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fter three years with President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo at the government’s helm, experts believe the Indonesian foreign policy legacy he inherited remains largely intact, even as interest from the Presidential Palace wavers.

This has been largely possible because of the professionalism of the country’s current cohort of senior diplomats, who have shown the initiative to further the country’s ‘independent and active’ foreign policy on their own amidst domestic political turmoil and global uncertainty.

However, in order for them to perform effectively, the country’s norms and values must first have been enshrined in a “default setting,” which includes previous doctrines, laws and regulations governing foreign policy.

“Indonesia has a well-established foreign policy bureaucracy [...] but when the president is not directly involved in foreign policy, quite often bureaucratic politics occur,” said Dewi Fortuna Anwar from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI).

“What the bureaucracy did yesterday it will do today and it will do tomorrow.”

With a hard-working foreign policy team led by Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi, Jokowi has not been sorely missed in Indonesia’s international engagements this year. Throughout the year, Indonesia has proven its mettle mediating international conflicts, from the Rakhine humanitarian crisis in Myanmar to the 50-year struggle for Palestinian statehood.

In ASEAN, Retno’s trademark shuttle diplomacy has been pivotal to the centrality and unity of the regional bloc on its 50th anniversary. From early on in his presidency, populist Jokowi has found it hard to persuade his constituency that he is an internationally minded leader. This label persists three years down the line, although he has made improvements in the way he has handled international forums with growing ease, as was particularly evident during the G20 leaders’ forum in July.

Even so, his absence at this year’s United Nations General Assembly in New York (UNGA) — the third in succession he has missed — did not make any visible dent on Indonesia’s ongoing campaign to join the UN Security Council in 2019.

Vice President Jusuf Kalla once again assumed the lead in the annual UN meeting, aided by the ever-industrious Retno, who racked up more than 90 meetings in the span of about 10 days.

Other ASEAN leaders were also missing from the UNGA, which further cushioned the President’s choice not to attend the multilateral forum.

However, the President’s hands-off approach to foreign policy still has its own repercussions, as a bureaucracy on autopilot can rarely formulate new policies or come up with creative solutions, Dewi noted.

While Retno’s silent diplomacy approach — getting results without getting them mentioned in the headlines — is undoubtedly effective, the international relations expert insisted that Indonesia’s approach to leadership does not always have to be invisible.

With regard to ASEAN, Dewi said: “Criticisms have been voiced by outside observers that ASEAN is in danger of disunity and, among other things, that is because of the lack of a clear leader.”

Phillips Vermonte, executive director of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said Indonesia could take more action in a region that is mired in regional issues that have developed out of national ones.

“To some extent, it was also because of the lack of leadership of Indonesia, which in the past was able to take various initiatives to solve such issues,” he said, citing examples like the Rakhine crisis.

Similarly, Dinna Wisnu from Atmajaya University’s Public Policy Institute said Jokowi’s “domestic-oriented foreign policy” has done little to contribute to the debate on human rights.

“The limits [to this foreign policy] are that we are more likely to act more defensively than actively abroad and this is largely discernible in the aspect of human rights,” she said.