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Indonesia's vision of the desirable order in Southeast Asia and the wider region has evolved over time, influenced by changes in both domestic politics and the external environment. Perceptions of external threats, national priorities, and the best means of promoting national interests have not remained constant. Nevertheless, Indonesia's "free and active" (bebas aktif) foreign policy that stresses nonalignment and strategic outlook that emphasizes the importance of national and regional resilience have provided important principles of continuity. First and foremost, Indonesia desires strategic autonomy for itself and the immediate environment in Southeast Asia, whereby regional states are masters of their own destinies rather than simply succumbing to the dictate of one or more external powers.
This essay will examine Indonesia's vision of an East Asian regional order in the context of the current rivalry between the United States as the resident power and China as the ascendant power. This rivalry, if not conflict, has been the permanent backdrop for Indonesia's foreign policy since the early days of independence and has informed much of it.
The History of Indonesian Foreign Policy
Indonesia's foreign policy has been shaped by a combination of factors such as geography, history, natural endowment, and level of economic development. On the one hand, Indonesia's successful revolutionary struggle for independence, huge geographic size and strategic location, wealth in natural resources, and large population have inculcated a strong sense of national confidence, an activist foreign policy outlook, and an unwillingness to simply become a follower of a great power or an alliance of powers. On the other hand, the long history of colonial exploitation under a divide-and-rule policy, the difficulty of uniting an unwieldy and porous archipelago with a highly heterogeneous population, the frequent intervention of competing external powers, a relatively low level of economic development, and limited capacity in terms of real power have all contributed to Indonesia's constant feeling of vulnerability and deep-seated suspicions of all major powers.1
These historical experiences play a particularly important role in Indonesia's perceptions of itself and its relations with the outside world. In 1948, three years after its declaration of independence and coinciding with the onset of the Cold War, Indonesia affirmed that its foreign policy would be "free and active." Essentially this meant that Indonesia would...