As chair of ASEAN, 2023 is a wonderful opportunity for Indonesia to demonstrate its regional leadership and oppose the recent decline in the external credibility of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. After all, a year earlier, as president of the G20, Indonesia had demonstrated its diplomatic prowess. capabilities by persuading the leaders of the United States and China to attend the Bali summit in 2022 and issue a joint statement. This is despite fears that the G20 framework is dysfunctional against a backdrop of intensifying US-China strategic festival and conflicts of opinion. Thus, Indonesia’s good fortune has enhanced its reputation as a global diplomatic actor and raised hopes that Indonesia will play a similar role in Southeast Asia’s regional factors.
ASEAN has faced significant tensions within the bloc in recent years over the conclusion of a code of conduct in the South China Sea with China and relations with Myanmar after the 2021 military coup. Indonesia’s presidency in 2023 represented the most productive possibility in years to find a solution to these disorders without dividing ASEAN.
But ultimately, President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) will devote few political and diplomatic resources in 2023 to addressing ASEAN’s pressing concerns. The theme selected through Indonesia for the 43rd ASEAN Summit “ASEAN, Epicenter of Growth”. At the summit, Indonesia placed special emphasis on the leaders’ gala dinner, which in its staging seemed to take precedence even over summit meetings. Instead, this selection strengthened the optics of Indonesia’s leadership and “brand” of international relations as a unifying power, which was notably manifested in Indonesia’s diplomatic successes in 2022. Although it holds the presidency, Indonesia seems hesitant to engage in a more ambitious timetable. focused on addressing long-standing tensions and revitalizing ASEAN.
However, from a narrower threat control perspective, this might have been a sensible decision. If Jakarta felt that the ASEAN disorders were too difficult to plausibly resolve, then it made sense to highlight them at the summit. This would only publicize tensions, thus not only jeopardizing Indonesia’s hard-won recently hard-won external credibility, but may also harm ASEAN itself at a sensitive time. The threat of the right message “ASEAN doesn’t matter” can harm ASEAN, either politically and even economically in the long run.
As the United States and China abandon the concept of ASEAN’s centrality in their own policies in Southeast Asia and resort to more bilateral and unilateral approaches in the region, it is now up to ASEAN member states to maintain the group’s diplomatic value. As global governance becomes dysfunctional, ASEAN still potentially has a vital strategic role to play in maintaining regional peace and stability.
What was required of Indonesia in 2023 as the regional hegemon was therefore to ensure the ongoing commitment to ASEAN of Southeast Asian countries—all with diverse geopolitical interests—and to build confidence in the organization. That is what Jokowi did in April 2021, when, on behalf of the 2021 chair Brunei, Indonesia brought Min Aung Hlaing (commander-in-chief of Myanmar’s armed forces) to Jakarta for crisis talks following the February 2021 Myanmar military coup.
To better understand why Indonesia has not implemented an ambitious leadership timeline in 2023, we must also look at the role of politics and national interests, just as we do when we examine the foreign policy of the United States or China.
One of the defining characteristics of Jokowi’s tenure has been a focus on economic expansion, either to bolster his legitimacy or to build Jokowi’s political legacy. The most notable is Indonesia’s national expansion strategy, Visi Indonesia Emas 204five (Golden Vision of Indonesia 204five). In 2017, it identifies several economic goals that Indonesia will have to achieve by 2045, Indonesia’s centenary as an independent sovereign state. These goals include an economic expansion of 5 to 6 percent per year, a GDP per capita of $29,000 per year. It has a population of more than three hundred million, becoming the fourth largest economy in the world and emerging from the middle-income trap to swell the ranks of the evolved, high-income countries.
To this end, Jakarta has mobilized its political resources by focusing on infrastructure structure and human resource development. Foreign policy and diplomacy, in turn, have been formulated to achieve those long-term results. The key elements of this strategy have been to attract foreign direct investment. investment, effectively implementing corporate IPOs to finance infrastructure, modernize industries, and expand exports. Diplomatic strategy has inevitably focused on relationships with potential investment partners: first with the world’s two largest economies, the United States and China, and then strengthening relations with others. primary economic powers such as Japan.
Moreover, when King Salman of Saudi Arabia visited Jakarta in March 2017, Jokowi deployed all diplomatic means to give him a royal welcome. When it became apparent that Saudi Arabia’s investments in Indonesia would fall far short of expectations, the Indonesian government’s president did not hesitate to publicly express its resentment.
