The chattering classes in Jakarta are having a collective meltdown over flight logs. Every time President Prabowo Subianto boards a state aircraft for Beijing, Washington, or London, the predictable chorus rises: "What is the return on investment for the average Indonesian citizen?" Critics line up to tally the cost of aviation fuel, weigh it against immediate local welfare payouts, and declare the trips a luxury the nation cannot afford.
This is bean-counting masquerading as foreign policy analysis. It is provincial, short-sighted, and fundamentally misunderstands how middle powers survive in a fracturing global order.
The lazy consensus dominating local editorials suggests that international diplomacy must yield immediate, transactional, and domestic dividends to be justified. If a state visit does not instantly result in a factory opening in Central Java or a direct subsidy for fishermen, it is labeled a failure. This perspective is completely detached from reality.
I have watched emerging economies stall for decades because their leadership treated foreign affairs as an afterthought or a photo opportunity. True sovereignty is not built by looking inward; it is secured by anchoring your nation so deeply into the global architecture that your stability becomes everyone else's problem. Prabowo is not on a sightseeing tour. He is executing a high-stakes hedging strategy designed to keep Indonesia from becoming collateral damage in the escalating cold war between the United States and China.
The Dangerous Myth of Direct Transactional Diplomacy
The core flaw in the current critique is the expectation of immediate reciprocity. Commentators look at a bilateral meeting and ask, "Where are the jobs?" They fail to realize that international relations operate on geological time, while domestic politics operates on a five-year cycle.
When a president travels, they are not acting as a procurement officer. They are establishing structural predictability.
Consider the mechanics of foreign direct investment (FDI). Capital is notoriously cowardly. It does not flow to countries merely because they have cheap labor or abundant nickel reserves. It flows to environments where the political leadership has demonstrated alignment, predictability, and personal guarantees at the absolute highest level.
[Traditional Local View] --> State Travel = Immediate Domestic Payouts (Flawed)
[Geopolitical Reality] --> State Travel = Macro Stability = Risk Reduction = FDI Flow
When Indonesia attempts to position itself as a critical node in the global electric vehicle (EV) supply chain, it is not competing against neighboring provinces; it is competing against Vietnam, India, and Mexico. A CEO of a multinational corporation or a sovereign wealth fund manager does not sign a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure deal based on a brochure from a trade ministry. They move when they see a head of state actively managing relations with global superpowers to ensure that their investment will not be nationalized, sanctioned, or caught in a maritime blockade five years down the road.
The critics want a receipt for every trip. But you cannot itemize the prevention of a geopolitical crisis. You cannot put a price tag on ensuring that your maritime borders remain unmolested while you extract natural resources. The cost of a state visit is rounding error compared to the economic devastation of being isolated from global credit markets or facing retaliatory trade tariffs.
Dismantling the Premise of the "People Also Ask" Concerns
The public discourse, amplified by superficial digital algorithms, continually loops back to three deeply flawed questions. Let us dismantle them one by one.
Does foreign travel take focus away from urgent domestic reforms?
This question presumes that a modern state apparatus cannot walk and chew gum at the same time. The presidency is an institution, not a solitary individual working out of a home office. While the executive branch projects Indonesian influence abroad, the domestic bureaucratic machinery—ministers, regional governors, and civil servants—continues to run.
In fact, domestic reform without international alignment is useless. You can optimize your domestic tax code and streamline local licensing all you want, but if Indonesia is excluded from major regional trade pacts or finds itself on the wrong side of global supply chains due to diplomatic negligence, those domestic reforms will simply govern an impoverished economy. International engagement is the shield that protects domestic development.
Why can't the Foreign Minister handle these trips instead?
This is a profound misunderstanding of political currency, particularly in non-Western contexts. In Washington, Beijing, and Riyadh, power is deeply personalized.
A Foreign Minister, no matter how brilliant, is a staffer. They represent the bureaucracy. A President represents the sovereign will of the state.
