{"id":1469,"date":"2016-12-02T20:48:55","date_gmt":"2016-12-02T20:48:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aiccusa.org\/?p=1469"},"modified":"2016-12-02T20:48:55","modified_gmt":"2016-12-02T20:48:55","slug":"ahok-trump-and-the-way-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/?p=1469","title":{"rendered":"Ahok, Trump, and The Way Forward"},"content":{"rendered":"

Commentary by Wayne Forrest<\/em><\/p>\n

Saying anything about a Trump Administration and its effect on US- Indonesia relations now could prove to be a fool\u2019s enterprise, but this month\u2019s commentary will take a shot, doing so by way of the controversy surrounding Basuki \u201cAhok\u201d Purnama\u2019s troubled bid to remain Jakarta\u2019s governor.<\/p>\n

With the precedent set by Jokowi, the Jakarta governorship is now a stepping stone to the Presidency. The race is turning out to be a political proxy fight wrapped in a religious tolerance issue.\u00a0 As the US presidential race demonstrated polls are not always an accurate indication of final voter preference and misinformation can play a major role in changing voter sentiment.\u00a0 No one knows whether Ahok has the ambition to follow his predecessor Jokowi as President but its clear that a \u201cho hum\u201d race (Ahok held 20 point margins over his two rivals, Agus Yudhoyono and Anies Baswedan as late as September) has turned into a barn burner since Ahok\u2019s remarks on people misusing a verse of the Koran to only vote for a Muslim went viral and became a convenient catalyst for rivals to push hard against President Jokowi\u2019s administration by first demanding the arrest of his former subordinate for blasphemy.\u00a0 Any notion that Jokowi\u2019s 2019 reelection will be fairly easy –given his artfully crafted majority coalition– is fast receding.<\/p>\n

The threat of further violence posed by the huge November 4th anti-Ahok demonstration has obsessed the police, the military, as well as the President, who has said little about possible changes to the world\u2019s security and trade architecture following Trump\u2019s election. After a serious internal debate within the police, charges of blasphemy (under an arcane law with very general provisions) were brought against Ahok in deference to the demonstrators, many of whom were not even from Jakarta.\u00a0 The Jokowi government clearly calculated that not filing the charges would have made things worse.\u00a0 As a result, a large rally planned for November 25th by \u201csupposed\u201d hardliners demanding Ahok\u2019s arrest has been postponed until Dec. 2 and limited to a park rather than city streets.\u00a0 I say \u201csupposed\u201d to make the point that in the murky world of Indonesian politics, nothing is as clear as it may seem; the hardliners can be someone else\u2019s creation or at the very least their paid proxy.\u00a0 For example, considerable speculation exists that former President Yudhoyono is supporting those opposed to Ahok not just because his son is running but also out of concern that ongoing investigations of actions taken when he was President could implicate him or members of his family.\u00a0 Some see a Jokowi-SBY confrontation down the road.<\/p>\n

Ahok has in the past successfully fought off opponents who played the religious and ethnic card (he is Christian Chinese) and Jakartans have shown their religious tolerance time and again.\u00a0 But in another parallel to the US election, what was once taken as a given can shift, especially in the era of social media, which has become wildly anti-Ahok.\u00a0 What a shame to see a popular and highly competent government official –who has fixed Jakarta\u2019s leaky storm drains literally and figuratively–taken down because of his free speech. Ahok is soldiering on and can stay in the race even when his case goes to trial but things are not looking good at the moment. Meanwhile Indonesia\u2019s reputation for religious tolerance and pluralism is suffering. The irony is that Indonesians are saying the same thing about the US.<\/p>\n

What little has been said by Indonesian leaders about Trump and his possible policies boils down to: world trade is declining, we need to build infrastructure and grow our consumer economy, let\u2019s wait and see what the US does.\u00a0 But what of the structural reforms embedded in the TPP that Jokowi embraced as a way to push Indonesia to compete in an increasingly globalized economy? \u00a0 These will likely take a back seat or be put on hold. \u00a0 On the US side, trade enhancement tools such as GSP could easily be viewed as net losses of US jobs and summarily scrapped.<\/p>\n

Indonesia, always a pragmatic balancer of superpowers, will likely now join China\u2019s TPP alternative RCEP (regional comprehensive economic partnership).\u00a0 But TPP was about rules and RCEP is about tariffs.\u00a0 If a Trump Administration cares only about tariffs and thwarting US imports, the inside deal makers that oppose Jokowi and Ahok and support zero sum economic policies will only be emboldened. \u00a0 The Economist likens the situation today to when Ronald Reagan was elected in a similar atmosphere of \u201cmake America great again\u201d. Indonesia in 1980 was by and large a protected economy that appealed to only a handful of multinationals. \u00a0 We do not want to go back to those days.<\/p>\n

Both governments need to realize 4 essential truths: (1) the US depends on Indonesian tropical commodities such as rubber, coffee, spices, palm oil, wood products, and botanical extracts\/essential oils; (2) 60% of Indonesia\u2019s capital markets is foreign-sourced money, much of it from the US; (3) although the US is not Indonesia\u2019s largest trading partner it is the largest market for its manufactured products; (4) Indonesia\u2019s huge and growing number of middle class consumers are big fans of US brands. \u00a0 Trump\u2019s election exposed the cracks in the global economic system built after WW II. They can be repaired if we keep these truths in mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Commentary by Wayne Forrest Saying anything about a Trump Administration and its effect on US- Indonesia relations now could prove to be a fool\u2019s enterprise, but this month\u2019s commentary will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1469"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1470,"href":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1469\/revisions\/1470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aiccusa.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}