The President Who Never Picked a Side

On October 20, Joko Widodo—universally known as Jokowi—will leave office as the most effective and admired of Indonesia’s five presidents since the country’s turn to democracy in 1998. Over the course of a decade leading the world’s third most populous democracy, Jokowi became best known for his domestic achievements: he bent Indonesia’s cacophonous and sometimes corrupt political elites to his will, drummed up tens of billions of dollars of foreign investment in airport, railway, and mineral-processing projects, and expanded the public’s access to health care and education. These improvements, alongside his humble origin story and straightforward communication style, helped make him incredibly popular: he is leaving office with an approval rating of 75 percent, rendering him one of the democratic world’s most well-liked leaders.

Less understood but equally consequential is the way Jokowi has shifted Indonesia’s foreign policy. For decades, Indonesia’s leaders tried to weave a path between great powers, often considering independence and nonalignment philosophical ends in themselves. Influenced by his experience as a furniture manufacturer and then the mayor of a midsize Indonesian city, Jokowi pivoted from his predecessors’ more rigid style and made a different approach—a uniquely practical and transactional one—his lodestar. He reframed Indonesia’s foreign policy as the art of the deal, bucking the expectation that developing countries must signal their choice between China and the United States. Polls of Asian policymakers and business elites often pose the question: “If your country were forced to align itself with one of these strategic rivals, which should it choose?” Jokowi consistently refused to make or account for such a binary choice, openly partnering with China to build up Indonesia’s infrastructure and industrial base, cutting business deals with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and engaging Iran and Russia in trade talks—all while continuing to maintain strong relations with the United States and Europe.

Other long-serving leaders of large developing countries such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan share Jokowi’s embrace of realpolitik. But Modi and Erdogan still reach for grander civilizational narratives to justify their pragmatism and strive for leading roles in multinational institutions. Jokowi, by contrast, chose never to attend a single UN General Assembly meeting in person. Throughout his presidency, critics suggested his foreign policy amounted to a turn inward that failed to secure Indonesia an appropriately influential role on the world stage.

But it seems clearer, by now, that Jokowi’s transactional, instinctive, self-interested strategy was in fact ahead of the times. It anticipated a competitive, fast-changing, egocentric world increasingly shorn of ideology, a world in which both leaders and citizens are less and less motivated by old, familiar divides between left and right and more focused on who can deliver them short-term material benefits. As his tenure draws to a close, other world leaders might look to Jokowi’s approach to bring clarity to their own foreign policies—which currently amount, too often, to a jarring mix of principled rhetoric and self-serving actions that leave their voters confused and suspicious.

MORAL IMPERATIVE

Ever since it won its independence from the Netherlands after World War II, Indonesia has tried to hedge its bets on foreign policy by navigating “between the power blocs,” as one of the country’s founding fathers, Mohammad Hatta, wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1958. Indonesia was a fragile country forged from the arbitrary boundaries of Dutch colonialism, and its early leaders had to work hard to keep the archipelago’s many ethnic and religious groups at peace. Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, hosted a conference in Bandung in 1955 to bring together newly independent countries in Africa and Asia to reject pressure to align with either the Soviet Union or the United States and focus more keenly on developing their economies and maintaining their hard-won sovereignty. Sukarno told delegates of his aspiration that they develop “a true consciousness of the interdependence of men and nations for their well-being and survival on earth.” As the Cold War intensified, Sukarno’s fears that Indonesia would become the target of yet another proxy war motivated him to help expand the Bandung Conference into the coalition that became the Non-Aligned Movement.

Indonesia’s embrace of what its leaders often called an “independent and active” foreign policy also enshrined the hope that, free from European control, postcolonial countries could reshape the world more equitably. But as Sukarno faced mounting economic and political problems at home, his foreign policy became increasingly aggressive and erratic; he blamed neocolonialism and imperialism for Indonesia’s domestic woes. In his later years in office, Sukarno leaned toward communism, sparking—or providing a pretext for—a military coup by a powerful general, Suharto, that unfolded over the course of 1965–66.

That coup was backed by the United States and other Western powers and led to the killings of hundreds of thousands of left-wing sympathizers and ethnic Chinese Indonesians. Officially, Suharto maintained Sukarno’s same “independent and active” foreign policy strategy. But his intense opposition to communism brought him closer to the West, as did his adoption of pro-business reforms promoted by the so-called Berkeley Mafia, a group of Indonesian economists who had been trained at the University of California.

