As superpower rivalry intensifies, Vietnam's trade engine and Indonesia's diplomatic heft offer Southeast Asia its best shot at shaping the global order instead of getting caught in the crossfire.

The government’s decision to incorporate implementation of the free nutritious meal (MBG) program into the performance criteria for the regional incentive fund (DID) has raised eyebrows. While the fund’s framework is accompanied by plans for additional regional assistance, whether these measures can meaningfully ease regional fiscal pressures amid austerity remains uncertain.

Decoding China's path forward begins with how the CPC governs itself—discover how the Fifth Plenary Session’s push for rigorous self-reform shapes the nation’s modernization and its growing partnership with Indonesia.

The President must use the opportunity presented by the two summits in Manila next week to apologize for the transboundary haze stemming from Indonesia's fires, and then reassume the country's role as an indispensable leader of ASEAN.

Small businesses are  brought into the the tax net once the state shows them what registration buys. Indonesia offers that deal only to its bigger borrowers.  

Passing the SDI Law is only the beginning. The real challenge is in translating national standards into operational practices across the country's vast and diverse government institutions. 

The recurring fires in Kalimantan, Sumatra and Papua point to a deeper governance challenge: the ability of the state to prevent environmental disasters, enforce accountability and protect the people who bear their consequences.

With his elevation to the country's second-highest executive office being the outcome of political interference from his father, then-president Joko "Jokowi" Widodo, it was only a matter of time before his critics and detractors started to litigate the process.

Facing acute climate risks, ASEAN is taking its united front to COP31, turning regional solidarity into global action for a resilient and sustainable future.

Hashim Djojohadikusumo's recent remarks about tapping the Rp 10,000 trillion shadow economy have renewed attention on the government's efforts to expand digital tax collection. While the measure could generate additional revenue, it is unlikely to address the structural weaknesses underlying Indonesia's fiscal challenges.

Bound by deep cultural roots and shared vulnerabilities, the Netherlands and Indonesia prove that middle powers hold the key to defending a fragmented global order.

A low unemployment rate does not prove policy success when the burden of survival has simply been outsourced to struggling families.

As modern cyber defense expands, the enduring lesson of Watergate is clear: powerful state surveillance is only as strong as the legal guardrails and ethical oversight that govern it.

What is taking place in the capital is a calculated, elite power struggle, a high-stakes game of political chess played entirely out of earshot of the tens of million Indonesians.

National pride cannot replace scrutiny: Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin’s domestic track record on judicial overreach, data governance and fractured medical trust makes him the wrong choice to lead the WHO.

The government plans to shift energy import procurement from Pertamina to the Oil and Gas Testing Center, or Lemigas, a public service agency (BLU) under the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry. The move could reshape control over the country's lucrative energy trade. The government argues that direct negotiations with supplier countries will speed up procurement, eliminate intermediaries and secure supplies, but will the new arrangement bring greater transparency and a shorter supply chain or merely add another industry player?

Challenging Western narratives on global food security, the Russian Embassy exposes the real bottlenecks in the Black Sea and outlines why Indonesia’s supply chain resilience lies in diversification, not geopolitical rhetoric.

The Red and White Cooperatives program is becoming increasingly all-encompassing, yet it remains anything but a genuine cooperative.

Behind Manila’s polished communiqués and ribbon-cutting ceremonies lies an institutional facade that can no longer mask ASEAN's failure to govern a region in crisis.

Turning emissions into valuable industrial goods sounds like a climate game-changer, but for Indonesia, carbon recycling is neither an outright silver bullet nor an affordable fix, unless policymakers learn to separate viable solutions from costly distractions.

The true moral failing lies with the orchestrators, the political elites who exploit this poverty, handing out costumes to the disenfranchised to ensure the "play" goes on flawlessly under the sacred banner of the Youth Pledge.

The world must not succumb to euphoria following Donald Trump’s latest defeat. If anything, his lame-duck status deprives Americans and everyone else of an excuse for avoiding hard conversations about the truly radical changes that will be needed to avert future catastrophes.

Indonesia has ramped up its biodiesel blend to B50 from B30 just in four years, but feedstock, engines, forests and infrastructure have not kept pace. Brazil and Malaysia remind us why sequencing matters.

Seen from the ground up, careful households, busy factories and confident investors explain Indonesia’s 5.47 percent growth, while the next gains will depend on jobs and exports.

Indonesia and Singapore maintain a relationship best compared to that of siblings: deeply interdependent with shared strategic interests, yet periodically strained by sharp divergences in perspective.

Indonesia’s robust 5.47 percent growth looks impressive on paper, but weakening consumer spending, rising unemployment and a strained state budget suggest the headline boom may be masking serious trouble ahead.

The 2026 midterms weren’t just a brutal defeat for Donald Trump, they may have locked the Republican Party out of power until 2032.