic issues and former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan has not been exposed to foreign and defense policy challenges as much as Prabowo.
The change from Jokowi to Prabowo in October cannot come at a more opportune moment. With the escalating tensions between China and the United States, Indonesia needs a president who has a strong grasp of the geopolitical challenges facing the country.
One major change we expect from Prabowo is to shift the focus in foreign policy, from economic relations under Jokowi, to defense and security. Of all the people, the incoming president knows well how vulnerable our defense capability is in the event of foreign aggression or a war erupting in the Indo-Pacific region. Indonesia failed to build its military capability to meet the Minimum Essential Force (MEF), reaching only about 70 percent of the target set for the end of this year, under Jokowi’s watch.
We can expect a more nuanced change to Indonesia’s approach to the US-China rivalry while still adhering to its non-aligned principle. Non-alignment never meant equal distance but more in the spirit of “navigating between two coral reels”, leaning to one side or the other depending on national interests, but never aligning completely with one. During the previous Cold War, former president Sukarno leaned toward the Communist bloc while Soeharto later took Indonesia closer to the West.
With the emerging cold war, Indonesia is economically closer to China but when it comes to security and defense, it is leaning toward the US. The rapidly changing geopolitical landscape requires Indonesia to continuously adapt, and this includes preparing the country in the event of a war erupting in our region.
The challenge for Prabowo as president beginning in October is to strike the right balance between domestic issues on the one hand, and foreign and defense matters on the other.
While he can count on the support of the Foreign Ministry to do his bidding, as Jokowi has done in the last 10 years, if we go by his foreign policy activism in the last few months ahead of the inauguration, we can look forward to a more active, engaging and higher profile president on the international stage.