The Middle Nation Sovereignty Framework Part Two: |Indonesia

So we can look with this framework. We can look at any specific country and view it through this framework. Like, say, Indonesia, for example. Incredibly important country, subhanallah. Huge Muslim population.

I think that the Muslim population in in Indonesia is the single largest Muslim population in any one country in the world. And Indonesia right now, in my opinion, is one of the most instructive sovereignty case studies in the global South. It's done a lot of things right, And they've done some things partially right. And the consequences of doing those things, those other things only partially right, the consequences of that are fully visible to us. So Indonesia is sort of a, it's a proof of concept and a cautionary tale simultaneously.

Okay. So first, let's establish what we're talking about. When we talk about Indonesia, we are talking about a country that is massive, as I say. I think it's about 282,000,000 people. It's one of the it's the fourth largest population on earth, the most populous country on earth.

It's the largest economy in Southeast Asia. They sit on the the intersection between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, which is obviously one of the most strategically important geographic locations or geographic positions in the world. Almost everything that moves between, East Asia and The Middle East, between Europe and Asia, has to navigate the waters between or or or the waters around the water the waters that border Indonesia. It's incredibly important location. But here's the really important thing that matters now in 2026.

Indonesia sits on top of the most important minerals on earth for the modern economy. All of this is found in Indonesia. Nickel, cobalt, bauxite, copper, coal, on and on. And when I say, nickel, you need to understand what that means today. Nickel is not just some mineral.

The whole world has decided that they're gonna go electric. Right? Electric cars and so forth. Every tech company, every vehicle company and so forth, they've all committed to this energy transition that requires batteries. Lots of batteries, and batteries require nickel, lots of nickel.

Indonesia accounts for 62% of global nickel production. 62%. That's massive. They have a stranglehold on one of the most critical inputs required for the technology economy for the next thirty years. See, the West has always gaslighted.

They've always gaslighted the global South about their wealth, about the wealth of the global South. You need to break that psychological programming. You really need to break that because we're talking about a country that's roughly the size of The US in terms of population. We're talking about a country that is geostrategically important. It's a regional powerhouse, and they've got the natural resources that that the that the whole global economy depends upon.

Indonesia is a hegemon. Don't kid yourself. That's what Indonesia is. Okay? So that's the starting point when we talk about Indonesia.

Now, obviously, for most of modern history, here's how the game worked in terms of resources, resource rich countries in the global South. You have the raw material, you dig it up, then you sell it cheap to the countries that have the factories. They process it. They manufacture it into something valuable, technology and so forth. And then they'll sell it back to you at ten, twenty, 50 times the price that you got for your minerals.

You get the revenue from selling the dirt, and they get the revenue from selling the technology, and you're supposed to be grateful. That was called free trade. That was called, comparative advantage and so forth. All sorts of, respectable economic terms that they use for their, pillage. Obviously, what it actually was functionally was you produce the raw input, and we capture the value.

That's how it worked. Well, in 2020, Indonesia looked at this arrangement with regards to nickel and they said, no. No. We're not gonna do that anymore. They banned the export of raw nickel, Raw nickel ore.

Full stop. No more selling Indonesian nickel at the bottom of the value chain. If you want Indonesian nickel, then you're gonna have to, build your processing facility in Indonesia. You create the jobs in Indonesia. You pay taxes in Indonesia or you don't get the nickel.

The EU got mad, obviously. They took the, Indonesian to the WTO because, of course, they did. That's what they always do. Their colonizer reflex is to suppress and to oppress and to subjugate. You're not supposed to make your own rules.

Who do you think you are? It's both because of their racism and because, frankly, they they they know that Indonesia holds the cards in this scenario. They know that Europe is over a barrel, which has in fact always been the case with Europe. They've always been over the barrel, and that's part of the reason they've acted the way they've acted. When Indonesia said, we have the right to develop our own industrial base, and the WTO, of course, sided with the EU because, of course, they did.

The WTO ruled against Indonesia, and Indonesia basically said, and? The WTO enforcement mechanism has been crippled for years because of The US, because The US was blocking the appointment of new judges, so they couldn't enforce their ruling. The system that was supposed to punish Indonesia for protecting their own development, protecting their own resource sovereignty, that system has been broken by the very country that's most likely wanted to punish Indonesia. You see that? The US paralyzed the WTO for their own reasons because they don't wanna follow rules themselves, because they don't believe in multilateralism themselves.

