By
Satish Chandra Mishra
Dr. Satish Chandra Mishra, an economist educated at Oxford and Cambridge with senior past experience at the United Nations (UNDP), OECD, and USAID, is the Founder and Executive Director of Arthashastra Institute, Bali, Indonesia.
Draw a line on a map from the Bay of Bengal through the Malacca and Sunda Straits to the Coral Sea. Three capitals sit on it: New Delhi, Jakarta, Canberra. Nobody planned it that way. Geography did.
For most of the last eighty years, these three countries barely spoke to each other. India looked inward, then toward its own neighbourhood. Australia looked toward London, then Washington. Indonesia looked toward nobody in particular. By design.
That design has a name: bebas aktif, free and active. It is not indecision dressed up as principle. Indonesia won its independence in 1945. A decade later, in 1955, it hosted the Bandung Conference, where newly independent nations from Asia and Africa agreed to refuse conscription into either Cold War camp, the meeting that gave the Non-Aligned Movement its name. Bebas aktif was Indonesia’s own translation of that idea into policy, and seventy years on, it still shapes every conversation Jakarta has with Canberra, or with Delhi.
If Indonesia has spent seven decades declining to pick sides, why would three years of paperwork change that? Isn’t this just two bilateral relationships wearing a trilateral costume, with Indonesia as the reluctant middle party in both?
On the evidence, it is the wrong one.
First, the pace. Between August 2024 and August 2026, Australia and Indonesia signed a treaty-level Defence Cooperation Agreement, ran their largest-ever combined military exercise, and then signed a second, broader security treaty on top of the first. India and Indonesia, in the same window, transferred BrahMos missiles, a deal that had sat in negotiation since 2023, held up because it was never a simple purchase. India and Australia finished a trade agreement, then a fuller one behind it. None of this was inevitable. Agreements this dense do not happen between countries hedging for form’s sake.
Second, the money has started following the paperwork rather than preceding it, which is the harder direction. Indonesia’s non-oil trade surplus with India passed the Philippines and closed in on the United States in 2025. Indian investment in Indonesian nickel and pharmaceuticals has moved from announcements to plants. Australia’s goods trade with Indonesia under their partnership has nearly doubled
since 2020. Trade agreements are cheap to sign and easy to ignore. These have not been ignored.
Third, Indonesia has not stopped being non-aligned. It has started treating non-alignment as something to be defended actively rather than simply declared. When Indonesia’s own defence and foreign ministers sat down with their Australian counterparts in Melbourne this August, the first thing out of Jakarta’s mouth was reassurance: the new treaty, they said, changes nothing about bebas aktif. Canberra’s own language, meanwhile, calls the same treaty a “deeper strategic alignment.” Two governments, one signature, two readings. That gap is not a flaw in the relationship. It is the relationship, working as designed.
Fourth, the institutions are starting to outlast the summits that produced them. A defence dialogue does not need Modi or Albanese or Prabowo in the room to keep meeting. A tariff schedule does not need a joint statement to keep applying. Somewhere between 2024 and now, the India-Indonesia-Australia relationship stopped being a sequence of leader-level photographs and became something closer to furniture. Nobody notices furniture. That is rather the point of it.
If the trend is already running in the right direction, why does it need any help at all?
Because trends that run on their own eventually stop running on their own. Every one of the agreements listed above still needs a domestic parliament, a domestic ratification process, or a domestic budget line to survive contact with its own government. Australia has already ratified its side of the 2024 defence agreement; Indonesia has not finished ratifying its side, eighteen months on. That is not obstruction. It is simply how democracies work, and all three of these countries are, unfashionably, democracies, which move at the speed of their own institutions rather than the speed of their prime ministers’ enthusiasm.
There is also an election calendar to reckon with, in all three capitals, on staggered but overlapping schedules through the rest of this decade. Agreements signed by one government can be quietly starved of budget by the next, not through hostility, but through neglect, which is the more common way policy dies. The next two to three years are the period in which these frameworks either get locked into institutions that survive a change of government, or they do not, and the region reverts to what it has mostly been for the last eighty years: three countries that trade politely and cooperate occasionally, without ever quite becoming partners.
Is that outcome likely? No. Is it impossible? Also no. Nothing about middle-power cooperation is self-executing. It requires someone, in each capital, to keep doing the unglamorous work of ratification hearings and budget lines long after the joint statement has stopped making news.
None of this requires India, Indonesia, and Australia to become allies in the way that word is used in Washington or Beijing. Indonesia will not sign a mutual-defence pact, and nobody serious is asking it to. What it requires is smaller and more achievable: that three governments finish what they have already started, rather than letting good agreements expire quietly in a filing cabinet marked pending.
The three capitals on that line through the Bay of Bengal did not choose their geography. They are choosing, right now, whether to do anything with it. History does not offer many second invitations of this kind. It offers this one, for perhaps three more years, and then it moves on to ask someone else.
