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 Three Chinese companies committed 250 million doses of vaccines to
the archipelago of 270 million people. A letter of intent was signed
with a UK-based company for another 100 million.
Absent from these pledges: the United States.
Not only was it not promising any vaccine, but months earlier the
United States shocked Indonesian officials by asking to land and
refuel its spy planes in the territory, four senior Indonesian
officials told Reuters. This would reverse a decades-long policy of
strategic neutrality in the country.
With the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo due to visit Jakarta on
Oct. 29, Washington's campaign to buttress its influence in the
region - part of its escalating global rivalry with China - has been
misfiring, say government officials and analysts.
On the other hand, China - Indonesia and the region's biggest
investor and trading partner - has won ground with vaccines and
trade.
America's strategic interests converge with those of many others in
the region; Washington opposes Beijing's island-building and
militarisation of the South China Sea. Vietnam, the Philippines,
Malaysia and Brunei dispute China's territorial claim to over 90% of
the waterway.
Indonesia does not have a formal claim to the waters, but it, too,
opposes China's claim. China is less popular among Indonesians than
the United States, according to polling in 2018 by the Pew Research
Center, a think-tank in Washington.
This is an edge that the United States under President Donald Trump
has blunted, according to interviews with more than a dozen
government officials, former diplomats and analysts. Meanwhile China
is managing to parlay its economic heft and early recovery from
coronavirus restrictions to strategic advantage, they said.
"The U.S uses sanctions and muscle too much," said one Indonesian
government source. "China is smart. It always uses the soft power
approach, the economic approach, the development approach."
Pompeo said ahead of his visit that there are issues where the
United States has already improved the relationship between the
countries, "but there's more that we can do."
U.S. assistant secretary of State David Stillwell said separately
the U.S. was working to build a "stronger economic partnership" with
Indonesia and the United States had donated 1,000 ventilators to the
country, part of a $12.5 million coronavirus aid package.
SPY PLANES
A former Dutch colony with hundreds of ethnic groups scattered over
more than 17,000 islands, Indonesia is a founder member of the
non-aligned movement, an alliance of developing countries which
agreed after World War Two to avoid any defence tie-ups that serve
the interests of the big powers. Since emerging from authoritarian
rule 22 years ago, it has never allowed foreign militaries to stage
operations on its soil, although it does conduct military exercises
with other nations.
With this in mind, Indonesian officials said it was a surprise when
the United States made multiple high-level approaches in late July
and early August to Indonesia's defence and foreign ministers to
grant landing and refueling rights to its P-8 Poseidon surveillance
aircraft. These play a central role in monitoring China's military
activity in Southeast Asia.
The proposal - first reported by Reuters - was swiftly rejected
after it was reviewed by Indonesia's President Joko Widodo, commonly
known as "Jokowi," the officials said.
Pompeo declined to comment on the rebuff. The U.S. Defence
department declined to comment, as did spokespeople for Indonesia's
government.
Singapore, the Philippines and Malaysia have allowed P-8s to fly in
and out of their territory; Washington's request was more political
than operational, said Euan Graham, an Asia-Pacific security analyst
attached to the Shangri-la Dialogue, an annual meeting of regional
security chiefs.
The P-8 bid was part of a region-wide U.S. diplomatic blitz that
began in mid-July with three days of speeches by Pompeo and other
senior U.S. officials denouncing China's conduct in the South China
Sea.
As well as declaring China's territorial claims unlawful, the United
States accused Beijing of "gangster tactics," saying Beijing denies
Southeast Asian states the opportunity to develop the sea's
resources. Washington has also announced sanctions on Chinese firms
and individuals that help China build military installations on
islands, atolls and shoals in the waters. China bases its claim in
the South China Sea on what it calls "historic rights."
Repeated incursions into Indonesia's waters by Chinese coast guard
and fishing vessels are an emotive issue in Indonesia, where there
is a strong nationalist streak. The presence of about 36,000 Chinese
workers in Indonesia - one-third of all foreign workers according to
government data - has also riled many Indonesians.
In the past, the government has blown up Chinese and other foreign
fishing vessels.
Senior officials say Indonesia has told China bluntly of its
concerns of its aggression in the South China Sea this year. In
July, Indonesia held military exercises in the portion of the
waterway its claims as its exclusive economic zone.
But Indonesian officials said Washington's response to China has
been unnecessarily combative. Adding to their anxiety, they said,
was a growing fear that military conflict was brewing after the U.S.
and China held major military exercises in the South China Sea
within sight of each other near the contested Paracel Islands on
July 4.
