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Analysis: Confident Prabowo is “rowing between two reefs”
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This handout picture taken and released on November 8, 2024 by the Presidential Palace shows President Prabowo Subianto (center) speaking with Vice President Gibran Rakabuming Raka (2nd left) and the Coordinating Minister for Political and Security Affairs Budi Gunawan (right) at Halim Perdanakusuma Air Base in Jakarta. (AFP/Handout)
P
rabowo Subianto’s first foreign sojourn as president, which took him to China and the United States in quick succession this month, shows how confident he is in running Indonesia’s foreign policy amid escalating tension between the two big powers.
When Prabowo pledged to live up to Indonesia’s nonaligned foreign policy principles in his Oct. 20 inauguration speech, many wondered how he intended to manage the big power rivalry. They did not have to wait long for the answer.
With the visits to Beijing and Washington early this month, Prabowo quickly brought Indonesia to “row between two coral reefs”, an expression coined in 1948 by Muhammad Hatta, Indonesia’s first vice president, when the country, then just three years into independence, had to deal with the emerging Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Time will tell whether Prabowo has been successful. But doing so at the start of his presidency is a bold statement to say that he can handle it. His military background, and his role as Indonesia’s defense minister in the previous administration, prepared him well to deal with the increasingly volatile geopolitical landscape and to give him the confidence to do so.
His decision to appoint his trusted aide, Sugiono, as foreign minister, instead of a career diplomat, is also an indication of his intention to take charge of the country’s foreign policy. Sugiono’s exposure to foreign policy has been limited to sitting in House of Representatives Commission I, which oversees foreign and defense issues among others.
Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, president in 2014-2024, shifted Indonesia to lean closer to China to the point of becoming economically too dependent on the Asian giant. Now with Prabowo in charge, the question is whether he will maintain this dependence, or try to rectify it and shift Indonesia to the middle, but he will need the US to play along. And that is the big unanswered question with Washington going through a leadership transition.
Prabowo made a shocking move when he agreed to put his name to a joint statement with China’s leader Xi Jinping at the end of his visit in Beijing. In one point in the statement, the two leaders agreed on joint development cooperation in “overlapping waters”.
