Nations such as Indonesia will be key to successful U.S. deterrence of Chinese aggression.
Nations such as Indonesia will be key to successful U.S. deterrence of Chinese aggression.
D espite Xi Jinping’s guidance to China’s diplomatic corps in June 2021 to project “a credible, lovable, and respectable image,” his regime continues to alienate itself from other Asian states — indeed, from states that would seem critical if China is to be successful in achieving its aim of hemispheric hegemony.
While Beijing has put Northeast Asia on edge with its ongoing aerial-intimidation campaign around Taiwan, it has simultaneously encroached upon the waters of Indonesia, interfering with lawful energy exploration.
China’s violations of Indonesian sovereignty are far from “lovable” and may be self-defeating. Because Indonesia is the world’s fourth-largest country by population and is Southeast Asia’s largest economy, it figures to play a central, and perhaps decisive, role in the competition between China and the United States for regional influence. There is good reason that Evan Laksmana, senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, has referred to Indonesia as the “strategic fulcrum in the era of U.S.–China great power competition.” China will understand that perfectly well, meaning that the aggressive stance it is taking toward Indonesia is at once puzzling and informative.
While less publicized than China’s conflicts with the Philippines and Vietnam, the Sino-Indonesian quarrel has been brewing for more than five years. The dispute centers on the maritime tract Indonesia calls the North Natuna Sea. This patch of ocean rests just off the Natuna Islands, a small, but inhabited, cluster, that sits between Borneo, the Malay peninsula, and continental Southeast Asia.
Indonesia maintains an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) claim over the tract consistent with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and is engaged in oil and gas exploration, production, and pipeline construction within it. Beijing, meanwhile, asserts that the tract falls behind the “nine dash line” used by China to demark its maritime sovereignty in the South China Sea, despite the North Natuna Sea being almost 1,000 nautical miles from mainland China.
In recent months tensions have escalated. “Indonesia faces further confrontations with China,” the Asia Times reported in December, “if a British-Russian consortium proceeds with the development of a natural gas discovery that will involve laying a pipeline across the North Natuna Sea border to connect with Vietnam’s existing offshore network.” In an attempt at preempting such a development, China issued what Reuters calls an “unprecedented demand” that Indonesia cease operations in the maritime region.
Between the Giants
Indonesia has long maintained a position of geopolitical independence. In 1955, it hosted the Bandung Conference that inaugurated the nonaligned movement during the Cold War. Though at times it did slide closer to the U.S., particularly during the Suharto era, Indonesia never stood as a proxy for Washington or Moscow, instead pursuing a hedging policy. Three decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Jakarta finds itself occupying a pivotal space between the 21st century’s two great powers.
Beijing has courted Indonesia by giving it a premier status in the Belt and Road Initiative. In fact, it was in Indonesia’s legislature that Xi rolled out the maritime aspect of the program in 2013. Today, China is Indonesia’s largest trading partner and a source of investment many Indonesians consider essential to the country’s economic growth. In late December, for example, Indonesian president Joko Widodo broke ground on a Chinese-backed quadrillion-rupiah ($130 billion) industrial zone on Borneo. The 30,000-hectare project in North Kalimantan province plans to manufacture solar panels, batteries for electric cars, industrial silicon, and other products using power from a Chinese-funded hydroelectric plant.
Attracted by such economic incentives, Jakarta has tilted in China’s direction the past decade. David Shambaugh, a China expert and author of the 2020 book Where Great Powers Meet: America and China in Southeast Asia, argues that Indonesia “distinctly swung toward China” in the 2010s and registers Indonesia among the seven regional states that have aligned more closely with Beijing than with Washington.
It is in this context that Beijing has decided to attempt to interfere with Indonesia’s domestic energy industry, an intervention given added force by the strong possibility that China will use its economic clout against Indonesia to try to get its way. China has already demonstrated, in examples such as its treatment of Australia, and even more recently, Lithuania, its willingness to punish other countries economically. Indonesia thus faces a dilemma — one that explains its hesitation to protest China’s actions in recent months.
Amid this tension, Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Indonesia in December, voicing the United States’ firm support for, to use the term of the State Department’s preferred phrase, “a free and open Indo-Pacific.” At the University of Indonesia in Jakarta, Blinken criticized China and appealed to the Association of Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN) countries, Indonesia foremost among them, that are so crucial in shaping the regional balance of power.
