Jakarta keeps adding foreign partners without deciding what each one is for

Indonesia under Prabowo Subianto signs deals in every direction: investment money from China, markets and defence technology from the West, and warm meetings with Russia. Writing in the Lowy Institute's Interpreter, Probo Darono Yakti says Jakarta is collecting relationships faster than it decides what each one is for. He calls the approach "partial multialignment": working with rival powers at the same time, each for a different purpose, without being owned by any of them. For a middle-sized country that is a sensible way to stay free. It only works when the government knows its own order of priorities.

The partners do not carry equal weight, and that is where Yakti sees the drift. China holds the most pull because of how much trade and investment money it brings. The trade agreement signed with the United States in February runs one way: Indonesia drops tariffs, the taxes charged on imports, from more than 99 per cent of American goods, while the United States keeps a 19 per cent tariff on most Indonesian exports. Russia has neither China's economic size nor the institutions that Western partners bring, yet it has taken a large share of Prabowo's personal attention.

His fix is a test of three questions before Indonesia signs anything big. What Indonesian interest does this deal serve? What dependency or expectation does it create? And can Jakarta refuse that expectation later without paying a heavy price? "A foreign policy can engage everyone and still lose focus," he writes. Strategic autonomy, the ability to pick your own course, is measured by which doors a government is willing to close, not by how many it opens.

Why it matters

The 19 per cent gap is the part you can already feel. Indonesian goods pay to enter the American market while American goods arrive here almost free, so producers selling at home meet more competition on the shelf. If you work in export manufacturing, watch what the next round of agreements asks Indonesia to hand over, because a deal the country cannot walk away from becomes a bill the next government pays.