Working Paper • Indo-Pacific Strategy • PDF Available
The Myth of Indonesian Neutrality
Strategic ambiguity, selective alignment, and the domestic politics beneath Indonesia's language of autonomy.
Status
Working Paper
Region
Southeast Asia
Primary Lens
Hedging Theory
Core Puzzle
Neutrality or selective alignment?
Research Puzzle
If Indonesia is truly neutral, why are its partnerships so uneven across strategy, finance, and regional order?
The paper argues that "neutrality" is better understood as a legitimizing narrative than as a descriptively accurate summary of Indonesian behavior. What exists in practice is calibrated hedging: issue-specific alignment choices contained inside a broader language of autonomy.
Paper Showcase
The full draft now lives inside the page, not just behind the title.
This interface now does two jobs at once: it gives visitors a fast intellectual overview, and it gives them direct access to the actual PDF for deeper reading or citation.
Argument Architecture
Claim 01
Neutrality as Political Language
Jakarta preserves the vocabulary of neutrality because it legitimizes autonomy, reduces domestic controversy, and keeps diplomatic maneuver space open across competing external partnerships.
Claim 02
Selective Alignment by Domain
Indonesia does not align evenly. Security coordination, economic development, maritime deterrence, and regional institutional strategy all pull toward different partners at different moments.
Claim 03
Domestic Institutions Matter
Foreign policy is not a unitary response. The military, economic ministries, presidential development priorities, and diplomatic elites often read Chinese and American power through different institutional interests.
Claim 04
ASEAN as Buffering Device
ASEAN centrality allows Indonesia to soften binary choice pressure by embedding competition inside a regional diplomatic architecture that privileges ambiguity, process, and managed coexistence.
Abstract
The project reframes Indonesian foreign policy as uneven alignment managed through a consistent language of autonomy.
Rather than treating neutrality as a stable middle point between Washington and Beijing, the paper shows that Indonesia combines differentiated partnerships with an intentionally broad diplomatic vocabulary. That vocabulary matters because it domesticates external strategy, stabilizes elite coalitions, and protects room for policy improvisation.
This approach explains why Jakarta can deepen maritime security cooperation with the United States while simultaneously welcoming Chinese capital into development strategy. The contradiction is only apparent if neutrality is understood literally rather than as a strategic narrative supported by issue-specific hedging.
Tension Axes
Security
Pull One
Military exercises, deterrence signaling, and maritime capacity building favor closer functional cooperation with the United States.
Pull Two
Formal balancing remains politically costly because it would contradict Indonesia's self-image as an autonomous regional actor.
Political Economy
Pull One
Chinese capital, infrastructure finance, and industrial development offer immediate domestic benefits for development-oriented governance.
Pull Two
Overdependence raises strategic anxiety around leverage, debt exposure, and the political optics of asymmetrical economic reliance.
Natuna and Maritime Sovereignty
Pull One
Incursions around Natuna push security institutions toward firmer coercive signaling and public sovereignty performance.
Pull Two
Economic and diplomatic actors still prefer controlled escalation so the dispute does not harden into full-spectrum strategic antagonism.
Regional Order
Pull One
Indonesia prefers continued American strategic presence to prevent regional hierarchy from collapsing into Chinese predominance.
Pull Two
At the same time, Jakarta seeks to avoid any order that forces Southeast Asia into exclusive bloc politics or alliance dependency.
Paper Flow
The argument moves from concept clarification to domestic politics, then outward to regional order.
01
Conceptual Opening
The paper distinguishes neutrality, non-alignment, strategic ambiguity, and hedging, arguing that these are too often collapsed into a single descriptive category when analysts discuss middle powers in the Indo-Pacific.
02
Domestic-External Linkage
It then shows how Indonesia's external conduct is shaped by internal regime needs: development legitimacy, elite competition, bureaucratic differentiation, and the symbolic value of bebas aktif.
03
Case Evidence
Episodes around Natuna, infrastructure cooperation, maritime modernization, and ASEAN diplomacy are treated as issue-specific windows into how selective alignment actually works in practice.
04
Regional Implication
The conclusion reframes Indonesian strategy as a model of autonomy-maximizing hedging under hierarchy, rather than as proof that neutrality remains intact in contemporary great-power politics.
Contribution
The page now shows the paper as both an argument and an object: readable on-site, downloadable, and anchored by a clearer theoretical contribution.
Reinterprets Indonesia's neutrality claim as strategic narration rather than fixed positional abstention.
Connects hedging theory more directly to domestic institutional fragmentation and regime legitimation.
Explains why ASEAN-centered diplomacy can coexist with materially uneven external partnerships.
Offers a more fine-grained vocabulary for analyzing middle-power behavior in Sino-American rivalry.
Selected References
Anwar, D. F. (2023). Indonesia's hedging plus policy in the face of China's rise and the US-China rivalry in the Indo-Pacific region.
Goh, E. (2008). Great powers and hierarchical order in Southeast Asia.
Kuik, C.-C. (2021). Getting hedging right: A small-state perspective.
Kuik, C.-C. (2022). Hedging via institutions: ASEAN-led multilateralism in the age of the Indo-Pacific.
Syailendra, E. A. (2017). A nonbalancing act: Explaining Indonesia's failure to balance against the Chinese threat.
Research Continuum
This paper sits inside a larger portfolio of arguments on institutions, pressure, and regional order.
The projects are different in subject matter, but they keep talking to one another. Together they trace how power is managed through ambiguity, procedural design, and unequal governance structures.
Current Thread
The Myth of Indonesian Neutrality
Working Paper • Southeast Asia / Strategic Competition
A paper on hedging, selective alignment, and the domestic politics beneath Indonesia's language of strategic autonomy.
Unequal Skies, Shared Destiny
A project on the Financial Rift, climate finance asymmetry, and responsibility allocation in unequal institutional orders.
De-Escalatory Institutionalism in the Grey Zone
An article on how informal regional institutions manage escalation where formal authority is blocked or politically unusable.