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View all search resultsAnalysis: Skipping G20, a costly foreign policy blunder for Prabowo
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Leaders attend a plenary session on the opening day of the G20 leaders' summit on Nov. 22 at the Nasrec Expo Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa. (Reuters/Pool/Thomas Mukoya)
Last month, President Prabowo Subianto skipped the G20 summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, undermining his claim to be a champion of multilateralism as well as his chances of assuming the vacant leadership of the Global South.
Earlier, Prabowo told South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa that he would attend when the latter came to Jakarta in October to extend the invitation to the summit personally.
In diplomacy, this is an absolute no-no. South Africa, Brazil, India and Indonesia are the representatives of the Global South in the gathering of leaders from the world's wealthiest nations. Prabowo should have gone there with the other leaders to show solidarity. This episode hardly caused a political ripple at home, other than that people noticed that Vice President Gibran Rakabuming Raka made his international summit debut to take Prabowo's place in Johannesburg. But the president's absence is a major foreign policy blunder that would hurt Indonesia's standing in the world.
The Presidential Palace's explanation that Prabowo had been skipping the G20 summit due to a tight domestic agenda is hard to accept, given that there were no major crises at home to stop him from leaving the country. In comparison, he left for Beijing in September to attend the sizable military parade amid widespread violent riots. The deadly floods in Sumatra occurred days after the G20 summit finished, and even then, he was widely criticized for the tardy response to the disaster that had killed more than 600 people.
Prabowo has traveled overseas extensively since his October 2024 inauguration, more so than any past Indonesian president, and these include attending several summits and the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in September. In many speeches, Indonesia's "foreign policy" president championed multilateralism as the best way of solving global problems and of stopping the world from becoming bipolar. He was living up to Indonesia's foreign policy main principles of being active, independent and nonaligned.
The G20 is not something a true multilateralist would want to miss, so when Prabowo decided at the last minute to delegate the job to Gibran, inevitably, speculations became rampant about the real reason for his decision.
One popular theory that has circulated is that Prabowo was playing to the drumbeat of United States President Donald Trump. If he wasn't following Trump's instruction, he certainly looked like he was trying to appease the US President. Trump boycotted the Johannesburg summit, claiming that South Africa's white minority had been the target of large-scale killings and land grabbing.
