A Traumatic Relationship: The United States and Indonesia–Russian Relationship

Abstract

Indonesia’s insistence on refusing to directly condemn Russia’s unprovoked aggression in Ukraine raised a lot of eyebrows. Some scholars attributed this to the long history of Indonesia–Russia relationship, which is dated even before the formal establishment of Soviet–Indonesia relations, when the Soviet Union brought ‘the Indonesian Question’ before the Security Council in 1946 and helped Indonesia’s struggle for independence. That, however, is only part of the picture. In fact, it is more important to see how the history of the relationship between the United States and Indonesia influenced Indonesia’s strategic culture and creating a feeling of trauma, the inability to trust the United States that influences Indonesia’s foreign policy, especially in regards to how Indonesia perceives and reacts to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The invasion is seen less as a state’s infringement of another state’s sovereignty than a sibling spat that is widely exacerbated by meddling from other countries.