Ahmad Syarif Syechbubakr – Advisers play a crucial role in foreign affairs, shaping the decisions leaders ultimately make. But the relationship between a leader and his advisers is rarely straightforward. It is shaped by the adviser's capacity to navigate the leader's ego and temperament, and, equally, by the leader's psychological disposition toward accepting advice.
In Indonesia – where institutions are neither as robust as in established democracies nor entirely weak – this dynamic becomes particularly consequential.
Three recent cases illustrate the consequences. The controversial plan to grant the United States blanket access to Indonesian airspace, Indonesia's involvement in Trump's board of peace initiative, and the earlier joint statement with Xi Jinping that appeared to concede ground on overlapping South China Sea claims.
Each of these triggered significant domestic backlash, forcing the president to spend political capital managing the fallout at home rather than advancing his agenda abroad.
Two factors have placed Indonesian foreign policy in this uncomfortable position: the president's deep-seated distrust of the foreign policy establishment, and his inability – or unwillingness – to separate loyalty from expertise in assembling his foreign policy team. Understanding how these two factors interact is the central task of this article.
The loyalist foreign minister
In Indonesia, graduation from the military academy carries considerable prestige.
The president himself is a former general who graduated from the academy in 1974. Few officers, if any, willingly abandon a promising military career in its early stages – making Foreign Minister Sugiono's trajectory unusual. A 2002 academy graduate, he resigned his commission as a first lieutenant in 2008 to join Prabowo, who had just returned from a period of exile in Jordan and was in the process of founding Gerindra Party.
Prabowo's selection of Sugiono as foreign minister marks the first appointment of a non-career diplomat to that post since President Abdurrahman Wahid chose Alwi Shihab in 1999.
For the two decades that followed, both Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (2004-2014) and Joko Widodo (2014-2024) relied on career diplomats to lead the foreign ministry. Despite their contrasting styles – Yudhoyono more active in foreign affairs, Widodo more domestically oriented – neither generated the volume of foreign policy controversy that has accumulated in just two years under President Prabowo.
Sugiono is, by most accounts, intelligent and adaptable. The problem lies elsewhere. He holds no independent political capital – his entire career, and, in many ways, his entire adult life, has been built in Prabowo's shadow.
This is where his advisory capacity breaks down. He does not relate to the president as a leader whose judgment he is there to complement and, when necessary, challenge. He relates to him as a patron whose decisions he is there to affirm and execute.
This is not a problem unique to Sugiono. It runs through much of the president's inner circle – figures who followed Prabowo from his residence in Hambalang all the way to the presidential palace, who were by his side long before he was elected, and whose political fortunes remain entirely bound to his.
Among them are Teddy Indra Wijaya, the Cabinet Secretary, and Prasetyo Hadi, the State Secretary, along with many others. What unites them is not competence – several are capable individuals – but total dependence on the president's patronage.
The result is what Irving Janis (borrowing from George Orwell) called groupthink: a condition in which loyalty requires each member to avoid raising controversial issues. Within this inner circle, dissent carries personal cost while deference carries reward.
This dynamic has quietly distorted the president's understanding of foreign policy and global politics, insulating him from the honest counsel he most needs.
The distrust with the bureaucrats
The professional corps of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is the institutional memory of the state.
They hold accumulated knowledge of bilateral relationships, the situational awareness of shifting global dynamics, and, crucially, the understanding of how to conduct foreign policy in accordance with Indonesia's long-standing doctrines of non-interference and non-alignment.
President Prabowo, however, does not merely distrust this establishment – he is actively suspicious of it. One of his early decisions was to cut spending across multiple ministries, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The consequences were immediate and practical: the ministry has since struggled with budget constraints that limit its ability to send officials to international meetings and cover basic travel costs – precisely at a moment when Indonesia has an ambitious foreign policy agenda that demands sustained diplomatic engagement.
Resources matter, especially because active diplomacy is not confined to the meeting room. It requires working-level follow-up – the quiet, unglamorous work of managing pre- and post-meeting engagements, tracking commitments, and ensuring that agreements translate into concrete next steps. Without adequate staffing and funding, this machinery stalls.
The consequences of this distrust extend beyond budgets. When President Prabowo travelled to Washington in November 2024 for his meeting with President Biden, he brought only the Foreign Minister and the Cabinet Secretary. On the American side of the table sat layers of State Department officials, including the U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia. The asymmetry was striking.
A similar pattern emerged in his recent meeting with President Putin: while the Russian side fielded at least twelve officials, Indonesia's delegation consisted of just three – the Cabinet Secretary, the Foreign Minister, and the Minister of Energy – with no representation from the Indonesian Embassy in Moscow.
The practical fallout has been significant. In several reported instances where no professional diplomats were present in the room, no formal meeting notes were subsequently shared with working-level staff.
Without a record of what was discussed or agreed, coordination breaks down and follow-up actions become difficult to execute – leaving agreements to fade into ambiguity, or worse, leaving the counterpart to define and drive the next steps on their own terms.
This is precisely what appears to have happened with the controversial U.S. request for blanket access to Indonesian airspace. The request was initially delivered informally, but without proper internal coordination on the Indonesian side, the process stalled.
The U.S. then returned with its own framing on the next steps, effectively setting the terms of a conversation Indonesia had never properly had internally.
What's next for Indonesian foreign affairs?
There are growing rumours that Sugiono is set to be reshuffled to the Coordinating Ministry for Human Development and Cultural Affairs – a role that is inherently inward-looking and would suit a transition away from foreign policy.
Supporting this reading, Sugiono recently replaced the president as chair of the Indonesian Pencak Silat Federation for 2026-2030, taking over a position Prabowo himself had previously held. He also currently serves as the Secretary General of Prabowo's Gerindra Party.
Taken together, these developments suggest a deliberate sequencing: repositioning Sugiono toward domestic affairs as part of a broader effort to groom him for a more central role in Gerindra's party machinery.
Whether or not this reading is correct, the foreign policy implications are limited. Any replacement is likely to be either another loyalist from the president's inner circle or a career diplomat selected precisely for their willingness to operate within the same constraints Sugiono has accepted.
The more consequential question is what, if anything, could force a genuine change in how the president conducts foreign policy?
The most plausible scenario is a serious crisis that can no longer be managed through domestic political maneuvering. That might compel the president to reconsider not just personnel, but the deeper habits of distrust and loyalty that have shaped his foreign policy from the start.