Jonah Lo
International Relations
Michaelmas Term, 2024
Cambridge Journal of Political Affairs, 5(2), pp. 1-13
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14331683

Introduction

Studies of Singapore’s foreign policy have a long history, with a body of scholarship particularly influenced by Singaporean scholars. One such example is the political scientist and future diplomat Chan Heng Chee (1969), who broke new ground analysing Singapore’s foreign policy in the first three years since its independence in 1965. Since then, Singapore-affiliated political scientists such as Bilveer Singh (1988), Alan Chong (2010), Amitav Acharya (2009), and Terrence Lee (2024) have focused on examining the key foundations, principles, and determinants behind Singapore’s foreign policy. These studies have been somewhat limited by the lack of archival revelations after independence, with the occasional exceptions, such as Ang Cheng Guan’s (2013) work on the Cambodian crisis. However, studies have been supplemented by a steady release of memoirs and foreign policy commentaries from diplomats and foreign policy leaders – including those by Tommy Koh (2019), Bilahari Kausikan (2017), and Lee Kuan Yew (1998).

However, interest in Singapore’s foreign policy has extended beyond its borders. This interest has been driven firstly by the unlikely success of the policy, as perceived by scholars such as Michael Leifer (2000) and Graham Allison (Allison et al., 2013), as well as political figures such as Tony Blair (Allison et al., 2013). Secondly, due to its small size, Singapore’s foreign policy successes have positioned it neatly within debates of the pre-existing subfield of ‘Small State Foreign Policy’ (Lupel et al., 2024). What has been lacking, however, has been a sustained analysis of Singapore’s contemporary bilateral relations with its Southeast Asian neighbours. The closest attempts that have been made have largely been narrative historical accounts, which have listed events but have not made sufficiently deep analytical assessments, especially regarding success or failure (Hamilton-Hart, 2010; Kwek and Liow, 2015; Suryadinata, 2022).

This is a shame because choosing to focus on the success of Singapore’s foreign policy could help to unbundle its constituent actors, actions, and periods, prompting useful questions such as ‘Who makes Singapore’s foreign policy successful?’ or ‘Under what conditions has this foreign policy been successful?’ In this spirit, I ask the question: ‘Has Singapore been successful in its contemporary policy towards post-New Order Indonesia?’

I will choose to answer this question by looking at how Singapore has been able to shape the Indonesian state’s foreign policy for two reasons. First is the broadly accepted (if occasionally contested) claim that international relations are state-centric, and hence, international relations depend on state foreign policies (Lake, 2008). The second is historical and contextual, keeping in mind that Indonesia has been willing and able to deal severe damage to Singapore as part of its foreign policy in the past due to its sheer size and proximity to the city-state. In the years leading up to Singapore’s independence, Indonesia, under revolutionary anti-colonial leader Sukarno, waged a bitter undeclared war with Britain and its Southeast Asian Commonwealth, particularly the Federation of Malaysia, which then included Singapore. Within Singapore, Indonesian sabotage campaigns produced a string of bombings, with 18 bombings in Singapore in 1964 alone (Tan, 2024).

With this in mind, I will examine the success of Singapore’s Foreign Policy using as framework Indonesia’s Foreign Policy Process. Naturally, foreign policy success is a difficult item to measure. Therefore, I will first introduce the framework and show why it is useful for the Indonesian case, alongside some useful contextualisation of Indonesian Foreign Policy. Next, I will move through each stage of Indonesia’s Foreign Policy Process, showing why Singapore is either successful or unsuccessful at engaging with each stage – and, crucially, the consequences thereof.

I conclude that Singapore has had limited success in its contemporary policy towards post-New Order Indonesia. This is because Singapore’s Indonesian policy has been uneven in its engagement with the diverse stakeholders present in post-New Order Indonesian foreign policy. I conclude by addressing why this uneven engagement has such stark effects and why Singapore’s policy is unlikely to change.

1. Framework: The Indonesian Foreign Policy Process

To examine the Indonesian case, I borrow from Alexei Tsygankov’s (2013) model of the foreign policy process, which he developed in his study of Russia. I choose to do so for several reasons.

