Geostrategic Development Today: Indonesia's Great Work In Southeast Asia

Head of the Policy Assessment and Development Agency (BPPK) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Siswo Pramono (Photo: Screenshot)

JAKARTA - Head of the Policy Assessment and Development Agency (BPPK) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Siswo Pramono revealed Indonesia's role in the development of Geostrategy. Mainly in Southeast Asia or ASEAN as the core environment.

"Our role there is very high. First, Indonesia is the largest country in Southeast Asia. If we talk about its history starting from Majapahit, Sriwijaya is a big influence for the southeast Asian region," said Siswo Pramono in the opening speech of the discussion Exploring Indonesia's potential excellence in mapping Geostrategic Regions and Cross-Region online, Monday, May 24.

According to him, this position will give the nuance or instinct of Indonesia to always play an active role in leading or leadership in southeast Asia.

"We see that when we run out of independence, leadership that we have taken even though it is only 100-200 billion U.S. dollars, very small but we have leadership for in the era of decolonization," he said.

Then, at the Asian-African Conference in Bandung at that time Indonesia has led the 'Seascape' where it is very important the involvement of the motherland in the birth of the island nation as part of the concept of the Republic of Indonesia.

"The non-aligned movement shows our leadership during the north-south cold war, the various negotiations were the role of our country is huge. Currently our GDP (Cross Domestic Product) is above 1 trillion US dollars. Of course our role is more expected, because it is already 2 times larger than Australia and South Korea approaching Japan," explained Siswo.

Then, Indonesia will also become the chairman of the G20 for next year. This position is very strategic because Indonesia is a fast growing country or fast grower and constant climber.

"So yesterday's G20, we saw our ranking go up and never go down. There are two countries, Indonesia and Turkey, the other down and down. If we keep going up," he said.

By law, Indonesia sees ASEAN as a national foreign policy guru. But at the world level, Indonesia has been seen as asean's teacher soko itself.

"We take leadership no longer behind and push, but it is already considered as 'Ing Madyo mangun Karso'. This is a very important strategic development in our region," siswo said.

He continued, in the concept of Lemhanas, since the beginning of national resilience has been adopted by ASEAN to be a national-based regional resilience approach. In fact, he said, there is a document in which ASEAN adopts it.

"It means that the human development index (HDI) of all asean countries including Laos Cambodia and Myanmar is experiencing a good increase. This is the data so that our HDI rises in Southeast Asia, then shows the robustness of these 8 southeast Asian countries experiencing improvements in national resilience. This means that regional resilience in ASEAN has been successfully realized," he explained.

Siswo said that it shows a very strategic development. ASEAN has become part of the global value chain.

"A lot of investment goes not far away, he went to the Southeast Asian region. Then ASEAN has developed into a single production base for the world market for example Toyota. Toyota's production is partly made in the Philippines, partly in Malaysia, partly in Thailand, then in assembling in Indonesia and marketed to Africa, Latin America, etc.," said Siswo.

That, he continued, is a small example of where the Southeast Asian country that was torn apart by the Cold War, now has a large and strong national resilience. It has also become a part of the world's global value chain for global production and more importantly developed into a single production base that is quite strategic.

"This is the first foothold for Indonesia which is very important and again Indonesia will become chairman of the G20 next year and chairman of Asean 2023. I think there will be an extraordinary aspect of strategy here," Siswo said.