Let me start by thanking the Pacific Forum, Foreign Policy Community Indonesia, and the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) for inviting me to participate in this conference.  It is certainly not news to anyone here that security relationships around the Indo-Pacific are of great importance in today’s world – and of critical importance in tomorrow’s – but this has not always been so clearly recognized, and I thus commend you on organizing this event.

I will today offer only my own personal perspectives, and they will not necessarily represent the views of anyone else at the MITRE Corporation, the Hoover Institution, or the U.S. Government.  Nevertheless, I’m pleased to have the chance to talk briefly about the U.S.-Indonesia security relationship, and how collaborative efforts building upon existing cooperation in counter-terrorism (CT) and counter-proliferation (CP) can contribute to the preservation and advancement of all states’ national autonomy and prosperity within a free and open international order in this region.

I.               Taking CT and CP to the Next Level 

The main thrust of these remarks will be about how to build better security cooperation beyond CT and CP, but let me start with a quick comment about some ways in which I think our countries can take cooperation even in these two areas to a higher level.  At present, to my knowledge, Indonesia does not participate in either the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism (GICNT) or the Proliferation Security Initiative(PSI).  Yet these two organizations would seem perfectly suited to provide rich collaborative opportunities, in ways entirely consistent with Indonesia’s desire simultaneously to increase its capacities while remaining carefully protective of national sovereignty and independence.

PSI, for instance, is a valuable way in which a wide range of diverse countries – including many in the Indo-Pacific region, including Cambodia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam – cooperate to help break up black markets that facilitate weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation, intercept WMD materials in transit, and use financial tools to disrupt such activities.  Yet PSI involves no obligation to do anything, nor any “creation” of new international rules, expectations, requirements, or obligations.  It’s a purely voluntary group of cooperative partners who work together, with each employing its own national authorities in coordinated and constructive ways.

Similarly, GICNT is also a purely voluntary partnership, this time consisting of fully 89 nations and six international organizations.  (In the Indo-Pacific, this includes Cambodia, China, Japan, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam.)  Its partners work together to strengthen global capacity to prevent, detect, and respond to nuclear terrorism through various multilateral activities that strengthen plans, policies, procedures, and interoperability. 

To my eye, involvement in these two organizations sounds like a perfect way for Indonesia to work collaboratively with us and with many other partners – again, on a purely voluntary basis – in ways that would clearly help increase Indonesia’s own capabilities, as well as contributing to the profound global good of making human society a “harder target” for terrorists seeking WMD. 

A third area of potential cooperation might be for Indonesia to work with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Radiological Sources (ORS) as part of well-established cooperative programs to reduce the prevalence of – or even eliminate – the use of radiological sources that could be stolen by terrorists and used in Radiological Dispersal Devices (RDDs, a.k.a. “dirty bombs”).  Such sources remain fairly widely used around the world in nuclear medicine, for example, but technology now permits many or most of them to be replaced by techniques that do not employ radiological sources capable of being used in RDDs.  Already, ORS has worked with some 80 countries to reduce or eliminate rad source usage at some 1,700 sites around the world.  So this also strikes me as a perfect U.S.-Indonesian cooperative opportunity, with excellent CT and CP implications.

II.             The Ethics of Nonalignment and U.S.-Indonesian Cooperation

But let me now turn to a broad geopolitical comment, for one of the questions asked by the organizers of this event related to what sorts of U.S.-Indonesian cooperation are possible considering Jakarta’s traditional non-alignment.  This is a very insightful and important question, but I also think it has a very clear answer.

To my eye, non-alignment should not today be any kind of obstacle to U.S.-Indonesian cooperation.  Nonalignment, in its traditional form, is an outdated concept, derived from an era in which the world seemed increasingly to be being divided into rigid military alliance blocks in a global competition between the rival and economically separated socio-economic “operating systems” of capitalism and communism. 

But while there certainly are some important competitive aspects to modern geopolitics – which is why we at MITRE recently established our new Center for Strategic Competition – that Cold War world is not the world of today.  The term non-alignment implies a contrasting notion of alignment, but in the contemporary context, nothing like the efforts of the 1950s to involve the emerging post-colonial states of the developing world into sprawling countervailing military alliances is occurring. 

Nor, are capitalism and communism juxtaposed in the way they were then.  After all, most countries in the Indo-Pacific – including China itself, which Nicholas Kristof once marvelously described as being not “Marxist-Leninist” but rather “Market-Leninist” – are today firmly dedicated to one form or another of market-based development.

Accordingly, the context in which traditional “non-alignment” evolved no longer exists.  Indeed, its implied contradistinction with alignment arguably evaporated years ago, with the end of the Cold War.

But I would make a further and perhaps more important point about non-alignment today.  I would argue that in the contemporary world, the ethical posture of nonalignment mitigates in favor of – rather than against – more U.S.-Indonesian cooperation.