Firstly, it is worth noting that while studies of Indonesian foreign policy have proliferated in recent times, there has been little analytical work on the Indonesian foreign policy process itself. The closest attempt was by Indonesian scholar Fadlan Muzakki (2017), who described the role of media in foreign policy processes. Nonetheless, existing studies have largely been historical and narrative, focusing on the preferences and strategies of specific leaders (King, 1990; Suryadinata, 2022). Given the lack of robust theoretical frameworks within the study of Indonesia, it is useful to draw on adjacent fields.

While different countries, Russia and Indonesia share some similarities, which make the deployment of theory from one to the other reasonable. As Indonesian scholar Hendra Manurung notes, Indonesia and Russia are similar in the recency of their regime changes during the late twentieth century, their religious and ethnic diversity, their challenges with internal security and terrorism, and their pursuits of a ‘very independent foreign policy’ – which can be understood to mean a policy that is wary of interdependence and is especially suspicious of the possibility of subordination (Manurung, 2018, p. 63). Importantly, all these traits (regime maturity, demographic composition, internal security, and broad foreign policy characteristics) are intuitively relevant for any study of foreign policy. While Manurung does not state it outright, the other intuitive similarity between Russia and Indonesia is their traditional role as leading regional powers, emerging from both their large size and historical legacy of regional hegemony. Lastly, the Tsygankov model is generalisable and is not dependent on any specific idiosyncrasies of the Russian context. It is also not dependent on a specific regime type – as Tsygankov built his model to account for Russian foreign policy under Tsarist, Soviet, and Federal systems (including both Yeltsin and Putin periods).

Tsygankov theorised that a state’s foreign policy-making process moves downstream from a dominant political coalition’s construction of a ‘National Identity’ to the strategic community’s construction of a ‘National Interest’ and, finally, to the specific ‘Foreign and Security Policies’ constructed by the specific bureaucratic apparatus (see Figure 1). Through a discursive process of negotiation and persuasion, different social and political groups form a dominant political coalition that proposes a certain National Identity – for instance, Democracy. The state then constructs a National Interest that can operationalise this identity into various policy-relevant normative goals and guidelines, described by Tsygankov as a ‘guide in policymaking’.

For instance, a National Identity of Democracy could construct National Interest in a way that identifies the export of democracy as a desirable foreign policy objective. These normative goals and guidelines are then delegated to different policy bodies. These bodies build and execute specific policies based on their unique organisational contexts, such as constructing an investment bank that supports democratising neighbours or a land army that can spread democracy by coercion or invasion.

Figure 1: Foreign Policy Process, abridged from Tsygankov (2013), Author’s Work.

1A. The Indonesian Foreign Policy Process Before 1988

Prior to 1998, Indonesia was ruled by the authoritarian New Order regime under President Suharto, who took power in a countercoup in 1965. In New Order Indonesia, Suharto did not just dominate political office or the state bureaucracy. Seeking to prevent the chaos of Indonesian party politics in the 1950s and early 1960s, Suharto sought to completely depoliticise Indonesian society, explicitly banning rural political organisations and suppressing mass mobilisation and political discourse across the nation (Ward, 2010). Instead of engaging in traditional party politics, Suharto pushed Indonesia to settle disputes through a technocratic, corporatist system embodied by his self-proclaimed ‘non-ideological’ Golkar party. This system would be further reinforced and enforced by a sprawling intelligence and military apparatus that envisioned itself as not just the servants but the forgers of the Indonesian nation, who needed to protect a strong sense of nationalism to keep separatism, Islamism, and foreign subversion at bay. Envisioning total societal control as the solution to both internal and external security, Suharto’s apparatus accordingly organised itself to infiltrate and monitor every aspect of Indonesian society down to the village level (Sebastian, 2006).

In the wake of the undeclared war with revolutionary Sukarno, this new explicitly depoliticised, anti-Communist regime suited Singapore well. Although there remained some friction about Singapore’s potential for economic competition with Indonesia – and its refusal to commute the death sentences of Indonesian commandos involved in the war – Singapore’s relations with Indonesia would largely improve: with the resolution of disputes, massive expansions in investment that ultimately added up to 3.7 billion USD, and cooperation in the form of ASEAN (Lee, 2001).