“We all have a stake in ensuring that the world’s most dynamic region is free from coercion and accessible to all,” he said. “This is good for people across the region, and it’s good for Americans, because history shows that when this vast region is free and open, America is more secure and more prosperous.”
One element of the Biden–Blinken strategy has been to support an “ASEAN-centered regional architecture at the heart of the Indo-Pacific,” something that is one of the bloc’s own ambitions. Blinken reaffirmed that stance on his Southeast Asia trip, but some observers doubt the sincerity of this U.S. position. The editorial board of the Jakarta Post, for instance, described Blinken as “unconvincingly” emphasizing U.S. support for ASEAN centrality.
But the Jakarta Post and like-minded skeptics should not be so quick to assume dishonesty. As former deputy assistant secretary of defense and architect of the 2018 National Security Strategy, Elbridge Colby argues in his 2021 book The Strategy of Denial, the U.S. does not need to — and indeed cannot — maintain its own hegemony in the Indo-Pacific or expect ASEAN countries to all toe the American line. What is realistic — and crucial, from Colby’s perspective — is to deny China the ability to establish its own hegemony in the region.
At least one key member of the Biden administration agrees. President Biden’s top China theorist, Rush Doshi, writes in his 2021 book, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order, that the U.S. ought to pursue an asymmetric strategy to deny China regional hegemony, rather than trying to match China move-for-move.
Thus, U.S. backing for a central role for ASEAN makes sense. There seems to be little reason to doubt Blinken’s sincerity in saying that this is something he supports. Putting ASEAN at the center of this strategy ought to provide an obstacle to China’s probable strategy of selectively peeling off states in the region from an emerging anti-hegemonic coalition.
What China Wants
But why does Beijing continue to needle the countries it would appear to need in its camp if it is to establish itself as the region’s unquestioned titan?
One answer is that it needs to secure resources in its near abroad to meet its exploding energy demands, and to protect itself against being cut off from Mideast oil at the Malacca Strait chokepoint.
Gregory Poling, head of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, questions the focus on energy, however. “The energy argument itself has really been a red herring in South China Sea discussions,” he suggested in 2021. “The real implications for the United States and other nations are that China’s threats to the right of other nations to tap their own energy resources amounts to an unacceptable threat to international maritime law, and there are few American foreign policy interests as abiding as defending freedom of the seas.”
A competing argument is that China’s maritime resource aggression is merely an expression of its will to dominate. Snippets from Southeast Asian diplomats support this line of thinking. As Shambaugh quotes one Singaporean source, “The Chinese will tell you to stand, then they will tell you to sit, but if you do both they will next tell you to kneel. It will never stop.”
On this reasoning, China’s aggression against Indonesia is reminiscent of the 1911 Agadir Crisis, when Kaiser Wilhelm sent the SMS Panther to harass the French in Morocco under the pretext of protecting German citizens but with the obvious underlying motivation of taking its proverbial place in the sun. Beijing’s policy today, similarly, may have no specific resource objective but may instead reflect its overriding ambition to establish (or re-establish, it would argue) China’s preeminence. Xi wants Indonesia to know that his party heads the so-called community of common destiny.
But the Agadir Crisis backfired on the Kaiser. France, Britain, and Russia aligned more closely in the ensuing months and years to deny Berlin European hegemony. China’s actions could well catalyze a similar reaction today, repelling Southeast Asia’s free agents from Beijing’s orbit and into a de facto anti-hegemonic alliance —a trend demonstrated by Indonesia’s hosting of the largest-ever joint U.S.–Indonesian military drill in August 2021.
The U.S. advantage, Shambaugh argues in his book, is Beijing’s own proclivity to “overreach, overstep, bully, intimidate, penetrate, smother, and overwhelm Southeast Asian states and societies.” All the Biden administration needs to do is get out of its own way.
Unfortunately, it has failed to display this capability. As Hudson Institute scholar Walter Russell Mead wrote in January, “President Biden’s prime geopolitical goal of balancing China runs counter to his goal of democracy promotion. So far, there aren’t many signs that the administration is handling this tension effectively.” As evidence, Mead highlights the states President Biden invited to his “Summit for Democracy” at the end of 2021. The list, deemed “awkward” by the Brookings Institution, included Indonesia, yet excluded another key ASEAN partner, Singapore.
The Biden administration has the ammunition it needs to counter China in the pivotal Southeast Asia region. Whether it has the clarity of thought and the resolve necessary to align states as disparate as Singapore and Indonesia into an anti-hegemonic coalition is yet to be seen.