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‘We Are Geopolitically Polygamous’

Former Indonesian diplomat Dino Patti Djalal on how his country views Trump and a new world order.

By , the editor in chief of Foreign Policy.
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Indonesia is sometimes described as the world’s biggest invisible country. How blind we must be. It is the world’s fourth-most-populated country and its third-biggest democracy; it has about as many Muslims as Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, combined; and it has a stunning ecological, linguistic, and cultural diversity, spread out over some 17,000 islands. Indonesia receives very little media coverage, but its point of view on world affairs is increasingly important, especially as so-called middle powers gain in prominence.

On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with former Indonesian vice foreign minister and ambassador to the United States Dino Patti Djalal. Djalal is the founder of the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia and an astute watcher of global affairs. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast, which usually drops on Fridays. What follows here is a condensed and lightly edited transcript.

Indonesia is sometimes described as the world’s biggest invisible country. How blind we must be. It is the world’s fourth-most-populated country and its third-biggest democracy; it has about as many Muslims as Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, combined; and it has a stunning ecological, linguistic, and cultural diversity, spread out over some 17,000 islands. Indonesia receives very little media coverage, but its point of view on world affairs is increasingly important, especially as so-called middle powers gain in prominence.

On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with former Indonesian vice foreign minister and ambassador to the United States Dino Patti Djalal. Djalal is the founder of the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia and an astute watcher of global affairs. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast, which usually drops on Fridays. What follows here is a condensed and lightly edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: Do Indonesians feel like their country matters for the United States?

Dino Patti Djalal: We certainly hope so!

U.S. engagement in Southeast Asia will need to dance with Indonesia as well. We have a comprehensive and strategic partnership with the United States—which we hope is a bipartisan thing—and yes, we do have good assets. We hope that those assets are appreciated by the Trump administration.

RA: From your vantage point in Jakarta, how do you see [President Donald] Trump in his second term?

DPD: We hope his attention to Southeast Asia, to ASEAN [the Association of Southeast Asian Nations], can be improved compared to the first Trump administration. It’s widely known that he had never been to an ASEAN summit, didn’t appoint an ambassador to ASEAN for some time, and left a number of posts vacant in Southeast Asia. So we do hope the second Trump administration will be more active and engaged in Southeast Asia.

But in Trump 2.0, we notice the U.S. retreating from world affairs. Of course, this was a theme in Trump 1.0, but it’s more intensified now. We used to see the United States leading in global affairs, not on every issue, but it was a major force driving world affairs. So we are seeing how this will impact the world and Southeast Asia. For example, the U.S. pulled out its funding for IOM, the International [Organization] for Migration, which was about 70 percent of the budget. And as a result, thousands of the workers at IOM were laid off. The institution is almost dysfunctional now. And so the very important issue, international migration, is suffering. I’m just talking about migration. I’m not even touching on health, on climate, and on other things.

RA: What happens in a world where America has retreated? Does that worry Jakarta?

DPD: It worries us. We call the United States a superpower, even though Washington doesn’t call itself that. It has the largest economy. It has enormous diplomatic, political, technological resources. Given those assets, the world counts on the United States to play an active role.

But if the United States retreats, it gives space for others to step in. Obviously, China is there. China is quite interested in stepping up its engagement in Southeast Asia and on the global stage. But there are also countries like India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Indonesia on some issues. So it does create space for other powers to work among themselves and to step up on certain issues.

A lot of us are confused when we see the United States now, because the United States is the most values-driven country in terms of its foreign policy and global engagement. It’s less so now.

RA: Let’s talk about tariffs. According to Trump’s initial reciprocal tariff calculation, they were to be 32 percent of tariffs on Indonesian exports. A new deal set tariffs at 19 percent. How do these tariffs change Indonesia’s view on its relations with the world and how it thinks about trade with other countries? It’s negotiating a free trade deal with the EU, for instance.

DPD: With the EU, for example, we’ve been negotiating a comprehensive economic partnership agreement for nine years. It was stuck. It didn’t go anywhere. But right after the Trump administration announced the tariffs, we are finalizing a deal with the EU. It’s a very generous deal; 80 percent of our goods will go there tariff-free. We expect Indonesia’s exports to the EU to grow by 40 percent or so in the next three to four years. And European exports to Indonesia would grow similarly—by 7 or 8 percent? But both sides agreed that this would not happen if there was not a tariff toward Indonesia. So, certainly, it has catalyzed new opportunities in trade relations among countries.