Perhaps most importantly, maintaining foreign relations with New Order Indonesia was easy. As the authoritarian commander of Indonesian society, politics, and policy, President Suharto dominated all three points of the foreign policy process. The New Order was simultaneously the dominant political coalition that constructed National Identity, the strategic community that built National Interest, and the security apparatus that constructed Security Policy. Accordingly, Singapore only needed to appeal to a narrow population of ruling ‘securocratic’ elites to acquire influence across the process. This was a task that Singapore completed by contributing to the security of the New Order’s regime. Specifically, this included injecting generous financial support directly into Suharto’s patronage networks, assisting with the overall development of Indonesia, and defending it publicly (Lee, 2001). As Terrence Lee (2001) documents, this included an instance when Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, a charismatic figure in Western media, wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald in 1986 in defence of the regime.

Figure 2: Indonesian Foreign Policy Process, abridged from Tsygankov (2013), Author’s Work.

1B. The Indonesian Foreign Policy Process Today

However, since the fall of Suharto and the New Order regime in 1998, such consolidation no longer exists. Security apparatus influence has receded to only security policy and the civilian strategic community. Furthermore, the Indonesian public has become important foreign policy actors and decision-makers (Novotny, 2010). As such, while Singapore’s policy towards Indonesia continues to succeed in making the specific contingency of Indonesian invasion largely unthinkable, it has been unable to consistently build influence ‘upstream’ into Indonesia’s broader vision of National Interest and has completely failed to access the popular politics from which National Identity flows.

2. Successful Security Apparatus Engagement And The Resolution Of Security Dilemmas

The most active and successful aspect of Singapore’s foreign policy towards Indonesia has been its deep engagement with the Indonesian security apparatus. Through establishing chains of reliance, integration, and interoperability with the security apparatus, Singapore has largely resolved security dilemmas – taking the form of situations wherein Singapore’s search for security increases insecurity in its neighbours (Tang, 2009). In that sense, it has effectively bought off traditional state-to-state security.

This has occurred broadly across the security apparatus. Singh notes how each service of the Indonesian Armed Forces has exercised with their Singapore counterparts since the early 1970s, contributing to a positive relationship between security forces (Singh, 2015). Former Trade Minister Chan Chun Sing (2019) noted that Singapore and Indonesia have engaged in regular officer exchanges and collaborated in actual military operations. Collectively, this has helped build mutual trust and interdependence, as well as prevented one state’s search for security from necessarily troubling another. This process is no better exemplified than in the Arrangement between the Republic of Singapore Navy and the Indonesian Navy Concerning Submarine Rescue Support and Cooperation (Ministry of Defence Singapore, 2012). Under this agreement, Singapore provides submarine rescue services for Indonesia, providing an essential service that Indonesia lacks but needs as it struggles to stretch its naval budget. Hence, each new Indonesian submarine acquisition provides new avenues for Indonesian reliance on and cooperation with Singapore rather than new areas for mutual fear and suspicion. This process is currently at play as Indonesia seeks to expand its submarine fleet to tackle new threats from China (Koya Jibiki, 2021). Conversely, Singapore’s acquisition of naval vessels which contribute to or complement submarine rescue capabilities can improve relations with Indonesia rather than evoke insecurity.

Similarly, security dilemmas in the Singapore-Indonesia relationship are resolved by intelligence collaboration (Singh, 2015). In 2016, a terrorist plot to strike Singapore from Batam by rocket was foiled by Indonesian authorities in tight coordination with Singaporean counterparts (Arshad and Hwai, 2016). Without deep intelligence integration and cooperation, the pursuit of security from terrorism would likely lead to vicious security dilemmas. For instance, to neutralise overseas terrorist threats without substantive operational support from local intelligence and police networks, the U.S. has often had to make dangerous and controversial military strikes overseas, heightening insecurity for locals and fostering anti-Americanism (Boyle, 2013).