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Foreign minister Retno responded to the rising superpower tensions in the region
by contacting her counterparts in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN) forum via their WhatsApp group. It was, said Retno, a "very fluid and
intensive communication" that quickly led to a joint statement on Aug. 8
decrying the "detrimental ramifications" of "changing geo-political dynamics in
the region."
VACCINE DIPLOMACY
President Jokowi, a former furniture manufacturer and exporter, has a plan to
transform Indonesia's economy and set a course for the country to become one of
the world's top five economies by 2045. That vision took a body-blow from the
coronavirus pandemic.
With fewer than 400,000 infections and 14,000 deaths, Indonesia's official
coronavirus burden is much lighter than many other big countries. However,
epidemiologists and public health experts say very low rates of testing and
contact-tracing mean the official figures significantly underestimate the spread
and the government can't suppress the virus. An estimated 10 million Indonesians
have fallen back into poverty and Indonesia's economic outlook has been
downgraded repeatedly by the government and international agencies.
Jokowi has said the government's response to the pandemic and prospects for
economic recovery are good compared to other countries.
Early access to a vaccine is Indonesia's only shot at controlling the pandemic,
said Greg Poling, a Southeast Asia analyst from the Washington D.C.-based Center
for Strategic and International Studies.
"It's the silver bullet," he told Reuters in an interview. "They have to get the
vaccine as fast as possible."
Jokowi's close confidant and Indonesia's coordinating minister for maritime
affairs and investment, Luhut Pandjaitan, gave the president cause for hope when
he returned in October from China's Yunnan province with promised supplies of
vaccines, which are in phase three trials, as well as a pledge to help Indonesia
manufacture and export one of the vaccines to other countries.
"It is very easy dealing with the Chinese and they actually executed almost all
of their promises and commitments," said a senior adviser who travelled to
Yunnan with Pandjaitan.
The U.S., grappling with one of the world's most severe COVID-19 outbreaks, has
hoarded its vaccines, withdrawn from the World Health Organization and, unlike
China, refused to join a WHO-sponsored plan to pool vaccines and distribute them
to countries based on need.
"They are completely ceding the field to China," said Aaron Connelly, an analyst
with Singapore's International Institute for Strategic Studies.
On his trip to Yunnan, Pandjaitan also secured almost $20 billion in funding
from Chinese companies for a pet project of the president: a plan to build a
lithium battery factory and nickel processing industry, the adviser said. Next
month, senior government officials say Indonesia is expected to sign the world's
biggest trade pact – the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership - that
involves ASEAN states and China, but not the U.S. Meanwhile, the U.S. has been
reviewing Indonesia's preferential trade status, to the alarm of Jakarta.
"NOT ONLY CHINA"
Indonesian officials and analysts say the Trump administration has made several
unforced diplomatic errors in Southeast Asia. These started in 2018 when Trump
did not attend the U.S.-ASEAN summit. In 2019, he sent his national security
adviser, a relatively junior government member, prompting seven of the region's
10 leaders to boycott the event. Washington has not appointed an ambassador to
ASEAN since 2017.
Connelly said Pompeo's confrontational rhetoric - he has described the Chinese
Communist Party as the "greatest threat" to the U.S. - makes Southeast Asian
states less willing to cooperate with the United States.
"He makes it about the U.S. versus China, rather than what China is doing to
Southeast Asia," he said.
Dino Patti Djalal, an Indonesian ambassador to the United States from 2010 to
2013, said Pompeo's "aggressively anti-China rhetoric" was, in part, targeting a
domestic political audience as the Trump administration tries to deflect
criticism of its handling of the coronavirus onto China.
Trump's push to cast China as the villain because the virus originated there had
not resonated with Southeast Asian governments, he said, while China's vaccine
diplomacy and its early economic recovery will serve Beijing well strategically.
"China is smartly and strategically using the COVID crisis to advance their
relationships (in the region)," he said. "They are striking that theme they have
always been pushing: When there are difficulties, it is China, not the U.S.,
that you can rely on."
Indonesia's foreign minister Retno Marsudi says Indonesia wants to engage with
as many countries as possible when it comes to combating the coronavirus and
developing its economy, including the U.S. This, she told Reuters, was the
essence of Indonesia's "independent and active" foreign policy.
"It's not only China," she said.
(Edited by Sara Ledwith)
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