RA: How does Jakarta think about Beijing’s ambitions in the region? How do issues like democracy and security and allyship factor into Indonesia’s relations with China?

DPD: First, it needs to be said that Indonesia had hostile relations with China for decades after 1965. But things normalized in the late ’80s, and we took a careful, incremental approach toward China. We need to know whether we can trust China not to interfere in our internal affairs. Indonesia is staunchly anti-communist. Bit by bit relations improved, trust elevated, and we ended up with a comprehensive and strategic partnership like the one we have with the United States. I think China’s leaders decided at some point to change their approach in Southeast Asia and to prioritize relations with Indonesia. They changed how they deal with Southeast Asia and Indonesia and became very involved. They now compete with the United States in terms of diplomatic seductions, economic engagement, confidence building, and so on.

We still have problems with China. It’s still a complicated relationship. But we don’t see China as a threat. There is a higher degree of trust relative to four decades ago.

RA: You say you don’t see China as a threat, but the United States increasingly does. These are your biggest trading partners, essentially. How do you square that?

DPD: There’s not much we can do in terms of U.S.-China rivalries, because that’s beyond our control. But we can try to affect how they behave in Southeast Asia. There are dialog partners for ASEAN. And we want to be as close as possible to both and maintain good relations to both because there’s a doctrine of ASEAN centrality, meaning ASEAN has to have good relations with all the major powers. Especially the United States and China. We can’t choose, Ravi. We are geopolitically polygamous. We date everybody so long as they bring benefit to us.

I tell my friends in Washington, “You may be a superpower, but in Southeast Asia, you have to compete for your space. You compete not just with China, you compete with India, you compete with Japan, you compete with the UAE, you can compete with Saudi, and so on.” Southeast Asia is an oasis of growth, and regionalism there is quite different. For the United States to be engaged, they need to up their game and not take us for granted.

RA: On a more serious note, everything you’re saying worked nicely in a world at peace. Today, major countries are at war, and major powers are divided over that. And if China were to attack Taiwan, that would create more tensions in your region. So were Indonesia to make a choice, how would it think about that?

DPD: Well, so long as the choice does not require us to enter into a treaty alliance, we will take a stand on certain conflicts. And we do that quite often. When the United States invaded Iraq, we opposed it. It was very hard because our relations were really improving with the United States after 9/11. So we do take a stand, and it depends on case by case, but we cannot enter into military alliances.

But one important point. Yes, there’s war in Europe. But Southeast Asia is relatively peaceful. We had the Vietnam War, the Cambodian conflict, and many internal wars, as well as proxy wars. And now we’re free from all that. People see the South China Sea as the flash point, but there is no death and no war in the South China Sea. Compared to Ukraine, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the Middle East, this is one region where all the claimants are actually talking together. China and the four ASEAN claimants are talking peacefully in negotiations to finalize the code of conduct in the South China Sea. Taiwan is a big concern for us, obviously. An outbreak of conflict across the Taiwan Strait would disrupt the flow of goods around these waters and paralyze trade, which would hurt the Southeast Asian economy. So we hope that Beijing and Taipei keep their tensions low.

RA: I mentioned that Indonesia has the world’s biggest Muslim population. That’s obviously affected its views of Israel. How do Indonesians view the Israeli-Gaza conflict right now?

DPD: We all know the term “double standards.” Every government in the world is guilty of that to some extent. When I was a diplomat, I admit I would sometimes say one thing and do another. But the double standards around Israel’s military attack in Gaza, which has been described as genocidal, reflects a world whereby there are one set of rules for most states and a different set for Israel. It seems that Israel is exempt from these rules. And I don’t know what it would take for a recognition that this is a clear violation of humanitarian international law. Some 60,000 civilians have been killed, most of whom are women and children. Of course, some of them are Hamas, but if this was done by any other country, that country would be clobbered and sanctioned ruthlessly. For Indonesia, it’s the highest degree of double standard that we’ve seen in the world system for quite some time now.

RA: Obviously, you don’t speak for the Indonesian government today, but you once did. Wouldn’t it help matters if Indonesia recognized Israel and had formal diplomatic ties with it? It could then have more leverage on some of these points.

DPD: Our President Prabowo [Subianto]’s position is that we support the two-state solution. And we will take part in the Saudi-France-sponsored international conference on this question. But our president has also said recently that if Israel recognized Palestinians’ independence, then Indonesia would do the same toward Israel. So there’s movement on Indonesia’s stance.

