A drill with China's navy near Taiwan puts Indonesia's neutrality in question

Indonesia's foreign policy has a name that most Indonesians learn at school: bebas aktif, "free and active". It means the country joins no camp and stays on speaking terms with every big power. Writing for the Lowy Institute's Interpreter, analyst Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat says the doctrine is still there on paper, but the planning behind it is not. Indonesia keeps making large moves without deciding first how they will look from outside, and other governments then supply the meaning.

His first example happened this week. An Indonesian frigate trained with China's navy in waters east of Taiwan. Taiwan's government called it a "military provocation" and said Beijing wanted to show it controls those waters; its foreign ministry asked Jakarta for an explanation. Indonesia's navy answered that nothing was arranged for the occasion. The ship, KRI I Gusti Ngurah Rai-332, was sailing home from Russia's ORRUDA 2026 exercise, held in Vladivostok from 23 to 28 July, and what happened with the Chinese vessel was a passing exercise, the short drill two navies run when they cross paths. Both explanations may be true at once, and that is the problem: the answer came after the headlines.

The second example is economic. Indonesia signed the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade with the United States in February. Under it Jakarta drops tariffs, the taxes charged on imports, on almost all American goods and promises to buy set amounts of US farm products, while Washington kept its 19 per cent tariff on most Indonesian exports. Legal experts who read the text found it lopsided: the deal binds Indonesia to firm obligations more than 200 times, and the United States nine times. Rakhmat's warning is blunt. "A country that walks into Washington and Beijing without its own plan does not stay neutral between them. It becomes a small piece of whichever story each side wants to tell."

Why it matters

If you work in an export business, the 19 per cent tariff is already in your margins, and this is the argument for why Indonesia agreed to it. The wider risk is reputational: a country that improvises looks unreliable to investors and to security partners, which makes the next deal harder to get. Watch whether Jakarta explains the China drill in its own words before its partners do it first.