Singapore has continued to expand such operations by positioning itself as the key regional partner for the Quad’s Indo-Pacific Maritime Domain Awareness initiative by processing and distributing Quad satellite data on illegal fishing and maritime militia through the Changi Information Fusion Centre to regional partners such as Indonesia (Lee et al., 2022). In sum, these arrangements allow Singapore to gather large amounts of intelligence on the region and use it to equip partner forces in order to accomplish shared security objectives while avoiding evoking insecurity in neighbours.

3. Inconsistent Engagement With The Strategic Community

However, such policy cooperation has been and can only be crafted within the parameters set by the strategic community in its construction of a ‘National Interest’. More ambitious or more long-lasting arrangements, such as those built around Indonesia’s broader policy posture towards Singapore or its policy towards the region, cannot be made only by the security apparatus that Singapore so expertly engages. For these kinds of security purchases to be made, approval must be obtained from the strategic community. Such approval is also needed for agreements such as alignments on policy towards regional great powers or understandings on regional military basing. Similarly, the cooperation that presently exists can only do so at the expense of the same strategic community.

The post-democratisation strategic community has been characterised by Daniel Novotny (2010) as comprising the Presidency, the Foreign Affairs Department (DEPLU, later KEMLU), the Parliament, and academia (notably excluding the business community, which Singapore has close ties with). As a community, it represents the population of Indonesia that conceives of, debates, and ultimately chooses between foreign policies – such as the role Indonesia plays in different international organisations and the bilateral agreements it forges with other states.

Formerly dominated by the military, the strategic community has witnessed radical change since the fall of the New Order in 1998, with civilian-led DEPLU taking over leadership of foreign policymaking after a deliberate policy of civilianisation from the Abdurrahman administration (Smith, 2000). Indonesia’s new, civilian generation of foreign policymakers, practitioners, and thinkers continue to have clear foreign policy objectives and role conceptions – driven by foreign policy traditions from before the New Order period (including its classical history), ideas and practices during the New Order period, as well as an eagerness to meet regional challenges (Dannhauer, 2022). In particular, the community values ASEAN and Indonesia’s active leadership role in the organisation. As Dannhauer (2022) points out, this was a key objective that the Foreign Ministry was willing to remain actively pursuing, even when former President Joko Widodo was relatively ambivalent to this priority in the late 2010s.

However, Singapore’s engagement with this group started as and has remained problematic. Historically, this has been a legacy of Singapore’s regime-supporting strategy that Terence Lee (2001) described, in which support for the New Order and its securocrats served as the cornerstone of Singapore-Indonesia relations. In his memoirs, the first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew (2000), noted that before democratisation, Singapore steered away from engaging non-regime political and policy figures in Indonesia to avoid offending the New Order regime. However, further reasons are needed to explain why Singapore has still struggled to build new relationships with this community in the more than 20 years since its democratisation.

One reason would be Singapore’s reluctance to align with Indonesia’s regionalist project for ASEAN, the ‘cornerstone’ of Indonesia’s foreign policy, which overshadows bilateral ties when it comes to DEPLU/KEMLU priorities (Yani and Montratama, 2018). Indeed, the regionalist project was itself articulated as the solution to bilateral issues in Novotny’s (2010) interviews with Indonesian foreign policy elites. However, Singapore has been slow to support and has often been publicly critical towards Indonesia’s regionalist projects, placing the country in the position of minimal goodwill with DEPLU and with equally minimal influence over its regionalist security concepts. Former Foreign Minister Jayakumar (2004) would employ a largely cautioned, if not outright sceptical, tone towards Indonesian plans for an ASEAN Security Community in Parliament, stating that: ‘Indonesia’s Plan of Action contains bold and imaginative ideas on the ASC. However, we need to proceed in gradual steps, starting with the doable short-term projects before progressing to the more difficult or ambitious ideals’ (Jayakumar, 2004, Column 1258). This criticism would come off as particularly disingenuous, given that the idea of an ASEAN Security Community had initially been proposed by Singapore itself (Emmers, 2014).

