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View all search resultsRethinking Soesastro for a new strategic environment
Given the new reality across policy sectors facing the world today, along with the securitization trend across the Asia-Pacific, there is no better time to revisit the work of Hadi Soesastro, whose analysis of Indonesia and the region’s response to great power economic competition remains strikingly relevant today.
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Stagehands arrange microphones on May 8, 2026, prior to the opening ceremony of the 48th ASEAN Summit in Cebu, the Philippines. (AFP/Pool/Aaron Favila)
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s of July 1, China’s regulation on outbound investment has effectively come into force. While it is every country’s right to have its own economic policy, this new instrument is notable, not only due to the magnitude of China’s economic power but also the substance in the regulation, which enables necessary and defensive measures to protect the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese investors along with their outbound investment.
Coming on the heels of the United States’ semiconductor export controls, the European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism and a wave of investment screening regimes across advanced economies, this regulation reflects a broader trend: the increasing use of economic policy and regulatory tools to pursue strategic and security objectives.
In other words, this regulation reinforces the securitization trend across the region.
The Asia-Pacific, once known for championing an open and market-oriented economy, now engages in the global race of commanding, if not controlling, flows of goods and capital in the name of security or national interest. The US, too, has shifted its approach and returned to prioritizing unilateral tariffs, blanket investigations and economic security alignment since 2025.
As this phenomenon echoes the era of US-Japan competition from the 1970s onward, when trade rivalry between major powers similarly reshaped the region, there is no better time to revisit the work of Hadi Soesastro, whose analysis of Indonesia and the region’s response to great power economic competition remains strikingly relevant today.
Today’s economic competition is profoundly different for at least four reasons.
First, the competitors do not share the same security arrangement as before. That interlinkage in the US-Japan hub-and-spoke model once gave both sides a structural incentive to negotiate, since economic friction carried the risk of spilling into the security relationship both depended on. China’s independent posture removes this interlinkage, leaving neither side compelled to negotiate economic terms the way Washington and Tokyo once did.
