Balancing Act: US, China Vie for Jakarta’s Friendship, But West Offers Little More Than Guns

Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation with the 16th-largest economy on the planet, sits astride key trade routes between the Indian and Pacific oceans and borders key waterways, including the South China Sea. There, Washington has cried foul over Chinese territorial claims and sought to rally nations against Beijing that have overlapping claims.

In recent years there have been several incidents in which Chinese fishing boats ventured into these waters and Indonesian authorities complained to Beijing about it, with both sides upping the ante by dispatching military or coast guard vessels there to fly the flag. At the same time, Indonesia has made a number of deals to buy military equipment from Western makers, including in the US and France.

One American news outlet recently characterized the situation as Indonesia seeking to “stave off” the People’s Liberation Army. However, in reality Jakarta’s relationship with Beijing is stronger than ever, and the island nation has expressed its greatest worry not about Chinese naval vessels, but Australian ones - in particular, Australia’s deal to buy nuclear-powered attack submarines from the United States.

When the US, Australia and UK shocked the world by announcing the AUKUS bloc in September 2021, Indonesia denounced Canberra’s move, saying it “takes note cautiously” of the decision and asked its southern neighbor to ensure it respects its Nuclear Non-Proliferation obligations.

Indeed, earlier this year Jakarta moved to buy two Scorpene-class attack submarines from France, and later also decided to buy 42 Dassault Rafale fighter jets. Last month, Jakarta also announced a deal to buy F-15 Eagle jets from the US, too. At the same time, the country’s joint effort with South Korea to develop the KF-21 “Boramae” fighter jet, an F-35 lookalike, quite literally took off this year.

However, Jakarta’s ambitious military expansion has raised many eyebrows, with observers questioning its commitment to the KF-21 program as the Indonesian economy has been kept aloft mostly by increased commodity demand amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In other respects, its economy is struggling, and the central bank has adopted a tighter monetary policy aimed at reining in inflation.

In October, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a hawkish think tank set up by the Australian government, opined that Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s defense binge “won’t give Indonesia the force it needs.” Ironically, the ASPI demanded far more spending from Jakarta, saying the increase “represents no effective change” to the country’s situation and remains inferior in terms of GDP percentage, to other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

That bloc has been a key ideological battleground between the US and China, since most of its members have overlapping sea claims with China and the US has a history of supporting anti-communist governments in many of those same states. However, Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure megaproject and its steady insistence on multilateral talks between equals to settle disputes have so far rebuffed Washington’s advances.

China and Indonesia have a long and troubled history. The two nations emerged from under the boot of Euro-Japanese colonialism in the aftermath of World War II and became strong leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement, which rejected Cold War dichotomies and sought to build themselves up after centuries of colonial underdevelopment. The Communist Party of China was even closer with the Indonesian Communist Party, and suffered a devastating blow when the Indonesian military mounted a coup d’etat in 1965 and massacred nearly 1 million communists.

With a US hand in the killings, the self-styled “New Order” grew closer to Washington, and passed laws discriminating against the archipelago’s ethnic Chinese population. A mob burned down the Chinese embassy in Jakarta in 1967 and Beijing severed relations for 23 years, only restoring them in 1990. However, that didn’t stop the discrimination, and another anti-Chinese riot in 1998 killed more than one thousand people, with hundreds of Chinese-Indonesian women being raped by the rioters. However, those same riots led to the fall of the New Order government and the restoration of Indonesian democracy.

The past year has seen several high-profile Sino-Indonesian meetings, including between Widodo and Chinese President Xi Jinping in December, when Bali hosted the Group of 20 summit. The two leaders issued a joint statement hailing their growing friendship and economic cooperation across multiple sectors, including the opening of a prestigious new high-speed rail line between Bali and Jakarta.

Today, China is Indonesia’s largest trading partner, with bilateral trade last year exceeding $114 billion. The US, by comparison, trades just $37 billion with Indonesia, according to International Monetary Fund data. So far, all the Americans can offer people is more guns.