A diplomat in Jakarta recently recounted a telling anecdote: President Prabowo Subianto, already on an overseas trip, decided on a whim to add a stop in a neighboring country. The host government received almost no notice, and the visit had to be scrapped. No offense was intended or taken, but the episode illustrates a pattern that has defined Indonesian diplomacy for 18 months: a president who runs foreign policy like a campaign rally, on instinct and momentum, rather than as a state institution, on process and preparation.
This is not an isolated quirk. Since taking office, Prabowo has visited dozens of countries, met Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin multiple times, pushed Indonesia into BRICS, signed a sweeping trade and security framework with Washington, and inserted Jakarta into mediation efforts from Gaza to the aftermath of Iranian strikes. Analysts increasingly describe this record as personalistic: foreign policy runs less through the Foreign Ministry's institutional channels than through the president's own relationships, instincts, and travel schedule. Foreign Minister Sugiono and career diplomats at Pejambon handle the follow-up; the direction and timing are set by one man, often on short notice.
The case for a personal touch
There is a case for this style, and Prabowo's defenders make it fairly. Indonesia, a country of nearly 280 million people, has long punched below its economic weight in global diplomacy. A president who shows up in Moscow, Beijing, and Washington within months of each other signals that Jakarta wants a seat at every table, not just a comfortable one at ASEAN's. Prabowo frames this as “good neighbor” diplomacy: friendly with everyone, aligned with no one, true to the “free and active” doctrine his predecessors espoused. Indonesia's nonaligned tradition has long rewarded presidents willing to talk to rivals simultaneously, and Prabowo's willingness to sit down with Washington and Beijing in the same season is, in that narrow sense, consistent with decades of practice.
But style and substance are not the same thing, and a foreign policy built around one man's calendar carries costs that one built around institutions does not. The first is credibility. Diplomacy runs on predictability. Host governments need lead time to arrange security, protocol, and a substantive agenda; a leader who bolts on a stop at the last minute asks his hosts to absorb a disruption his own planning failed to anticipate. Canceled or scaled-back visits, even minor ones, accumulate into a reputation — and reputations are hard to shed once other capitals start hedging against Jakarta's next surprise.
Coordination and institutional atrophy
The second cost is coordination. As the president simultaneously deepens trade ties with the United States, expands cooperation with China, joins BRICS, and offers to mediate conflicts in the Middle East, someone in Jakarta must reconcile these moves into a single, coherent strategy — and explain to skeptical partners why none of it amounts to taking sides. Indonesia's own foreign-policy law mandates nonalignment; critics have already flagged the awkwardness of a word like “alliance” surfacing in agreements with Washington. That contradiction is what happens when big commitments are made in the moment, capital by capital, rather than worked out in advance by the ministry whose job is exactly that.
The third cost is institutional atrophy. A foreign service exists to give a country continuity across administrations, not just across a president's travel schedule. When major decisions are made on the road, by instinct, the ministry is reduced to a cleanup crew rather than an engine room. That may work while Prabowo has the energy and the relationships to sustain it personally. It will not survive him, and it will leave his successor with weaker institutions to inherit.
Indonesia's foreign policy would be better served by a lighter presidential travel schedule and a heavier institutional one: fewer trips made or extended on impulse, and more of the substantive work — negotiating positions, coordinating with the ministry, building the coalitions that make a summit meaningful — done before the president ever boards a plane. Let the system he leads do more of the work: route big decisions through the ministry before they are announced abroad, give host governments the lead time diplomacy requires, and trust that patient, less telegenic groundwork will do more for Indonesia's standing than the next impulsive whistle-stop.
A president can be the face of foreign policy without being its only mechanism. Indonesia's diplomats, and the countries that host them, deserve the difference. The stakes are high: as Jakarta deepens ties with Beijing, questions about who benefits are already emerging, and the hidden costs of those deals are becoming harder to ignore. Meanwhile, Prabowo's economic vision, which lacks a labor-market foundation, may undermine the very stability his diplomacy seeks to project. And as Indonesia grapples with man-made environmental crises, the need for coherent, institutional governance has never been clearer.
