Summary: This article argues that Indonesia’s bebas aktif policy benefits the whole Southeast Asian region, not just Indonesia. Instead of focusing only on Indonesia’s domestic reasons for staying non-aligned, it shows how the policy helps maintain stability across the region. While many international relations theories suggest that growing rivalry between major powers would force countries like Indonesia to take sides, the article explains why Indonesia has stayed non-aligned for decades – and why changing this would create widespread problems.

Australia’s 2026 National Defence Strategy (NDS) identifies intense US-China competition as ‘an enduring feature of our strategic environment’ and stakes Australia’s security on five interlocking tasks: defending the continent and its approaches; deterring through denial any adversary’s attempt to project power; protecting Australia’s economic connections to the region; contributing to Indo-Pacific collective security; and upholding the global rules-based order. Every one of those tasks depends, in ways the NDS does not make explicit, on a structural condition that this article identifies and analyses: Indonesian non-alignment.

The 2026 NDS states plainly that ‘any effective balance of military power in the Indo-Pacific will require the presence and role of the United States,’ and directs the ADF to deepen coordination with regional partners to ‘shape a region governed by rights and rules, not fear or force.’ That shaping effort depends on ASEAN’s institutional coherence – on the existence of a multilateral framework through which smaller states manage great power competition without being forced to choose sides. This article, co-authored at Indonesia’s Army Command and Staff College by an Australian Army major alongside counterparts from the US, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, demonstrates that ASEAN’s coherence is not a structural given. It is instead a condition that Indonesian non-alignment actively produces, and that Indonesian alignment – in either direction – would rapidly dissolve.

The warning for Canberra is concrete. The 2026 NDS directs Australia to ‘increase coordination with regional partners’ and strengthen ‘more diverse international industrial partnerships.’ Australia’s expanding bilateral defence engagement with Jakarta – through Super Garuda Shield, capability transfer frameworks, and ministerial-level dialogues – is consistent with those directives. The article demonstrates, however, that well-intentioned bilateral deepening can cumulatively cross a ‘regional legibility threshold’ at which China, ASEAN partners, and hedging states perceive Indonesia as functionally aligned with the US, even absent any formal declaration. Once that threshold is crossed, the stabilising architecture on which Australia’s own denial strategy depends begins an irreversible erosion. The NDS’s investment in collective deterrence cannot be disaggregated from the institutional conditions that make collective deterrence possible.

The February 2026 closure of the Strait of Hormuz sharpens this analysis directly. The NDS draws on lessons learned from conflicts in the Middle East in shaping capability acquisition; it should also draw on the alignment pressure that crisis generated across Southeast Asia. Indonesia’s approximately 20-day petroleum reserve buffer was exposed, China’s insulation through overland supply converted energy dependency into a new vector of strategic leverage, and every government in the region faced intensified pressure to declare loyalties. The 2026 NDS identifies “improving national civil preparedness and resilience” as a core pillar; this article extends that logic regionally, arguing that structural energy interdependencies in Southeast Asia – and their exploitation under crisis conditions – constitute a material threat to the non-aligned posture on which Australia’s preferred regional order rests.

The practical implication for defence planners and government is this: bilateral frameworks with Jakarta are most strategically durable when calibrated to preserve Indonesia’s non-aligned posture rather than inadvertently erode it. A Jakarta that maintains principled independence is strategically available to both Washington and Beijing – and therefore to Australia as a credible regional partner and honest broker. A Jakarta that has been perceived to choose is strategically lost to half the region. The 2026 NDS commits Australia to a rules-based, partner-enabled Indo-Pacific. This article explains the single structural condition on which that commitment most consequentially depends.

To read the full publication, just follow this link.

Still Interested?

Why not read this article by Damon Radford, titled ‘With, By, and Through – Instructing at a Foreign Military Academy’ or The Cove’s Know Your Region series on Indonesia.

Cove+ also offers a series of short courses on Strategy that relate to this article.