By Justin Hastings
The Australia-Indonesia Defence Cooperation Agreement,signed on 29 August, is a major step forward in bilateral relations. The steady trend of engagement and cooperation will disappoint Australians hoping for a bigger strategic realignment in the Indo-Pacific, but it does present some concrete opportunities for improving the overall relationship, depending on implementation. Yet the devil is in the details.
The quick negotiations and signing of the agreement with Prabowo, the current Indonesian Defence Minister and future president, suggests that there is little reason to think there will be fundamental changes in Australia-Indonesia relations over the next half-decade, althoughPrabowo’s temperamentwill likely bring occasional turbulence. In Australia, Parliament will scrutinise Indonesia’s human rights record, the implications of the two countries’ militaries operating in each other’s territory and other areas that could prove controversial.
The treaty is not an alliance, as Prabowo emphasised even as he was signing it, but a continuation of Indonesia’s policy of non-alignment while it seeks cooperation and friendship with nearly all in the region. This is not uncommon in Southeast Asia. Vietnam has pursued strategic partnerships with a diverse list of countries recently, including the United States, China and Australia, to shore up its own security.
Perhaps to make this point, Indonesia hosted a high-level meeting with Chinese officials andagreed to military exercisesat nearly the same time as it signed the defence cooperation agreement with Australia.
Instead of fundamentally redefining the Australia–Indonesia strategic relationship, the defence cooperation agreement appears to focus on ironing out nuts-and-bolts issues and addressing legal constraints on cooperation. The treaty makes provisions, for instance, for each country’s military to operate from the territory of the other and provides legal protections to military personnel, allowing for more complex military activities. The key will be to produce actual cooperative operations that showcase the benefits brought by implementing these provisions.
Australia can use these cooperative activities to smooth over continuing rough patches in the bilateral relationship and pursue mutual interests. For example, when the Australian government suddenly announced AUKUS several years ago, it raised the hackles ofseveral Southeast Asian partners— not least Indonesia — which argued that AUKUS submarines would threaten regional security and compromise non-proliferation efforts.
Indonesia appears to havesoftened its stancesince then, and Prabowo’s pragmatism about AUKUS helped produce language in the recent Indonesia-Australia agreement that emphasises information-sharing, coordination and cooperation on maritime security issues. Canberra has an opportunity to build confidence in Jakarta about its intentions in the Indo-Pacific as Australia pursues the most expensive naval acquisition program in its history.
Because of its robust relationship with China and its policy of non-alignment, Indonesia will not cooperate with Australia specifically to counterChinese influence in Southeast Asia, but they have their own reasons to be concerned about Chinese activities in the South China Sea.
China claims parts of Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone near the Natuna islands, which led to aquietly-resolvedarmedstandoffin 2021. Jakarta does not recognise China’s claims in the South China Sea and has cited as evidence the2016 Permanent Court of Arbitrationfinding that rejects the nine-dash line. Both Australia and Indonesia tend to support multilateral solutions to international problems— upholding the validity and implementing enforcement of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) are likely to be straightforward for both countries.
The treaty also apparently contains a reference to increasing technical cooperation in certain areas of science and technology. While this is usually boilerplate language in any strategic partnership agreement, this is potentially the key to real advances in the relationship. Indonesia’s foreign policy establishment dislikes AUKUS not only for regional security and non-proliferation reasons, but also for the perceived unfairness of the technology transfers in both pillars of AUKUS from the United States and the United Kingdom to Australia.
While Indonesia is unlikely to get access to the most sensitive AUKUS technologies, Australia would do well to use the agreement to rethink and step-up technology transfers to Indonesia in any bilateral military cooperation activity or defence export deal.
As it seeks to modernise, the Indonesian military has been on a procurement spree under Prabowo and is trying to diversify suppliers to minimise dependence on any one partner. Australia’s contribution to these efforts has beenconfined toa dealfor Bushmaster protected mobility vehicles. But a broader program of defence cooperation, licensed production and technology transfers, strategically targeted toward areas where Australia has expertise and Indonesia has needs, could solidify confidence between the two countries.
By easing the details of defence cooperation, the treaty could also permeate to other areas of the bilateral relationship. For a neighbouring country, Australia has long represented a surprisingly small share of Indonesia’s trade — in 2021, Australia represented only4.8 per centof Indonesia’s importsand 1.4 per cent of exports.
While defence trade will never be a large percentage of overall trade, defence products are manufacturing and technology-intensive and an improvement in the defence trade climate between Indonesia and Australia could spearhead a broader interest in bilateral trade.
- About the author: Justin Hastings is Professor of International Relations and Comparative Politics at the University of Sydney
- Source: This article was published by East Asia Forum