Indonesia has been urged to put the "outmoded" regional bloc of ASEAN on the back burner and instead initiate a new Asia Pacific forum that could better accommodate more big powers.
Rizal Sukma, executive director of Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said Tuesday Indonesia should invite South Korea and Australia to initiate the Asia Pacific 8, a forum to convene big powers with a degree of hostile relations toward each other, to secure Southeast Asian regional interests.
"The group will consist of the United States, Japan, China, India, Russia, South Korea, Australia and Indonesia... The ASEAN forum (EAS) is an outmoded architecture to gather big powers, as it consists of too many countries with irrelevant profiles," he said during a national seminar titled, "A decade of Indonesian foreign policy: Reflection and Projection" at the University of Indonesia.
The 42-year-old ASEAN has played a pivotal role in creating regional political stability amid the rise of China and India, but weak members are hampering the bloc's progress.
ASEAN comprises 10 countries with differing political maturity and economic prosperity, and only two of them - Indonesia and the Philippines - are deemed true democracies in the region of over 570 million people.
Rizal said the cancellation of last month's EAS summit in Pattaya, Thailand, due to opposition protests against the host country's government dealt the bloc a great blow, hinting at the big powers creating another forum.
ASEAN leaders have managed to bring Japan, China and South Korea under one umbrella to form ASEAN+3. A subgroup with India, Australia and New Zealand makes up the East Asian Summit (EAS).
Rizal said Indonesia could not wait any longer for the repositioning of the regional architecture, because "the rise of China, the arrival of India, the reengagement of the United States and the revitalization of Japan" could have an adverse impact on Southeast Asia.
"We can either stay quiet and see the big powers organize themselves, or be involved to protect our interests," he said.
He added the forum would be more acceptable if it was initiated by Indonesia, South Korea and Australia, as they were countries dubbed as the central axis middle powers, in which other big powers did not feel threatened by their presence.
Rizal pointed out Indonesia had made a mistake by prioritizing its foreign policy based on geographical proximity.
"ASEAN has become a cornerstone of Jakarta's foreign policy because of proximity, although we know countries like the United States are much more important than Laos or Cambodia," he said.
Pelita Harapan University international relations expert Alexius Jemadu said ASEAN had lost its relevancy to Indonesia's foreign policy as Jakarta had failed to expand its political clout in the bloc.
"We are the third-largest democracy in the world, but we failed to spill over the democratic values to our neighbors... ASEAN members do not accommodate Indonesia's democracy partly because they are not ready and partly because Indonesia is not firm enough with it," he said.
CPF Luhulima, a senior CSIS researcher, said Southeast Asia needed to protect its regional interests in the face of new powers by enhancing regional security.
"Our regional security has to be able to secure our national interests. Indonesia has started with the ASEAN security community and promoted the enforcement of democracy and human rights *in the bloc*... Indonesia has to maintain this position in the ASEAN forum because democracy is the pillar of our regional security that keeps intervention by big powers at bay," he said.
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