In high-stakes diplomacy, certain commitments can only be made leader-to-leader. When dealing with personalized regimes like China or the Gulf monarchies, personal chemistry and direct executive guarantees are the only currencies that matter. Sending a minister to do a president's job sends a subtle but clear signal of low priority. In the brutal calculus of geopolitics, if you signal that you are not serious, you are dismissed.
Wouldn't this money be better spent directly on the poor?
This is the ultimate populist trap. It sounds virtuous, but the math is catastrophic. Take the entire annual budget allocated for state travel and divide it across the tens of millions of Indonesians living near the poverty line. The result is a one-time payout worth less than a cup of coffee per person.
Now, contrast that with the alternative: using executive diplomacy to secure market access for Indonesian agricultural goods, negotiate favorable terms for sovereign debt, or attract sovereign wealth funding for massive infrastructure projects that employ hundreds of thousands over decades.
True poverty alleviation is structural. It requires macro-stability, foreign capital, and technology transfer. None of those things can be found by sitting at home in Jakarta and admiring your own virtuous intentions.
The Strategic Necessity of the Multi-Alignment Playbook
We are no longer living in the unipolar world of the 1990s. The international system is undergoing a violent recalibration. For a nation like Indonesia, located squarely at the maritime crossroads of global trade, neutrality cannot be passive. It must be aggressively active.
Prabowo’s travel itinerary reflects a sophisticated understanding of this reality. It is a masterclass in dynamic hedging.
┌───────────────────────┐
│ Active Indonesian │
│ Diplomacy │
└───────────┬───────────┘
│
┌────────────────────┴────────────────────┐
▼ ▼
┌──────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐
│ Beijing Visits │ │Washington Visits │
│ • Secure FDI │ │• Security Ties │
│ • Trade Access │ │• Tech Access │
└──────────────────┘ └──────────────────┘
By visiting Beijing, Indonesia secures the capital and infrastructure commitments necessary to maintain its domestic growth targets. By immediately pivoting to Western capitals, it reassures Washington and its allies that Jakarta will not become a client state of China. This dual posture prevents either superpower from taking Indonesia for granted.
If you only show up in Washington, Beijing stops offering favorable economic terms because they assume you are out of reach. If you only visit Beijing, Washington begins to view you as a security threat and adjusts its supply chains to bypass you entirely.
The frantic travel schedule is the price of maintaining optionality. It is the only way to ensure that Indonesia remains the actor, rather than the stage upon which other empires play out their rivalries.
The Real Risks of the Contrarian Approach
To be intellectually honest, this aggressive global posture is not without significant risks. It is a high-wire act where the cost of a misstep is immense.
- The Over-Commitment Trap: By engaging deeply with multiple competing power centers, you risk creating contradictory expectations. If Jakarta promises maritime security cooperation to the West while simultaneously promising deep industrial integration to China, a moment will come when a choice must be made.
- The Rhetoric-Reality Gap: State visits produce spectacular communiqués and vague memorandums of understanding (MOUs). The downside to this globetrotting approach is that if the domestic bureaucracy fails to follow up on these high-level agreements, the political capital spent creating them is permanently vaporized.
- Domestic Discontent: While the macro-economy benefits from geopolitical stability, the psychological reality of the voter cannot be ignored. If the benefits of global alignment do not trickle down into visible economic security fast enough, the populist backlash can destabilize the very regime attempting to execute the strategy.
Despite these vulnerabilities, the alternative is far worse. A passive, isolationist Indonesia would quickly find itself carved up into informal spheres of influence by global superpowers, its resource wealth extracted on terms dictated entirely from abroad, and its voice ignored in the forums that shape global trade.
Stop Looking at Flight Costs; Start Looking at the Board
The debate over state travel needs to grow up. Stop evaluating foreign policy through the lens of a domestic audit.
The metric of success for executive diplomacy is not an immediate fiscal return. It is the preservation of strategic autonomy in a world that wants to force you to choose a side. Every trip taken by the head of state is a diplomatic investment to keep Indonesia independent, relevant, and secure.
The next time you see a headline criticizing the frequency of presidential overseas visits, change the question. Do not ask what the trip cost. Ask what it would cost Indonesia to be left out of the room entirely.
