RIFQAH ZULHANZAHIRA, RIFDAH ZULHANZAHIRA, & ALKHANSA GASSANI
By accepting massive Chinese state-backed infrastructure capital for high-speed rail and industrial parks while simultaneously hosting military exercises with the United States and its allies, Jakarta seeks to maximize immediate leverage. However, this transactional posture ensures that Indonesia stands for no definitive global order. It risks being viewed not as a principled middle power, but as a high-end bazaar where strategic access is auctioned off to the highest bidder.
- ASEAN: A Shield or a Poor Man’s League of Nations?
The insistence on “ASEAN Centrality” represents perhaps the most glaring strategic illusion in modern Indonesian diplomacy. Jakarta routinely treats ASEAN as its primary foreign policy vehicle to provide a regional diplomatic shield that prevents Southeast Asia from being carved up into superpower spheres. Yet, ASEAN functions largely as a diplomatic mirage that is functionally impotent against hard security threats. It operates as a talk shop while member states pursue individual survival strategies, often dismissed by regional neighbors like Singapore and Malaysia.
Neighboring states fully recognize its severe limitations. Singapore operates on a hyper-realist, high-tech survival strategy backed by deep ties with Western security architectures. Malaysia plays an agile, highly pragmatic balancing game. Myanmar is in violent structural decay, while Cambodia and Laos lean heavily into Beijing’s orbit.
ASEAN’s consensus-driven model ensures that it remains functionally impotent when confronted with existential hard-power crises. Much like the League of Nations during the 1930s—which stood by helplessly as Imperial Japan steamrolled Manchuria and Fascist Italy swallowed Ethiopia whole—ASEAN lacks the mechanisms, unity, and military enforcement to stop a superpower from asserting dominance over the Indo-Pacific. Clinging to ASEAN Centrality as a primary security umbrella is not a grand strategy; it is an avoidance mechanism for a nation lacking its own solo power act.
III. The Cold Hard Power Reality: When the Game Turns Hot
The fundamental flaw of middle-power hedging, resource nationalism, and summit diplomacy is that they function exclusively during peacetime or gray-zone competition. They rely entirely on the assumption that superpowers will agree to keep their rivalry contained within economic and diplomatic boundaries.
History offers an uncompromising lesson: Si vis pacem, para bellum (If you want peace, prepare for war). Peaceful trade, open commerce, and international communication are never guaranteed by sweet words, diplomatic summits, or signed communiqués. They are guaranteed by raw naval power, industrial capability, and an overarching strategic vision.
The superpowers do not build hyper-advanced supercarriers—such as the Ford-class ships, the USS Enterprise, the USS Doris Miller, or China’s expanding Type 003 and Type 004 carrier strike groups—merely to bluff or brag at international maritime expos. They build these platforms to project absolute force, enforce blockades, and command ocean lanes during high-intensity conflict.
If the ever-heating competition between the United States and China crosses the threshold into direct military confrontation, Indonesia’s defensive mechanics will instantly evaporate.
First, maritime neutrality will collapse. A nation cannot declare “neutrality” over the Malacca, Sunda, or Lombok Straits when warring superpowers view those exact choke points as essential operational corridors. Sea lanes will not be negotiated through diplomatic summits; they will be secured, mined, blockaded, or swept by naval battle groups. Strategic geography ceases to be diplomatic leverage and becomes an immediate military target.
Second, resource bans will prove entirely impotent. In a total mobilization scenario, foreign access to critical minerals like nickel will not be negotiated through export tariffs or domestic smelting laws. Supply chains will be secured through force projection, maritime embargoes, or physical coercion.
Third, regional coalitions will fragment rapidly. When existential force is applied, consensus-driven regional organizations disintegrate. Member states are forced into immediate alignment based on survival, leaving buffer organizations like ASEAN rendered entirely obsolete.
When hard power takes center stage, a nation that lacks indigenous defense manufacturing, air superiority, and a blue-water navy ceases to be an actor on the board. The chess metaphor collapses. Indonesia would not be a piece making moves; it would revert precisely to what it has historically been during great-power clashes: the battleground territory where foreign empires fight for dominance.
IV. The Historical Cycles of Nusantara: Flashes of Agency in a Sea of Passivity
A rigorous examination of the past two millennia reveals a striking historical reality: the default condition of the Nusantara archipelago has almost always been that of an oceanic highway and an extraction node for foreign powers. Across over two thousand years of history, native inhabitants exercised true, outward-projecting strategic agency during only three major epochs, along with a few desperate flashes of resistance.
The Historical Exceptions: Strategic Vision and Maritime Enforcement
What distinguished these rare moments was not mere physical size, but the sudden realization that geography must be actively integrated and militarized, or it will be weaponized by external powers.
The first major epoch occurred in the 7th century under Jayanasa and Srivijaya, characterized by militarizing the bottleneck. Jayanasa recognized that sitting passively along the Malacca Strait meant remaining a subject of Indian and Chinese merchant power. Srivijaya’s dominance was not built on agrarian land mass, but on assertive naval coercion. Srivijaya built a powerful navy that cleared piracy, forced passing vessels to dock at its ports, paid tariffs, and traded under Srivijaya’s regulatory authority, successfully transforming a passive shipping lane into a sovereign maritime mandate.
The second epoch took place in the 13th to 14th centuries under Kertanegara, Tribuwana, and the Singhasari-Majapahit empire through preemptive containment. Observing the expanding Mongol (Yuan) threat from the Asian mainland, Kertanegara launched the Pamalayu Expedition—a brilliant preemptive geopolitical strike designed to unify Sumatra and the surrounding sea lanes before Kublai Khan’s fleet could establish a foothold. Decades later, Queen Tribuwana Tunggadewi and Prime Minister Gajah Mada inherited this strategic architecture. Through the Sumpah Palapa and the political concept of Mitreka Satata, Majapahit unified the maritime rim into a cooperative, self-policing commonwealth backed by a powerful blue-water fleet, ensuring continental empires could not divide and conquer the islands.
The third epoch emerged with the 1945 Revolutionary Generation in forging a sovereign state. Declaring independence in 1945 and fighting a four-year armed and diplomatic revolution forced a fragmented collection of island cultures into a single sovereign republic. The founders successfully defeated Dutch efforts to fracture the archipelago into weak, manageable puppet states (such as the State of East Indonesia), converting a colonial extraction zone into an internationally recognized sovereign actor. An honorary mention in this lineage belongs to Adipati Yunus of Jepara (Pati Unus), who in 1513 launched a massive, forward-leaning naval strike against Portuguese-held Malacca in a desperate, courageous attempt to dislodge a foreign colonial wedge before European sea power could establish a permanent grip over the spice routes.