As friends in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) have occasionally tried to explain it to me, it does seem to be the case that even as the Cold War context of rival military alliance commitments faded, non-alignment retained a strong political resonance as a moral and ethical posture that drew upon the moral energies of the era of decolonization and valorized the independence and autonomy of sovereign peoples.  As a political valence that retained some relevance even in the post-Cold War period, the ethical posture of nonalignment claimed to be about the importance of the developing world protecting itself against military coercion and economic exploitation, about the unfairness of asymmetric dependency, and about the new nations of the Global South preserving their autonomy against the might of developed countries richer and more powerful than they.

But if indeed the idea of “non-alignment” has residual political force in this fashion, its ethic of independence and autonomy against hegemonism makes improved U.S.-Indonesian cooperation on key shared security issues not merely possible but also necessary.  The key issues for U.S.-Indonesian security cooperation today, as elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific, revolve around efforts to do precisely what it is that nonalignment – as an ethical posture – hopes to accomplish.  Specifically, they revolve around protecting the political, economic, and strategic autonomy of the sovereign peoples of the region against China’s efforts to enmesh them in exploitative webs of dependency, coercion, and subjugation. 

The key issues today, in other words, aren’t ones of incorporation into “my alliance” or “his alliance,” but rather about how to cooperate better as friends and partners to preserve the sovereignty and independence of regional states against submergence in a new Sinocentric order.  In this context, the ethical values of nonalignment point strongly in favor of deeper cooperation between our governments, rather than against it.  Indonesia’s non-aligned tradition can thus actually be a foundation for cooperation to help preserve the free and open international system of the Indo-Pacific.

III.           Forms of Cooperation

A.            Maritime Domain Awareness, ISR, and Maritime Patrol

So what forms might I envision such improved security cooperation taking?  Well, one possibility might be to implement a greatly expanded cooperative capacity-building program to assist Indonesia in improving its overwater intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities, maritime domain awareness, and maritime patrol capabilities in the country’s maritime littorals and Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).  This is an arena in which our two countries share important interests, and improved U.S.-Indonesian cooperation in these areas is vitally important to preserving Indonesia’s security, autonomy, prosperity, environmental integrity. 

China’s seizure and militarization of ever-greater portions of the South China Sea, for instance, shows Beijing’s blithe willingness simply to appropriate for itself any regional territories it wants.  As China makes increasingly sweeping and unjustified claims to everything covered by the so-called “Nine-Dash Line” it is trying to foist upon the world by force and intimidation, moreover, China is clearly only getting started. 

Already, Chinese officials are adding “lines” to this ahistorical but notably hegemonistic concept: official maps just a few years ago added a tenth line, eating into Philippine territory and sweeping up northward to the east of Taiwan.  Like Moscow and like European imperialists of the 19^th Century, Beijing apparently now thinks it gets to redraw maps of the world to its own advantage and at its leisure.  This presents tremendous threats to the states of Southeast Asia.

I know that China rejects Indonesia’s claims to some portions of the South China Sea, such as in claiming that Indonesian exploratory gas drilling in Indonesia’s own EEZ around the Natuna Islands is actually being done in “Chinese” territory.  I also understand that authorities in Beijing has repeatedly dispatched ocean survey vessels into Indonesian waters in an effort to support such ridiculous Chinese claims.  Beijing’s growing territorial self-assertion against Indonesia’s territorial integrity makes greatly improved maritime domain awareness, ISR capacities, and patrol capabilities a security imperative of the first order. 

This would be a cooperative arena, moreover, completely consistent with Indonesia’s traditions of non-alignment and desire to avoid being sucked into some kind of U.S.-China rivalry, because these issues aren’t about “U.S.-China rivalry” at all.  This is about preserving Indonesia’s rights and sovereignty against Beijing’s encroachment.  Such matters are certainly embedded in larger geopolitical issues, but these issues aren’t about “United States versus China”: they are about all countries in the Indo-Pacific preserving their interests and rights as sovereign states against Sinocentric hegemonism.

Better U.S.-Indonesian cooperation on maritime patrol, domain awareness and ISR would also be of great value against the scourge of Illegal, Unreported, and Under-reported Fishing (IUUF) in this region.  Chinese fishing fleets, after all, have become notorious for their unlawful exploitation of resources from the EEZs of countries in the developing world, often without the countries whose resources they are stealing even knowing that these fleets are there.

In fact, as detailed in a recent report by the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), “China commands the world’s largest distant-water fishing fleet (DWF), has the world’s worst illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing record, and its crews are known to abuse foreign workers.”  Furthermore, EJF has identified “more than 300 confirmed and 240 suspected fisheries offenses between 2015 and 2019, and highlighted a range of human rights abuses and destructive fishing practices — such as bottom trawling — committed by Chinese vessels.” 

This is thus another reason why it would be so valuable for Indonesia and the United States to cooperate more on maritime domain awareness, ISR, and patrol.  Indonesia has a strong interest in preventing such environmental despoilation and unlawful resource extraction from its EEZ by Chinese fishing fleets.