The violent pivot from Sukarno to Suharto, and Suharto’s eventual ouster due to popular protests in 1998, seemed to confirm for Indonesia’s subsequent leaders the need to pursue a more cautious foreign policy, prioritizing being “independent” over being “active.” The fallout from the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the fracturing of Indonesia’s highly centralized political system kept the three interim presidents who succeeded Sukarno too busy at home to pursue an assertive foreign policy. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Indonesia’s first directly elected president, who governed from 2004 to 2014, sought a greater role for Indonesia on the world stage. But this effort lacked a strong guiding vision beyond his favorite mantra: Indonesia seeks “a million friends and zero enemies.”

FRIENDS FOR BENEFITS

After Jokowi was elected president, in 2014, however, he reframed Indonesia’s long-standing foreign policy approach. When he burst onto the national political scene after a seven-year stint as the mayor of Solo, a city of 500,000 people in central Java, the international press regularly compared him to U.S. President Barack Obama because of his rapid ascent and the wave of hope for change that he rode, especially among young Indonesians and human rights activists. Voters were impressed by his concrete record of achievement in Solo—he had revamped local markets, improved infrastructure, and worked with local communities to improve living and business conditions—and his humble background and freedom from corruption. With the help of his canny political instincts, as well as smart advisers, Jokowi played up his man-of-the-people image, choosing a workaday red-and-blue checked shirt as his campaign uniform. He unabashedly advertised his lack of ideology, suggesting that he was someone who could finally get things done rather than just talk.

When, early in his presidency, Jokowi pledged to make Indonesia a “global maritime fulcrum,” some local and international analysts interpreted this statement as a plan to transform Indonesia into a decisive balancing force in Asian security. But Jokowi’s first years as the country’s leader were characterized by a turn toward a more nuts-and-bolts, development-focused agenda than his most fervent backers had anticipated. In conversations with me during his first term, Jokowi’s advisers made it clear that he wanted to accelerate Indonesia’s annual GDP growth rate from five to seven percent; build much-needed ports, airports, and toll roads; improve Indonesians’ access to health care and educational opportunities; and attract more foreign investment.

For Jokowi, foreign policy became a means to achieve these domestic ends. Rather than looking to strategic thinkers or history books, he thought about foreign policy with the practical perspective of a furniture manufacturer. His approach took shape not long after he assumed power—for instance, when tensions flared in 2014 in the South China Sea as Beijing intensified its efforts to police Vietnamese and other countries’ fishing boats in contested waters. One adviser confided to me that he was struggling to convince the president that this dispute mattered to Indonesia. But he eventually caught Jokowi’s attention by explaining that the growing number of maritime clashes in the region would ultimately raise the cost of shipping and insurance for Indonesian companies that exported.

This focus on Indonesia’s economic interests above all made Jokowi an outlier compared with his predecessors—and with many other Southeast Asian leaders. Although Yudhoyono had considered developing friendly relations with other nations an end in itself, Jokowi explicitly rejected this attitude after he returned from his maiden international summit as president in November 2014. “For me, ‘free and active’ means making friends with countries that can provide us with benefits,” he told reporters on his plane. “What’s the point of making friends if we are always on the losing end?”

MULTIPLE CHOICE

From then on, although he occasionally spoke of the need to rebalance the global order to favor developing countries, Jokowi generally avoided grandiose diplomatic rhetoric. He eschewed many multinational summits, focusing squarely on attending economic forums such as G-20 and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings and using them to hone a sales pitch for investing in Indonesia. During his decade in power, he presided over an increase in foreign direct investment into Indonesia of nearly a third, to $286 billion. Jokowi ultimately judged foreign political and corporate leaders by their ability to “show [him] the money.”

Soon after becoming president, Jokowi was courted by Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Impressed by how rapidly China had developed its own infrastructure, in 2015 Jokowi chose a Chinese state-backed consortium to develop Indonesia’s first high-speed rail line—rejecting a rival Japanese bid, much to Tokyo’s frustration. One major factor in his choice was that, unlike their Japanese competitors, the Chinese state-owned companies did not require financial guarantees from the Indonesian government. This deal was the first in a series of major economic partnerships with Beijing that brought the two countries into much closer alignment. Indonesia’s previous leaders were reluctant to put so many eggs in one basket. But Jokowi was more motivated by who could invest quickly and at scale.