Such comments would continue to poison relations over the decades. Ambassador-at-Large Bilahari Kausikan (2015) would choose to describe Indonesian regionalist projects broadly as projects of ‘Indonesian dominance’. This instinctive aversion to regionalism can be traced to Singapore’s fear of being passed the financial burden of supporting new members but can also be connected to the influence of Lee Kuan Yew, who often articulated a preference for partnering with faraway powers over regional partners, stating that ‘your neighbours are never your best friends wherever you are’ (Ang, 2015, p. 9).

Furthermore, Singapore has also encountered difficulties in building deeper engagement that goes past the leader level. In 2009, Foreign Minister Goerge Yeo called for increased engagement between Singapore and Indonesian legislatures during a parliamentary session (Yeo, 2009). However, such engagement remains largely limited, with only two Singapore parliamentary delegations to Indonesia between 2012 and 2022 (Channel News Asia, 2012; Singapore Parliament, 2019). In comparison, the United States sent three Congressional delegations across the same period (U.S. Embassy Jakarta, 2015; U.S. Embassy and Consulates in Indonesia, 2016; Smith, 2022).

In this context, it is unsurprising that Novotny’s (2010) study of Indonesian foreign policy elites found that Singapore ranked as Indonesia’s fourth largest threat after China, the United States, and Australia. Singapore also ranked as more of a threat than Malaysia, with Indonesia having land borders and territorial disputes, and Japan, which had previously invaded Indonesia. Singapore’s most successful achievements with this community have hence largely been limited to its engagement with presidents, though this engagement has varied depending on the contingencies of personal dynamics. While Singapore had reasonable success engaging the Widodo, Megawati and Yudhoyono administrations, Presidents Habibie and Wahid held actively negative attitudes towards Singapore, significantly shaped by personal feuds with Lee Kuan Yew (Kwek and Liow, 2015).

The impacts of this inconsistent engagement have been overwhelming. The most significant set of agreements between Indonesia and Singapore, with large impacts on security policy, has been the 2007 Extradition Treaty and Defence Cooperation Agreement. This agreement contained several important security provisions for Singapore, including agreements allowing Singaporean troops to train in Indonesia. Although the agreement had the support of the two nation’s leaders, it was not able to acquire support in the Indonesian Parliament for fifteen years due to parliamentarian suspicions around a potential Singaporean security threat. The agreement was hence only ratified in 2022 (Ayman Falak Medina, 2022). This indicates that even after succeeding in persuading elements of the civilian strategic community, such as the national leaders, Singapore’s inconsistent approach has proven, and will likely continue to prove, immensely slow in acquiring enough support in the community to shift policy – even on issues such as defence and law in which Singapore has both interest and expertise.

4. Absent Engagement In Popular Politics

However, if engagement with the strategic community has been limited and inconsistent, then engagement with the popular politics shaping that community has been nearly completely absent. Since 1998, Indonesian politics has shifted from being dominated by the New Order regime to politics concerned with democracy and parties. This has reshaped the vision of national identity from that derived by the New Order leadership. A 2021 nationally representative poll conducted by the Lowy Institute that asked Indonesians where their country belonged found that Indonesians most identified with the ‘democratic world’ and Southeast Asia, followed by the Islamic World, Asia-Pacific, and Indo-Pacific (Bland et al., 2022). These findings are consistent with other polls, which identified a consistent value for and pride in democracy among the Indonesian public (Tamir and Budiman, 2019).

Given the popular interest in democracy in Indonesia, it is perhaps unsurprising that regional powers such as Japan and the United States have made democracy a cornerstone of their diplomatic relations with Indonesia (U.S. Agency for International Development, 2022). However, Singapore has rarely engaged with the Indonesian public on the basis of democratic identity. Singapore’s lack of initiative in affirming Indonesian democracy is regrettable when one considers that Singapore itself identifies as a democracy. Instead, Singapore leaders have occasionally moved in the opposite, counterproductive direction; in the early years of Indonesian democracy, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong described Indonesia’s ‘teething problems with democracy’ which had ‘come too early and gone too far’ (Lee, 2006, Paragraph 23). This was part of a broader discussion about the challenges for Asian countries to adopt liberal democracy. More broadly, Singapore’s public advocacy for a vision of conservative, collectivist ‘Asian Values’ in the 1990s stood in contrast to Indonesia’s pursuit of liberal democracy, with Presidents Habibie and Abdurrahman firmly distancing themselves from the ‘Asian Values’ concept (Smith, 2000). Notably, across both these incidents, it was largely Singapore’s concern about engaging in public critiques about the compatibility of Asian societies and democracy that created its distance from Indonesia’s position on liberal democracy.