B.             Strategic Trade Controls

Another potential area for improved cooperation between our two governments is in the arena of strategic trade controls.  Despite its support for multilateral diplomacy and the rule of law, Indonesia has not traditionally been a strong supporter of multilateral export control regimes.  Personally, I think this is disappointing, and hope that more can be done here.

But I would also point out two things relevant to potential future cooperation.  First, even if Indonesia remains lukewarm about multilateral export control regimes, nothing prevents it from choosing to adopt strong strategic trade controls every bit as effective as well understood “best practices” elsewhere.  Nor is there anything to prevent countries such as the United States in helping with this, through the sort of capacity-building programming that my former State Department bureau, or DTRA itself, is so good at providing.

Moreover, there are important reasons for Indonesia to develop strategic trade controls as a way to help protect itself against threats from China.  In today’s security environment, after all, technology-transfer threats are not limited to those presented by terrorists and rogue proliferators in places such as North Korea and Iran. 

As I mentioned a moment ago, Indonesia faces growing maritime territorial threats from China, which is gradually seizing and militarizing more and more of the South China Sea and other regional waters – at the expense of countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.  Critical to Beijing’s ability to succeed in this, however, is the strength and capability of its armed forces, particularly the air and naval forces of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).  And this is another way in which developing and implementing technology transfer controls are today powerfully in Indonesia’s interest. 

China is working to indigenize as much technology as possible in order to end dependencies upon outside sources.  Nevertheless, it has not yet fully succeeded in this, and it still seeks many things in foreign markets, including through elaborate networks for the circumvention of export controls elsewhere.  Beijing thus still needs to acquire items, equipment, material, and know-how from abroad as it expands the PLA’s reach and ability to threaten and intimidate Indonesia, as well as other regional countries.  This gives Jakarta a strong incentive to ensure that Indonesian trade and commerce is not exploited to the PLA’s benefit and thus Indonesia’s own territorial detriment. 

A robust and effective strategic trade controls apparatus could thus help ensure that Chinese technology-acquisition networks are not able to use Indonesia as a source or transhipment point for items having potential dual-use applications.  Indonesia and the United States share a strong interest in ensuring that the PLA gains access to as few of such things as possible.  Improved Indonesian capabilities in the area of strategic trade controls would also help make it easier to explore cooperative possibilities in defense-related cooperation that moves beyond simply procurement and arms sales and more into the arena of technology transfer and co-production of certain items or systems.

C.            Cybersecurity

An additional area of possible cooperation I should mention is in the arena of cybersecurity.  As Indonesia attempts to build out its digital economy, press reports have suggested it has been turning increasingly to Chinese technology companies such as Huawei for cybersecurity. 

Needless to say, China is an extraordinarily unwise choice for a cybersecurity partner.  It is not merely that China is absolutely notorious for cyber-espionage and cyber-facilitated intellectual property theft, and that Huawei itself has already been associated with Chinese espionage in locations such as the Netherlands and the African Union Headquarters in Ethiopia.  It is that – in sharp contrast with technology companies in the United States, Europe, and the democracies of the Indo-Pacific –Chinese technology companies (and indeed all Chinese companies) operate under the heavy-handed “guidance” and political control of the Chinese Communist Party, and that China’s National Security Law requires them to cooperate with the Chinese security services in any way officials might desire.

Especially for a country such as Indonesia that faces explicit and worsening territorial claims and incursions from China in regional seas, and that is at real risk of being sucked into a 21^st Century form of Sinocentric vassalage in the years ahead if Chinese strategic planners have their way, turning to China for “cybersecurity” help is simply a terrible idea.  In English, we have a phrase about how foolish it is to pick a fox to guard one’s henhouse, and turning to Chinese technology companies for cybersecurity help amounts to doing pretty much exactly that.

Accordingly, I’d argue that a very promising area for cooperation between Indonesia and the United States – as well as between Indonesia and other Western countries – is in providing alternatives to reliance upon China for cybersecurity.  Rather than seeing Indonesia put itself increasingly in Beijing’s power as Chinese technology firms make inroads into local networks, such Western assistance could help Indonesia genuinely protect itself. 

Here, as in other areas, cooperation can serve the cause of Indonesia autonomy and independence against the threats presented by East Asia’s new Sinic hegemonism.  With help, in other words, Indonesia can put good fencing up around its proverbial cyber henhouse, and can send that Chinese fox packing.

IV.          Conclusion

All these suggestions all make good sense to me, and from a technical and programmatic standpoint seem very “doable.”  But my key point is broader, and stems from my earlier comments about how in today’s security environment, the ethical posture of nonalignment should make us steadily better friends and partners.  I’m very pleased to be a part of this discussion, and look forward to doing what I can to advance this very important regional partnership.

Thank you.

-- Christopher Ford