Delegations from ASEAN and Russia attend the ASEAN–Russia Commemorative Summit in Kazan, Russia, June 2025.

Photo source: Russian Presidential Executive Office / Kremlin.ru

When Mohammad Hatta set out the principles of Indonesian foreign policy in 1948, he reached for an image that belonged to the archipelago itself. Indonesia, he argued, should row between two reefs, mendayung antara dua karang, refusing to let either the American or the Soviet bloc dictate its course. The formula later hardened into bebas aktif: Indonesia would decide where it stood, and it would remain an active participant in world affairs while doing so. Behind the metaphor sat a larger claim about sovereignty. Cooperation, in Hatta‘’s reading, did not require submission, and engagement did not require alignment. For seven decades that language has given Indonesian diplomacy a striking continuity across radically different political orders, allowing Jakarta to present flexibility as principle rather than expediency. It also handed the wider postcolonial world a grammar of self-determination, the same grammar that ran through Bandung in 1955 and the Non-Aligned Movement that followed. What the metaphor quietly assumed, however, was a material condition. There has to be open water between the reefs, and the boat has to be seaworthy. Rowing is not a doctrine; it is a capacity. And it is precisely that capacity that is now under strain. The question facing Indonesian foreign policy today is not whether Jakarta still believes in non-alignment. It is whether the material conditions that once made non-alignment exercisable still exist, and at what price. That question, I would argue, is not Indonesia‘’s alone. It is being asked, in different registers, across much of the Global South.

An absence that requires explanation

President Prabowo Subianto‘’s decision to skip the ASEAN-Russia Commemorative Summit in Kazan on 17 and 18 June drew attention precisely because Indonesia did not disengage. Foreign Minister Sugiono attended in his place, spoke on the president‘’s behalf, and endorsed deeper cooperation with Moscow on trade, food and energy. Jakarta was in the room; the president was not.

The official explanation, that Prabowo preferred to concentrate on domestic affairs, was brief to the point of opacity. The temptation is to read the empty chair through the familiar grammar of hedging: engage without committing, cooperate while preserving the option to reverse course, send the minister so that the president‘’s absence becomes its own signal. That reading is plausible. It is also, in my view, too comfortable, because it treats foreign policy as a repertoire of gestures and ignores the pressures under which those gestures are produced. There is no evidence that Prabowo stayed home because of the protests, the fiscal squeeze or the pressure on the rupiah, and the government has established no such connection. But the setting in which the trip was canceled is analytically decisive, and even Foreign Policy read Indonesia‘’s unusually low profile against an economy that looked "rocky." Prabowo‘’s absence occurred at the precise moment when the domestic effects of an external energy shock were becoming harder to contain. The war involving the United States, Israel and Iran, which began on 28 February with the American air and maritime campaign against Iranian targets, disrupted traffic around the Strait of Hormuz and, at the height of the crisis, pushed crude above 100 dollars a barrel. Shipping and insurance costs climbed, and supply uncertainty spread through every Asian economy dependent on imported energy. A fragile April ceasefire later took some of the heat out of prices, yet the damage kept traveling downstream through the second quarter, which is why the domestic reckoning arrived in June even as the barrel eased.

Indonesia‘’s exposure has a specific structure. The country is rich in coal and commodities, yet it depends heavily on imported crude and refined petroleum, and roughly a fifth to a quarter of its crude imports normally pass through Hormuz. Domestic production has declined for years, refining capacity has never caught up, and consumption keeps rising. Because fuel prices are among the most politically sensitive variables in Indonesian life, an external shock translates almost immediately into a fiscal dilemma: hold regulated prices down and compensate state-owned suppliers, accept a wider deficit, or cannibalize other spending. None of these options is painless, and all of them are political. The shock did not stay at sea. It traveled through import costs, the exchange rate and the budget, and from there into transport, food prices and household purchasing power. This is what I mean when I say that the international system does not knock at the door of domestic politics; it is already inside the house.

The domestic chain of the energy shock

On 12 June, around 1,500 students demonstrated in Jakarta against higher fuel prices, the rising cost of living and spending they considered wasteful, marching under the warning that Indonesia was heading towards bankruptcy. The immediate trigger was concrete: the government had let the price of Pertamax, the non-subsidized fuel favored by the urban middle class, rise by more than 30 per cent. The rupiah had meanwhile breached 18,000 to the dollar, its weakest level on record, after trading closer to 16,000 earlier in the year, while the Jakarta stock market had shed roughly a third of its value since January. Similar protests followed in other cities, and their targets widened to include the expanding role of the military in civilian institutions. Prabowo‘’s free nutritious meals program, which had carried much of the social promise of his campaign, became a lightning rod. By June it was associated with administrative disorder and corruption allegations: the former head of the National Nutrition Agency and two former deputies had been arrested on graft charges tied to the scheme, and the government had already trimmed the program’s 2026 allocation from 335 trillion to 268 trillion rupiah, a cut of some 67 trillion, with officials signaling further "efficiency" savings to come. The controversy was never really about whether schoolchildren should eat. It posed a harder question about the Indonesian state: whether it can administer a program of this scale without reproducing the leakage, fragmented authority and patronage that have historically accompanied large distributive schemes.