The fact that President Jokowi has not attended a single UN General Assembly since his inauguration in 2014 suggests that security and/or shared values are not a top priority for his administration. Indonesia’s foreign policy successes during the Jokowi era have generally been evaluated on the basis of the gains and losses of the national economy.
The Golden Indonesia 2045 Vision growth strategy was set forth in 2017, and the predominant focus on the economy was only reinforced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic-induced slowdown has made it a challenge for Indonesia to reach the original goal of 5.1% year-on-year growth, ensuring that it escapes the middle-income trap by 2038 while the country is still enjoying its demographic bonus. The negative growth experienced in 2020 alone means that 7% annual growth is now required to achieve the long-term target.
There are some tail winds for the Indonesian economy, though. The relocation of the capital from Jakarta to Nusantara, set to finish by 2045, will stimulate both the public and private sectors, and an industrial strategy aimed at positioning Indonesia as an international hub for the manufacture of electric vehicle batteries has been adopted to attract private investment. However, the feasibility of such policies is still questioned. Furthermore, Indonesia still currently relies on sales of natural resources like coal for its foreign currency reserves, due in part to commodity price increases following the COVID-19 pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. With a growth rate of currently less than 5% per year, the goal of joining the ranks of developed countries by 2045 will be hard to achieve. Some Indonesian economists have even expressed their concern by coining the term Indonesia Cemas (Anxious Indonesia) in place of Indonesia Emas (Golden Indonesia) contained in the headline of the 2045 economic growth strategy.
In response, President Jokowi is focusing on even more competitive international relations to attract investment. When he traveled to Washington in 2022 to attend the first ASEAN-US Special Summit, he announced on the president’s official online page that his major accomplishments — perhaps even more than his meeting with U. S. President Joe Biden — included meetings with Elon Musk and other U. S. companies. During his stopover in Beijing to attend the Belt and Road Summit in October 2023, Jokowi touted his call to invest in new capital and the nickel processing industry for battery production.
Moreover, the September 2023 ASEAN Summit in Jokowi gave the impression of being more focused on the good fortunes of the ASEAN Indo-Pacific Forum than on the ASEAN Plenary Session. He called on participants to invest in green infrastructure, sustainable financing systems and virtual transformation. In doing so, Jokowi positioned the ASEAN summit as a stage of investment opportunities rather than geopolitics. Essentially, it redefined the “open” descriptor of Japan’s and the United States’ “free and open” Indo-Pacific visions to mean “open to investment opportunities” for governments and businesses around the world.
In view of the above, the position of Japan and ASEAN in Indonesia’s current foreign policy strategy is clear. Indonesia urgently wants to boost investment and concrete economic cooperation to sustain maximum expansion in the long term. Any foreign policy initiatives and cooperation proposals will therefore want to address this central detail of Indonesia’s national strategy. How they do this will have a direct effect on how Jakarta prioritizes their importance.
This does not mean that Indonesia is completely indifferent to domestic social issues or security challenges. Rather, in the current ordering of Indonesia’s foreign policy priorities, the realization of economic gains on a country-by-country basis is ranked higher than shared political or religious values, human rights, democracy promotion, or even the interests of the Southeast Asian region and regional stability. This has been a constant during the Jokowi administration and will continue until a new president takes over in 2024.
For the past 25 years, Indonesia has held the freest and fairest elections in Southeast Asia, and 2024 will be no exception. Due to constitutional limitations, a new government is guaranteed to come into force in 2024 for the first time in a decade. Depending on who becomes president, Jakarta’s definition of the national interests that drive Indonesia’s foreign policy and strategy may simply remain consistent with that observed under Jokowi’s administration, or it may simply be significantly replaced.
So far, the Indonesian government has avoided making any particular commitment to its purpose of becoming a primary global force. Given the current trend for primary forces to prioritize their own economies, the technique focused on Indonesia’s economy is not all that surprising. It is vital not to forget that Indonesia is a de facto regional force and has the potential to become a primary global force. It has a large population and its economy is already by far the largest in the Southeast Asian region. Therefore, for Japan and other ASEAN countries, which already recognize Indonesia’s geopolitical importance, strictly following the country’s internal political trends will remain of paramount importance, regardless of any foreign policy statements. about the ambitions of a marvellous force.
(Originally in Japanese. Header photo: Indonesian President Joko Widodo and his wife Iriana welcome Prime Minister Kishida Fumio and his wife at the ASEAN Summit gala dinner in Jakarta on Sept. 6, 2023. © Reuters. )