After postponing yet another visit to Indonesia this year, speculations have emerged on whether this delay will deal a blow to US President Barack Obama’s popularity in the country. Observers point out that despite being the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, the world’s third-largest democracy, and a member of the G20, Indonesia might not rank as high as it would like to be in Obama’s list of priorities.Skeptics go even further, suggesting that Obama has fallen short of his powerful address last year
in Cairo promising “a new beginning” and engagement with the Muslim world (Ernest Bower, CSIS, June 4).In addition to over promising and under delivering, the Cairo speech has also disappointed many who believed that Indonesia would have made a much better location representing the Muslim world, taking into consideration that its Muslim population was threefold that of ...