How Indonesia could be a bridge between China and the US in Asia

As I prepare for a visit to China this week, it strikes me that countries often have to erase parts of history to create history. I have in mind how Indonesia and China have overcome a legacy of distrust to build a sustainable relationship in what is called the Asian Century. They have become natural partners in Asia.

In 1965, an insurrection by Indonesian communists aligned with Beijing led to one of the worst crises of contemporary Indonesian history. Relations with China plummeted; indeed, diplomatic ties ceased in 1967 and were only restored in 1990. Unfortunately, relations were tested again soon afterwards by attacks on ethnic Chinese in Jakarta in 1998 and by Beijing’s diplomatic intervention on their behalf, although the victims were Indonesian citizens.

The two decades since then have seen bilateral relations flourish to a degree that an uneasy past could not have foretold. China-Indonesia relations today are based not on the fortunes of any one community, but on a shared investment in a common Asian future at a time of acute transition. The United States remains the preponderant global power, but the scope and degree of its pre-eminence are changing. Unlike its expansive geopolitical past, when it laid the foundations of the global economic and strategic order after the end of the second world war, it has recently entered a mode of self-willed contraction.

US President Donald Trump has signalled the new conservative mood in American strategy by pulling his country out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris Accord on Climate Change. It would be wrong to say that America is becoming protectionist, let alone isolationist – it is not there as yet – but it would be right to see Trump as trying to shore up America’s domestic strengths so as to reposition it as a global power. In the interregnum, the degree of American influence abroad will decrease.