RA: Contrast all of this with how Indonesia sees Russia’s war in Ukraine. In the past, the Indonesian government has proposed plans to resolve the conflict, but those ideas were often criticized by the West as parroting Russian talking points. How do you see it?

DPD: When President Prabowo was defense minister, he made some suggestions about creating demilitarized zones or cease-fires. There was talk of having a referendum in some of the occupied areas. He has not talked about that since becoming president, but the idea of a cease-fire that he talked about is now being discussed by both sides. Indonesia supported and is, in fact, one of the co-sponsors of the U.N. resolutions that called for Russia to withdraw. So our position remains the same. We hope that negotiations with both sides will lead to a cease-fire and a permanent solution. And we stand by the U.N. resolution that calls for respect for Ukrainian sovereignty.

RA: When you look at the state of the world today, how is global order shifting? And how does Indonesia fit within that world order?

DPD: We are in the midst of a transition. We’re forming something new, but unfortunately the shape of that emerging or the next world order remains elusive. We certainly need to reform the institutions of that world order. The WTO [World Trade Organization] is dysfunctional. The nonproliferation treaty is being violated every day. The work of the U.N. Human Rights Council is not going well. The WHO [World Health Organization] is not functioning well. The United States has pulled out of the climate treaty. Again, it’s just struggling. The U.N. Security Council is no longer fit for purpose. When the conflicts around the world involve the interests of the United States or China or Russia, they use their veto power. So these institutions are becoming dysfunctional. That needs to be fixed in the new world order.

We remain committed to the U.N. Charter. That does not need to be changed. But the way we adhere to and act consistently on the principles of the U.N. Charter remains very important for the next world order that we are shaping.

RA: If Indonesia could shape or choose what a reformed world order looks like, where would it direct its energies? You’re arguing for a reform of the existing system. You want rules and norms. But what if China were to become bigger and stronger and tries to impose its will on global order? Would Indonesia seek that out or try to stop that?

DPD: Two points on that. First, you raise a very good question. Most countries that are cynical about the world order and call for a new one have not specified what they want. The United States after World War II was very specific about the rules-based world order that remains today. But if you ask Indonesia, India, Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa, Saudi, they all have different conceptions, or no conceptions, about what structures need to be built, or how the old structures need to be reformed. Certainly we don’t want to replace the United Nations. That would be terrible, unthinkable. But how do we reform the U.N. and its organs and other international institutions?

Secondly, as we seek the next world, the last thing we want is to find ourselves in a China-centric world. China is a great power, and we have good relations with China, but we want a world where everyone’s equal, where there’s no hegemon and no spheres of influence. We want to keep our sovereignty and strategic autonomy. We want to cooperate on the basis of equals. So we don’t want a China-centric world to replace the old world that is not working anymore.

RA: And within that, there’s a growing movement to expand BRICS, which Indonesia has joined. There’s a sense that middle powers also have a growing role within the G-20. And then finally, the global south as a whole tends to coalesce more today than it did a decade ago on a range of issues, especially climate financing. With your perspective from Jakarta, how do you see that?

DPD: As we joined BRICS this year, we are also applying to OECD [the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development]. Hopefully, we will finalize that in 2027. We’re also applying for CPTPP, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. So we are, again, geopolitically promiscuous. We like to have platforms everywhere and keep our feet in different platforms.

In the global south, the non-aligned movement is losing a lot of steam. So the actions are seen to be taking place in BRICS now. Of course, BRICS has Russia. But India’s presence and South Africa’s presence in it make us quite comfortable. The majority of BRICS countries are in the global south. BRICS has a larger economy now than the G-7, and there are more countries lining up to join BRICS than to join the EU or G-7. So how BRICS evolves will offer interesting prospects.

And we hope that first, BRICS does not become a geopolitical unit. We would be uncomfortable to see BRICS becoming geopolitical. And secondly, Indonesia does not want BRICS to be an anti-West grouping. And it’s a hard balancing act because of the presence of Russia.

RA: And Iran.

DPD: And Iran, yes. So we bring a balancing factor in BRICS. Our line is very clear. We have good relations with the West. We are a proud democracy, and we don’t want to become anti-West. And the third wish is more personal: change the name. Would the U.S. join a group called Sweden, Norway, and Germany? Obviously not. So as BRICS grows, it’s strange or weird to be joining a big group that is more consequential named: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. So I hope they change the name.

Ravi Agrawal is the editor in chief of Foreign Policy. X: @RaviReports

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