Indonesia's non-alignment 2.0 — Evan Laksmana on Jakarta's hedging

Evan A. Laksmana, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and previously senior research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore, has been the most cited academic analyst of Indonesian defense and foreign policy since the mid-2010s. His 2023-2024 work on the Prabowo Subianto administration's foreign policy continuity captures Jakarta's update of its long-running bebas-aktif (free and active) doctrine.

Indonesian non-alignment as constitutional principle dates to the 1948 Hatta speech that established 'rowing between two reefs' as the doctrine for a newly independent state caught between US and Soviet camps. Under Sukarno it leaned anti-Western. Under Suharto it leaned pro-Western while preserving the formal label. Under Yudhoyono and Jokowi it became a more literal balancing posture as Indonesia's economy and military scale grew. Under Prabowo, in Laksmana's reading, it has extended into what he calls non-alignment 2.0 — a more operational and less rhetorical hedge that is comfortable with simultaneous engagement on opposite sides of major files.

The defense procurement record is the clearest evidence. SIPRI's arms-transfers database for 2018-2023 records Indonesia importing major systems from France (Rafale fighters, Scorpène submarines), the United States (F-15EX framework deal, P-8 maritime patrol), South Korea (KF-21 co-development, frigates), Russia (Su-35 deal frozen post-2022 but Su-30 fleet maintained), and Turkey (Bayraktar drones). The procurement diversity is by design — no single supplier can turn spare-parts dependency into political pressure.

On the South China Sea, Jakarta's posture is similarly differentiated. Indonesia rejects China's nine-dash-line claims where they intersect Indonesian exclusive economic zone waters off the Natunas. Jakarta has stepped up patrols and base construction. At the same time it has avoided joining Philippine-style public confrontation with Chinese coast guard vessels and has refused US requests for more visible freedom-of-navigation cooperation.

Laksmana's argument, against a tradition of Western analysis that treats Indonesian non-alignment as either incoherent or insincere, is that the doctrine has internal logic and substantial domestic-political backing. Jakarta's elite consensus across PDIP, Golkar, and Gerindra is that the country gains more from optionality than from alliance commitment. The 2025-2029 Prabowo administration is, by his reading, the continuation of that consensus rather than a departure from it.

­Evan Laksmana, senior fellow with the Asia-Pacific Programme at the National University of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and previously a senior researcher at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, has produced the most analytically careful Indonesian-side reading of Jakarta's post-Cold-War foreign-policy trajectory. His work, including book-length treatments and a steady output of policy papers for CSIS Jakarta and the Lowy Institute, frames Indonesian foreign policy under successive presidents (Yudhoyono, Jokowi, Prabowo) as the operationalisation of what he calls non-alignment 2.0 — a strategic posture that updates the Sukarno-era non-alignment doctrine for the multipolar conditions of the 21st century.

The structural drivers of the doctrine are geographic and economic. Indonesia is the largest Southeast Asian state by population (over 280 million), the largest economy in ASEAN, the third-largest democracy globally, and an archipelagic state straddling the Malacca and Sunda Straits that connect the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Its bilateral trade with China exceeds $130 billion annually; its bilateral relationship with the United States is anchored by the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership upgraded in 2023; its membership in ASEAN, the G20 (chair in 2022), the Indian Ocean Rim Association, and an extensive bilateral treaty network with major Asian, European, and Middle Eastern partners structures the operationalisation of the doctrine.

The free-and-active foreign-policy formulation, embedded in Indonesian foreign-policy doctrine since the 1948 Hatta speech in which it was first articulated, has had different operational meanings across the post-1945 decades. The post-2014 Jokowi-era variant emphasised commercial diplomacy, infrastructure-investment attraction (including from Belt-and-Road sources), and Indonesian agency in shaping regional institutions. The Prabowo administration that took office in October 2024 has signalled continuity in the broad doctrine, with somewhat greater rhetorical emphasis on Indonesian strategic autonomy and on the Global South framing that Brazil, India, and South Africa have also advanced.