So, they paralyzed the WTO just like they paralyzed the United Nations. And alhamdulillah, that ended up helping Indonesia. So Indonesia held. The ban on raw export, raw nickel exports held. And they've been doing it until now.

Now before the export ban, Indonesia sold nickel ore at roughly $60 per ton. $60 per ton. After processing, the product value jumped to $14,600 per ton. Look at that. They turned a $1,000,000,000 export into a $33,000,000,000 export.

Non tax government revenue from nickel increased 15 fold. Nickel overtook coal as Indonesia's biggest export owner in 2025. Indonesia went from selling raw material to hosting the first EV battery cell plant in Southeast Asia, all within a four to five year period. That's how rapidly you can turn things around. Because, again, the wealth is actually yours.

The wealth is actually yours, and it always has been. This is what resource sovereignty looks like, resource nationalism. This is what it looks like when a country actually does it. So that's the proof of concept that I was talking about. That's the proof of concept.

Now let's talk about the problem because there is a problem. It's a manageable problem. The export ban worked. Like I say, it forced foreign companies to build refineries on Indonesian soil. But Indonesian companies today only own about 10% of Indonesia's nickel refining capacity.

So how is that possible? Well, because Chinese farms, Chinese companies, mainly operating through Indonesian registered shell companies own 75 to 90%. See, look at the difference in the instincts. Look at the difference in the in the in the reflexes. Like I say, the westerners fought Indonesia's export ban.

They were racially offended that Indonesians wanna have processing and they wanna have refining done in their country, where the ore comes from, where the minerals come from. So they fought it. The Europeans fought it. They wanted to punish Indonesia for raising their heads up and for thinking that they had a right to make their own rules. Well, wasn't China's reaction.

China said, okay. Your country, your rules, we respect that. We'll go along with that. And they complied legally. They complied legally with the rules, with the with the ban.

And they set up shell companies that are Indonesian registered. They built the processing, they built the refining plants, so on, all on Indonesian soil, all fully compliant legally. And now they own most of Indonesia's refining capacity. So the policy worked, but imperfectly, because you didn't include anti capture mechanisms in the policy. You understand?

So now smaller Indonesian mining companies are not able to sell to international buyers because the export ban closed that door for them. So now they have to sell to the refineries, and the refineries are Chinese controlled, Chinese owned. And Chinese controlled and Chinese owned refineries, they get to set the price. So you've replaced selling cheap ore to foreign buyers with selling cheap ore to foreign controlled domestic processes. You understand?

So you moved the dependency onshore, basically. It's better. No doubt, it's better. It is better. It is an improvement.

But it is still a dependency. You have to call it what it is. This is what you call patron switching, the patron switching problem that I mentioned earlier. You escaped one patron only to walk into the arms of another patron. The instrument, the export ban was correct.

It was correct. The mistake was not building in the anti capture protections alongside the export ban. Like, protections like mandatory rules that Indonesians have to own a minimum share of every refinery. Genuine transparency that pierces the the the shell companies to reveal who actually owns what. There should be state equity stakes in every joint venture and so on.

These are things that you need to do. So lesson learned. The good news is Indonesia knows this. They recognize this, and they're already moving to fix it. They're starting to require divestment.

They're raising royalties. They're requiring export earnings to stay in Indonesian banks. So they're moving in the right direction. It's a learning curve. And in my opinion, Indonesia is learning very quickly.

They're learning very quickly. Indonesia's mineral sovereignty is 62% geological and only 10% industrial, and that's the gap that they need to close. And they will close it, inshallah. Now let's talk about The US trade deal. In 2025, The US threatened 32% tariffs on Indonesian goods.

Now Indonesia has a significant textile industry. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of jobs, hundreds of thousands. So the threat was real, and Indonesia negotiated. They got 10 19% tariff instead of 32%. But look at what it cost them.

US companies got exempted from Indonesia's local content requirements. This is a mechanism that forces foreign investors to hire locally, to source locally, and to transfer technology. They got exempted from that. Indonesia agreed to remove the restrictions on exporting critical minerals to The US. In The Indonesia agreed to to buy $4,500,000,000 in US agricultural products, which is deepening their food import dependency.

