India and Indonesia have been tied to each other for more than 2,000 years, through sailors, traders and monks who crossed the Indian Ocean. That imprint is still visible: Brahmi script, Sanskrit, temple architecture, dance traditions and even Yawadvipa, the name widely believed to refer to Java in the epic Ramayana. Sukarno, Indonesia’s founding president, once said that the bond between the nations went back more than 1,000 years and that only colonialism interrupted it. That spirit still shows up today, from the Non-Aligned Movement to the G20 and BRICS.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to Jakarta from Monday to Wednesday last week was hardly just ceremonial. The two governments signed 16 to 20 agreements covering defense, critical minerals, maritime security, digital payments and healthcare.
Two of those agreements were significant: a contract for India’s BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles, worth an estimated US$630 million, making Indonesia the third buyer after the Philippines and Vietnam; and, more consequential, a deal to jointly develop the Port of Sabang, about 160km from India’s Great Nicobar Island Development Project.
The port deal, bracketing the mouth of the Malacca Strait, turns Modi’s visit from symbol into maneuver. The strait is a lifeline for global energy trade. China accounted for about 48 percent of the import volume passing through it in the first half of last year, and about 80 percent of China’s crude oil imports travel the same route. The strait is China’s most important energy artery and its most exposed one.
Beijing has known this for two decades. In 2003, then-Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) named it the “Malacca dilemma.” A blockade at the strait in a conflict over Taiwan could choke off energy supplies and stall the Chinese economy within weeks.
China has tried to hedge with pipelines through Myanmar, Kazakhstan and Russia, but none of the alternatives are mature enough. The strait remains the one link Beijing cannot replace.
For India, deepening its footprint in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and linking it to Sabang, functions as asymmetric deterrence against China, particularly with ongoing tensions along the Line of Actual Control in the Himalayas.
If China’s land power along the Himalayan front is hard to match, India has another lever at sea, right where Beijing is most exposed.
As Indonesia modernizes its military with equipment tied tactically to India’s, Beijing’s narrative that the US is the region’s only real threat becomes harder to sustain.
Indonesia is not turning its back on China, which is still its largest trading partner and top investor in downstream resource processing, including nickel, of which Indonesia holds about 21 percent of the world’s known reserves.
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto is not swapping China for India; he is adding a third security partner outside the US orbit, true to Indonesia’s hedging habit.
India fits that role because, as a fellow global south nation and heir to the Non-Aligned Movement, its presence carries none of the baggage of Western imperialism.
Jakarta frames the partnership around five official pillars, none of which name China. Anyone reading a map of the Malacca Strait can see where this points.
China would likely respond by accelerating its alternatives: Gwadar Port in Pakistan, the Kyaukpyu pipeline in Myanmar or a land bridge project in Thailand bypassing the Malay Peninsula. None of these projects have a smooth record, given their high costs, difficult terrain and political instability in transit states.
The BrahMos contract and the Sabang agreement are concrete steps. Together they add a new variable to China’s maritime security calculus, right at the northern gateway of the Malacca Strait, a spot that has unsettled Beijing for two decades.
With India and Indonesia standing together at that gate, the “Malacca dilemma” has gone from theoretical to a sharp geopolitical fact. How far it goes will only be clear in the years ahead, depending on how seriously Sabang actually gets built.
M. Guntur Cobobi is a researcher at the Center for Global and Melanesian Studies at Universitas Khairun in Indonesia.
Belgians, like Taiwanese, often get told that their country does not exist. My memories of early adult life in Brussels have served me well in Taiwan. When I first landed in the city of Kaohsiung, I had the strange feeling that I was going back home. At the time, I was living in Australia, but Kaohsiung felt much closer to Brussels than Sydney ever did. I know first-hand the feeling of being told that one’s country is not a real country. In my case, it came from UK politician Nigel Farage — who told the European parliament in 2018 that
“Did you know that Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) was an American citizen?” The question was posed over dinner a few weeks ago by a colleague of ours. Of us all, he is by far the best Mandarin speaker and encyclopedic in all things Chinese. For decades, we have gathered quarterly for martinis, early dinner and diplomatic war stories in Rosslyn, Virginia, a few blocks from the Washington, DC headquarters of the American Institute in Taiwan. In the 1970s, we were young diplomats and attaches together at the US Embassy in Taipei and later in Beijing. We all are retired now, yet
Micron Technology Inc and its South Korean peers face an intractable problem. With data centers for artificial intelligence gobbling up supplies of their memory chips, there are not enough to go around. This scarcity is forcing up memory prices and making Micron, SK Hynix Inc and Samsung Electronics Co astonishingly profitable. But customers are unhappy, governments could intervene and shortages may open the door to Chinese rivals. As recently as 2023, memory manufacturers were suffering huge losses as demand and selling prices collapsed. This is still a cyclical industry but I think the bigger risk right now is this trio
When the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile deep into the Pacific on Monday, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs offered the region a suggestion: “Do not overinterpret.” It is a remarkable request. A JL-class missile arcing past US tracking facilities on Guam and the Marshall Islands — launched while more than 30 nations take part in the RIMPAC exercise in Hawaii — is not a weather balloon. It is a message that reads: we can reach you from underwater, and we want you to know it. The test completes, or nearly completes, China’s nuclear triad. It
RSS