Against this backdrop of poor democracy-centred diplomacy, Singapore’s persistent, public, and explicit nostalgia for Suharto and his authoritarian New Order regime has not won Singapore much sympathy. In his memoirs, former Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew declared that the authoritarian leader ‘deserved a more graceful exit’ as he ‘had concentrated his energies on stability and the economy’, creating ‘golden years for Southeast Asia’ (Lee, 2000, p. 282). In a Parliamentary budget debate, Second Minister for Foreign Affairs Lee Yock Suan described a ‘perceived decline of ASEAN post-Suharto’ (Lee, 2003, Column 871). Such rhetoric comes in contrast with Suharto’s legacy in Indonesia itself, which has not been exclusively negative but has certainly proved a point of national controversy (Pathoni, 2008). This has been made toxic for Singapore’s reputation in Indonesia as a hub for New Order finances, which has made it vulnerable to allegations that it continues to host funds stolen from the Indonesian people during the dictatorship, even without its public displays of nostalgia for the regime (Kwek and Liow, 2015).

This comes on top of pre-existing differences between the Singaporean and Indonesian public based on Islamic identity and Islamic diplomacy. Such difficulties have produced the most public eruptions of anti-Singapore sentiment in Indonesia in recent years, with demonstrations against Singapore held in Medan and Jakarta in 2022 in response to Singapore’s imposition of immigration restrictions against an Indonesian radical preacher (Yulisman, 2022). Such challenges do not necessarily reflect failures in Singapore’s foreign policy given the city-state’s domestic sectarian concerns but do set the context for why Singapore has started at a disadvantage and why it requires engagement with other forms of popular Indonesian identity if it seeks to buy security from Indonesia.

Furthermore, in terms of foreign policy execution, Singapore has failed to effectively engage with Indonesian popular politics through its media. From 2020 to 2022 alone, Singapore’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs issued three press statements explicitly denying claims published by Indonesian press outlets about Singapore (Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2020; 2021: 2022). This indicates that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been unable to clarify, communicate, or convince the Indonesian outlets of the information before publication. Along with failing to adjust its rhetoric to engage with Indonesian democracy, Singapore’s Foreign Service has failed to engage with the new powerbrokers of Indonesian democracy, resulting in an ambivalent, if not antagonistic and defensive relationship.

Accordingly, it is unsurprising that the aforementioned Lowy poll found that more Indonesians expressed confidence in Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, United Arab Emirates Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed, and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida than Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who would theoretically have an advantage given his proximity and long tenure, especially in comparison to Kishida (Bland et al., 2022). However, when one considers how states have engaged popular Indonesian identities, the rankings make more sense: Saudi Arabia and the UAE have had in-built and exploited advantages in terms of engaging Indonesia’s Islamic identity, while Japan has had great success in engaging Indonesia’s democratic identity. Critically, such conditions have had implications for the practical life choices of respondents. Singapore was found to be a less attractive place to work and study than Japan, the United States, and South Korea. Malaysia also ranked higher than Singapore as a place to pursue education. This has severe implications for present and future attempts to strengthen Singapore’s soft power through education – a critical facet of soft for most major states (Gallarotti, 2022).

In sum, while Singapore is not viewed as a serious threat or rival in Indonesian public opinion, it remains largely shut out from Indonesian popular politics because of its reluctance to engage with popular facets of Indonesian identity, such as democracy.

