China’s recent actions in the South China Sea have posed a looming threat to Indonesia. These include China’s frequent acts of defiance of international law, interfering with Indonesia’s policing efforts in its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and challenging Indonesia’s maritime sovereignty within President Joko Widodo’s Global Maritime Fulcrum agenda.

Although these developments have generated the expectation that Jakarta would assert a stronger balancing position towards Beijing to protect its interests, Indonesia, in fact, has not been pursuing a balancing strategy despite the strong nationalistic nuances behind the Global Maritime Fulcrum agenda. A crucial factor for this is the lack of consensus among the key domestic actors on the China threat.

… Emirza Adi Syailendra is a Senior Analyst at the Indonesia Programme at the S. Rajaratnam of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU). A longer version was published by Taylor & Francis in Asian Security on 5 September 2017.