The South China Sea dimension is the operational test case for how Indonesian non-alignment is calibrated against Chinese pressure. The Natuna Islands lie at the southern end of Beijing's nine-dash-line claim area, and Chinese coast-guard and fishing-fleet incursions into Indonesia's exclusive economic zone have repeatedly tested Jakarta's responses. The Indonesian posture has combined firm operational responses (naval patrols, occasional vessel interceptions, the 2021 establishment of a forward base at the Natuna Islands) with deliberate avoidance of public diplomatic confrontation. Laksmana's reading is that the calibration is meant to preserve Indonesia's broader commercial-and-diplomatic relationship with China while maintaining the operational presence that signals sovereignty.

The Indo-Pacific framing is the institutional vocabulary Indonesia has helped develop. The ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific, adopted in June 2019, formalised the Indonesian-led ASEAN approach to the strategic-vocabulary shift that the US, Japan, Australia, and India had been advancing. The Outlook explicitly framed the Indo-Pacific as a region of cooperation rather than rivalry, emphasised ASEAN centrality in the institutional architecture, and rejected the implicit anti-China framing that some US-led Indo-Pacific formulations carried. The Outlook has become the institutional baseline for ASEAN's collective engagement with the broader Indo-Pacific framework, even as bilateral responses from individual ASEAN members have varied.

The defence-and-security dimension of the doctrine is where the 2020s evolution has been most measurable. Indonesia's defence procurement has diversified across French Rafale fighters, US F-15EX fighters, Korean KF-21 co-development, Turkish and Italian platforms, and a range of additional sources, deliberately avoiding the single-supplier dependence that would constrain political autonomy. The Prabowo administration, given its candidate's pre-electoral defence-procurement background, is expected to continue and potentially accelerate this diversification track. The broader doctrinal commitment — that Indonesia will not host foreign bases, will not align with any external bloc, and will conduct its security relationships through bilateral arrangements calibrated to the specific need — remains the operational frame within which the specific procurement and partnership choices are made.

The forward-looking implication of this analysis is that the structural drivers identified above will continue to shape policy trajectories across the second half of the 2020s. The doctrinal frameworks, institutional arrangements, and bilateral relationships described in the preceding sections are durable across multiple electoral cycles in the participating capitals, and any disruption of them would require shifts in underlying interests rather than rhetorical adjustment. The analytical reading developed here is not a prediction of a specific outcome at a specific date. It is a framework for reading the next round of developments — the summits, the policy announcements, the data releases, the bilateral and multilateral diplomatic moves — against the structural constraints the framework identifies. Each subsequent development can be read as confirming or refining the framework's predictions, and the cumulative pattern across multiple developments is what produces the analytical clarity that policy work most often needs. The headline-driven coverage of any specific event will continue to misread the broader trajectory; the data-driven, frame-anchored reading developed here is the antidote to that misreading and is the analytical discipline the policy community most needs across the remainder of the decade. The arithmetic of the underlying interests does not change quickly. The political and rhetorical surface above the arithmetic does change, sometimes quickly, and reading the two together is what produces analytical durability and policy-relevant insight that survives the news cycle.

The institutional research that underwrites this reading — the policy papers, the journal articles, the open-source datasets, and the running track records of the named scholars — represents a body of work substantially larger than any single explainer can summarise. Readers seeking deeper engagement should consult the primary sources cited in the preceding sections directly. The reading developed here aims to be a useful entry point rather than a substitute for that primary literature, and the framing has been chosen to surface the analytical moves that carry the most explanatory weight across the largest set of subsequent developments. A reader returning to this material in a year, in three years, or in five years should still find the framework usable, because the structural relationships it describes change more slowly than the headline developments they organise. The decade ahead will produce many specific events that this analysis cannot anticipate. The framework, if it is the right one, will help organise those events as they arrive.