6. Conclusion

If Indonesia today is defined by its heterogeneity, Singapore’s foreign policy towards Indonesia has been defined by its unevenness towards heterogeneous groups. It has been inconsistent in persuading civilian strategists and absent from engaging in popular politics but has maintained an exceedingly close relationship with the security apparatus, enabling it to effectively ‘buy away’ and negate security dilemmas that would often be expected in international politics. However, this strategy has been unable to expand purchases of security, such as buying a place in broader regional security cooperation. This is not to say that the engagement of security apparatuses is necessarily short-term. Indeed, the security apparatus is consistently the most trusted institution in Indonesian society (Ramadhan et al., 2022). Across several national polls, the military exceeds the Presidency, the Parliament, and both local and foreign press as a trusted source of information to the public. It would also be remiss not to mention the recent election of former leading New Order General Prabowo Subianto to the Presidency (Kurlantzick, 2024).

However, this trust has been earned precisely by the security apparatus’ commitment to respect democracy, admit past errors, and stay within its lane of security policy (Muhtadi, 2022). While recent trends in Indonesian democracy have not been promising regarding the quality of democracy, the possibility of the return of a military regime remains remote even under Prabowo (Bland, 2024). Hence, it is extremely unlikely for an Indonesian policy built upon security engagement to move ‘upstream’.

To expand the scope and longevity of its security, Singapore needs to progress beyond containing contingencies of bilateral conflict to insert itself as a factor in Indonesia’s broader strategic vision of the region or, even further, engage with the public-political discourses from which national identity flows. But to do this, it will need to reckon with the idea that its spectacular successes in security apparatus engagement cannot make up for less successful engagement with civilian strategists and popular politics. Unlike in the New Order’s consolidated state, Indonesia’s security apparatus, strategic community, and national politics are currently too far apart to be able to carry favours back and forth in such a way. Instead, Singapore must be willing to engage popular politics and civilian strategists. This means more substantive cooperation on the domains that these communities value, such as ASEAN governance.

One counterargument to the feasibility of this option would be to point to the limitations of what Singapore’s Foreign Ministry can reasonably be expected to do. This objection has real validity. Singapore, while certainly rich, remains a small state with a relatively slim government budget. As the Foreign Minister noted in 2024, the Foreign Ministry commands the smallest share of the government budget (Balakrishnan, 2024). Diplomat memoirs consistently stress the challenges of working with numerically small labour forces in the Foreign Ministry, individual missions, and delegations, as well as the need to rotate officers across different missions in order to keep the workforce strong (Anderson, 2022). Under such circumstances, it is perhaps unrealistic to expect Singapore to be able to hold large, regular press conferences in Jakarta, let alone smaller cities and locations across Indonesia. Instead, a continued focus on security relationships would be far more efficient and less demanding on the public purse while still satisfying Singapore’s core security needs.

However, as I have shown, it is not just an issue of funding. A great deal could be gained from resetting the attitudes and public tones that Singapore adopts: less disdain for ASEAN and Indonesian democracy and fewer displays of public nostalgia for Suharto and New Order would be beneficial. Furthermore, the need for more widespread engagement with the Indonesian public and civilian elites has never been greater. In the past decade, Indonesia has seen a rise in nationalistic and Islamist populism, particularly in the digital sphere (Nadzir, 2022). Thus far, this populism has mostly focused on targets within Indonesia, but it has already shown its ability to activate mass mobilisation and radical politics to an extent reminiscent of the Sukarno period and at a speed that far exceeds historical parallels. If Singapore is not able to start interfacing with the civilian elites and the public quickly, building up a distinct positive reputation and its own narrative, it might see itself dragged into other narratives that produce far more negative and unpredictable outcomes.

Unfortunately, these necessary and plausibly easy changes seem relatively unlikely; in large part, this is because some of the attitudes that hamper engagement were baked into the Singapore foreign policy doctrine by Lee Kuan Yew and entrenched by his long shadow over Singaporean politics and identity at large. His instinctive suspicion of regionalism, deep sympathy for Suharto and New Order, ambivalence over democratic solidarity, and advocacy of ‘Asian Values’ have all caused friction in the construction of an effective Indonesia policy. Singapore’s ability to better engage with a post-Suharto Indonesia might well depend on whether it can construct a post-Lee Kuan Yew foreign policy – one that does not just consider what Indonesia does but reconsiders who Indonesia and its decision-makers are and what they value.

Jonah Lo

© The Author(s) 2024. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.