When Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles signs a new bilateral Defence Cooperation Agreement today with Indonesia’s Defence Minister and president-elect Prabowo Subianto, observers would be wise to treat Australian claims of its ‘historic’ significance with caution.
Australian officials who deal with Indonesia surely tire of commentators telling them to curb their optimism. Jakarta’s limitations as a security partner, shaped by its non-aligned foreign policy and threat perceptions that diverge from Australia’s, are well known and factored in.
And yet Australia sometimes struggles with positivity bias in its inter-governmental relations with Indonesia, especially at the political level. Canberra’s desire to project optimism across such a consequential, previously fraught relationship is understandable. But this can also lend itself to amnesia and hyperbole.
Over the past decade, Australia’s efforts to elevate defence relations with Indonesia have at least managed to stay aloft. But if Canberra has escaped the vicissitudes that previously marred Australia’s interactions with Indonesia, its defence cooperation initiatives have also failed to live up to their ‘historic’ billing.
The previous 2012 defence cooperation agreement (DCA) was upgraded as recently as 2021 under Australia’s previous, Liberal-National government. This upgrade was also heralded as a historic breakthrough. Yet it is now largely forgotten.
As far back as February 2024, the current Labor government was already predicting that its plans to conclude a new, treaty-level DCA ‘would be the most significant form of defence partnership in the history of relations between Indonesia and Australia’. Notably, Indonesia’s government has been much more circumspect throughout the negotiations.
Like the work of artist M C Escher, the ‘historic steps’ of Australia’s defence relations with Indonesia seem to wind back on themselves without fundamental purpose beyond perpetual ascent. Any perceived uplift in strategic cooperation from the latest agreement is likely to prove similarly illusory.
Admittedly, it is difficult to offer a conclusive judgement when so little detail about the new agreement is publicly available. We have repeatedly been told it will have treaty status, deepen reciprocal access between the two countries armed forces and improve inter-operability through enhanced exchanges and expanded exercises.
Given Indonesia’s geographical spread across Australia’s northern approaches, Canberra has obvious reasons to pursue greater access for the Australian Defence Force. If impactful projection is to be realised, it will depend greatly on the ADF’s ability to move through the Indonesian archipelago. Peacetime rights of maritime passage and overflight, mainly on a north-south axis, are already enshrined in international law and Indonesia’s own legal declarations.
The advent of AUKUS highlighted residual sensitivity in Jakarta, in regard to Australia’s future operation of nuclear-powered submarines near Indonesia. On the other hand, the nuclear submarines of AUKUS, with their greater endurance and payloads, could bypass Indonesia in any future major conflict by moving the viable zone of operations further north. Australia’s existing diesel submarines are more suited to interdiction operations within the archipelago.
But bilateral discussions on such sensitive subjects are likely to stay well out of the public domain.
Beyond transiting through Indonesia, Australia no doubt harbours grander ambitions to use enhanced defence cooperation with Indonesia in a diplomatic shaping context, presenting this as part of a common effort to uphold the rules-based order on an Indo-Pacific level. This is where Canberra and Jakarta are most prone to seeing past each other. Prabowo’s recent statements suggest he sees a mainly neighbour-to-neighbour relationship with Australia, including stability across the long, shared maritime boundary.
The big test here, one senses, is Prabowo’s willingness to accept Australian offers of capacity building that would improve Jakarta’s maritime domain awareness and ability to control its vast archipelagic sea and exclusive economic zone, including monitoring the increasing and sometimes undetected presence of China’s navy on and an under the water.
Australia is likely to view Prabowo’s elevation from defence minister to president as a helpful point of continuity, centring defence ties within the bilateral relationship. He is well known to Australia. But Prabowo also remembers Australia’s potential to be a thorn in Indonesia’s underbelly from his own military experiences in East Timor. Papua remains a latent but potent source of Indonesian suspicion towards Australia, which Canberra can only do so much to mitigate.
Inter-operability has some practical meaning in the military relationship. At the lower end of capability, Indonesia’s armed forces already use Bushmaster vehicles, while at the higher end, Australia’s operation of F-35As in exercises in Indonesia demonstrates increased trust and confidence, especially between the two air forces. But one significant constraint on inter-operability is likely to be Prabowo’s ambition to boost defence cooperation with Russia, affirmed on his recent trip to Moscow. In this context, Australia’s intelligence community will also be following Prabowo’s expressed intention to cooperate with Russia on civil nuclear energy.
Indonesia’s sometime prickly protectiveness of its sovereignty may constrain its defence cooperation with China, particularly if Beijing overplays its hand in the South China Sea. But Prabowo is also pursuing deeper defence links with China, in parallel to those with Australia. The more porous Indonesia becomes to Chinese and Russian strategic influences, the greater Australia’s difficulty in developing meaningful depth to the defence relationship with it.