The energy crisis sharpened the dilemma because it forced choices. Money spent cushioning fuel prices could not be spent elsewhere. Cutting subsidies risked the streets; protecting the meals program invited the charge that the administration was defending the president‘’s electoral brand while the broader fiscal position deteriorated. This was the environment surrounding Kazan, and it changes how the summit should be read. The energy pressure that complicated Prabowo‘’s position at home simultaneously strengthened Jakarta‘’s interest in Moscow. The commitment to import as much as 150 million barrels of Russian crude in phases through the end of 2026, taken after Prabowo‘’s April visit to Moscow and reaffirmed at Kazan, together with the parallel talks on nuclear cooperation with Rosatom, belongs to the same causal chain as the fuel hikes and the protests. A war in the Gulf raised import costs; import costs strained the rupiah and widened the subsidy burden; that burden drove the search for alternative suppliers. Foreign policy analysis routinely keeps these fields apart, filing alignment under strategy and inflation under governance. Indonesia‘’s situation exposes how artificial that separation has become. The state does not conduct diplomacy in one room and manage the budget in another. It manages a single structure of pressure with instruments drawn from both, which is why a reading in the register of Robert Cox, one that treats the state as the site where world order and domestic social forces meet, travels further here than the older image of states colliding like billiard balls in an anarchic void.

From strategic autonomy to managed dependence

The interesting question, then, is not whether Indonesia is drifting toward Russia in some broad diplomatic sense. It is what kinds of dependence Jakarta is prepared to accept in order to secure energy, protect the budget and preserve political authority. Officials like to present bebas aktif as a doctrine that has survived the Cold War, the New Order, democratization and the US-China rivalry with its meaning intact. But non-alignment has never been exercised in conditions of freedom. During the Cold War, superpower competition imposed risks while also creating bargaining space: aid, recognition and support could be sought from more than one direction, and the rivalry itself gave non-aligned governments leverage. The decades that followed offered a different kind of room, in which Indonesia could deepen economic ties with China, keep defense relations with the United States, work with Japan and Europe, and maintain channels to Moscow without every transaction carrying the weight of a permanent geopolitical choice. That room is closing. Sanctions, export controls, financial restrictions and technology bans now reach into decisions that were once ordinary commerce. Supply chains have become instruments of security policy, and payment systems and technical standards carry geopolitical consequences that stay invisible until a crisis exposes them. The Russian oil deal illustrates the point more sharply than any theoretical statement could. Months after it was announced, the arrangement was still snagged on regulatory and logistical constraints: a shortage of tankers willing to move sanctioned crude, long and costly shipping routes, and Pertamina‘’s need to avoid breaching the covenants on its global bonds. Indonesia is formally free to buy Russian oil. The exercise of that freedom, however, runs through shipping, insurance, payment routes, storage, refinery compatibility and the risk of secondary pressure, and it is throttled by the very financial architecture, the Western bond markets and sanctions-driven insurance regimes, that Jakarta cannot exit. Legal sovereignty persists while the material cost of using it climbs. Autonomy is a material condition before it is a legal one, and the two can drift apart for a long time before anyone names the gap. The language of diversification obscures this. Buying Russian crude gives Indonesia another supplier, improves its bargaining position and offers relief in an emergency; oil purchases can, at least in principle, be reduced or redirected later.

Nuclear infrastructure operates on an entirely different timescale. The conversations in Kazan have not yet produced a binding technological relationship, but if they move into contracts and construction, they will tie Indonesia to maintenance systems, training pipelines, fuel arrangements, regulatory standards and specialist expertise for decades. Dependence of this kind requires no formal political control. It sits inside the infrastructure itself: in who holds the knowledge, who performs the repairs, who writes the software and who supplies the fuel. This is where the distinction that matters comes into focus. Crude oil and nuclear technology bind a peripheral economy to external powers on different time horizons, and infrastructural dependence is the stickier of the two, because it embeds foreign expertise, standards and maintenance regimes into the productive base of the country itself. The point extends well beyond Russia. Chinese technology, Japanese finance, American security systems or South Korean nuclear expertise would each generate their own asymmetries, because no major infrastructure agreement is politically neutral. A country can multiply its suppliers and still lose room for action. Decisions taken under crisis conditions have a way of hardening into arrangements that later become prohibitively expensive to alter, and that is the quiet mechanism by which emergency management turns into durable structure.

The material limits of bebas aktif

For these reasons I would resist celebrating the empty chair in Kazan as evidence of strategic finesse. What it revealed is less flattering and considerably more important. Indonesian foreign policy is now conducted under conditions in which external shocks reach domestic politics faster than ever, while the very instruments used to manage those shocks generate new forms of dependence.

Indonesia retains real agency. Its market is large, its diplomatic standing is intact, and it can engage several partners while refusing formal alignment. But autonomy cannot be measured by counting the capitals with which Jakarta maintains relations. It depends on whether the state can absorb shocks, finance its own choices, regulate the foreign technology operating on its territory, and prevent emergency measures from congealing into permanent constraint. ASEAN provides diplomatic cover for this balancing act, offering member states a regional umbrella under which to engage competing powers. It has done far less to reduce the material vulnerabilities that make such engagement costly in the first place, which is a familiar pattern in the organization’s history: procedural centrality without structural capacity. The Kazan summit fit the pattern precisely, producing a declaration, a plan of action and a joint statement on energy cooperation, while the hard constraints, the refineries and tankers and bond covenants, sat untouched on the national ledger of every member state. Hatta’s metaphor still captures Indonesia’s determination to avoid subordination. It says nothing about who builds the boat, who insures the voyage, where the fuel comes from, or what happens when the engine cannot be repaired without foreign assistance. Indonesia can still choose its direction. It has progressively less control over the conditions of the journey. And it is in that gap, between the freedom to choose and the capacity to sustain the choice, that the future of bebas aktif, and of non-alignment across the Global South, will be decided.