A similar pattern emerged in Jokowi’s approach to Indonesia’s important mining industry. Yudhoyono had equivocated on whether to enforce a wide-ranging ban on the export of raw minerals such as nickel to boost downstream processing and industrialization. But Jokowi rigidly upheld it over the objections of the United States and Europe. In an attempt to cast their objections as principled, Western countries warned Indonesia that the ban on the export of unprocessed commodities, which breached international trading rules, would damage the country’s growth prospects. Jokowi ignored these admonitions, and Chinese companies moved in to pour billions of dollars into remote Indonesian regions to develop smelting and other processing facilities.

Steps such as these made some U.S. policymakers and analysts fear that Jokowi was choosing China over the United States. But as he opened the doors to Chinese industrial conglomerates, Jokowi also assiduously courted investors from Europe, Japan, South Korea, and the United States, attracting major commitments from Hyundai, LG, and Microsoft, among others. Although he visited China eight times and met Xi on 12 occasions, Jokowi has maintained Indonesia’s diplomatic freedom of action and managed to keep Western partners keen to expand their engagements with his country. The more broadly successful deals Jokowi cut, the more he became convinced that Indonesia had a stronger hand in international negotiations than his predecessors had believed.

MATERIAL WORLD

There were risks inherent in Jokowi’s values-free, transactional attitude, ruling from the gut as much as the head. Betting so heavily on Chinese investment may pose longer-term threats to Indonesia’s foreign policy independence, given Beijing’s propensity to use economic linkages as coercive leverage. In private conversations with me, some Indonesian officials have said that they increasingly factor China’s possible responses into their foreign policy calculations and have become wary of upsetting such an important, and prickly, partner.

In the longer term, as China, Europe, and the United States all seek to “de-risk” sensitive sectors of their economies, Indonesia may lose access to some U.S. and European markets and technologies thanks to its expanding connections with China. However little a Southeast Asian country may want to choose a side, both Beijing and Washington may well force uncomfortable choices on these countries in the coming years.

In the near term, however, Jokowi succeeded in shifting Indonesia’s foreign policy so it became a tool to further his economic ambitions, including by deliberately refraining from seeking any specific role for Indonesia on the world stage. Jokowi is unashamed in his pursuit of national self-interest. When he visited Kyiv and Moscow in June 2022 for talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin, it was not to play global peace broker—unlike, for instance, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who, along with top officials from six other African countries, traveled to Russia and Ukraine in 2023 to bring an “African perspective” to facilitating a peace process. (The mission achieved no concrete results.) 

Jokowi may be at the vanguard of a global shift.

The goal of Jokowi’s trip, by contrast, was to try to find ways to stop the restrictions on grain exports from Ukraine, which had increased the price of noodles and other staples in Indonesia. His timing was serendipitous, as a deal on the exports of grain through the Black Sea was agreed to a month later. If this more targeted, materialistic approach left outsiders thinking that Indonesia punched below its weight globally, that was just fine with Jokowi.

In fact, Jokowi may be at the vanguard of a global shift. The philosophical precepts that underpin the so-called rules-based international order imply that to be self-interested, as a nation, is fundamentally a bad thing. But countries are shifting toward national egoism as a guiding principle of their foreign policy, even if they, unlike Jokowi, would be embarrassed to say so. United States’ and Europe’s recent moves to strengthen their industrial policies bear a strong resemblance to the Indonesian leader’s nationalistic approach. And perhaps one of the main lessons of Jokowi’s success—as reflected in his enduring popularity and real improvements to the lives of Indonesians—is that leaders should now take a chance on honestly articulating and consistently applying this new approach, instead of prevaricating.

After all, although the rivalry between the United States and China appears to be intensifying, this great-power competition is very different from the one that dominated during the Cold War. Neither great power is, in fact, now offering other countries a clear vision for how to organize their politics and society. The choice between the two is neither as ideological nor as stark as analysts often present it. And governments of all stripes are trying to pursue their own industrial strategies rather than investing in refreshing the global economic system. Tightly focused on economic self-interest, embracing deals with whoever can support his goals, Jokowi stands out as a leader for the world as it is becoming, not as it was, nor as some wish it would be.