Indonesia agreed to raise their US crude oil imports from 4% to 40% of total crude, going from minimal US energy exposure to majority US energy dependency, all in one deal. Now I'm not saying that Indonesia should have refused. I'm not saying that they should have just rejected this this negotiation. With 250,000 jobs at stake on the short term calculus, it was a defensible concession. But I'm saying you have to understand what it cost and understand why it cost that much.

It cost that much because Indonesia's economy is still heavily dependent on US market access. So that 32% tariff threat worked because it was credible, because it could actually hurt you. When losing access to someone's market creates a crisis for you, then you are negotiating from a position of weakness, and that needs to change. That's informative and educational for Indonesia. The long term goal has to be to reach a point where you can shrug off any threat like that.

If The US says that they're gonna tariff you, you can literally just not care, you know, because you've you've diversified your export markets enough. That's what you need to do. You can do that when your, South South trade is large enough to significantly replace US access. When your domestic demand also is strong enough to absorb more of what you produce. When you build collective arrangements with other countries that raise the political cost of economic coercion against you in terms of building collective sovereignty, what I'm what I've been talking about.

Okay? Indonesia isn't there yet, but understanding that that is the goal is the beginning of getting to the goal. Now that whole trade deal, by the way, with The US was based upon the tariff threat, and the United States Supreme Court has ruled that those tariffs are illegal. So in my opinion, the whole deal should be rendered null and void. It was entered into under false pretenses, and they should scrap it.

Now in January 2025, Indonesia became a full member of BRICS. They're the first Southeast Asian country to do so. BRICS is basically a coalition of major economies that are building alternative institutions to western led, the the the western led global order, alternative development banks, alternative payment systems, coordination on trade, coordination on investment, the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, the dollar reserve system, and all of that. All of this was designed after World War two by The United States so that they could run everything. They could run the world despite having a complete lack of qualifications to do so.

So BRICS is an attempt to build something else. Now is it perfect? No. Obviously, it's not perfect. But the framework, the idea that there should be alternative institutions that the global South countries actually have a stake in, obviously, this is correct.

And Indonesia is now inside that framework. They join BRICS. But here's the problem as I see it. Indonesia joined BRICS, but they haven't really figured out what they wanna do with their membership yet. They haven't really figured out what BRICS what it means to them to be part of BRICS.

They're just sort of treating it as a kind of a diplomatic statement more than a strategic tool. So in my opinion, Indonesia needs to start using BRICS. They need to be pushing for local currency payment systems so that, Indonesia and China trade doesn't route through the US dollar anymore. They need to use the new development bank to try to fund infrastructure, in Indonesia on terms that don't come with ideological strings, with, conditionality as as the funding from the West always comes. They need to build South South trade partnerships that make US tariff threats less terrifying and less credible.

Indonesia is the largest economy in Southeast Asia. They're the largest Muslim majority country in the world. They have every reason to be a leader inside of bricks. Okay? They've got the membership.

That's your entry ticket. Now you have to actually play. Now you have to actually play. So where does Indonesia go from here? First, you need to fix the nickel capture problem, and they're working on that.

The divestment requirements need to be enforced. The beneficial ownership registry needs to be public. It needs to be searchable, and it needs to actually be enforced. Indonesian companies need to own more of the processing infrastructure. Indonesian companies.

They need to own the infrastructure, not just the geology. And then I think Indonesia needs to use their palm oil leverage. Indonesia produces 60% of global palm oil, and Malaysia produces the most of the rest of that. So together, Malaysia and Indonesia control 85% of global supply. That's extraordinary market power.

Indonesia and Malaysia, in my opinion, should be coordinating pricing standards. They should develop their own sustainability certification, a certification that does not require European approval. And Indonesia and Malaysia need to be negotiating from that 85% market position rather than defending themselves individually. They need to work collectively together. The you need to take BRICS seriously, operationally, start trading in local currencies with China, with India, with other BRICS members wherever possible.

Every transaction that bypasses the dollar, reduces the lever that dollar based financial coercion has over Indonesian decisions. This isn't anti Americanism. This is pro Indonesian. Indonesia should lead, in my opinion, on ASEAN collective sovereignty. ASEAN is nearly 700,000,000 people.

700,000,000 people with a combined economy in the trillions. But ASEAN countries keep negotiating with The United States individually. So The US can threaten Indonesia, and they can tariff them at 32%, Vietnam at 20%, Cambodia at 25%, and everyone runs to cut separate deals. Okay? A unified ASEAN negotiating position led by Indonesia would completely change the leverage dynamic.

Now Indonesia started a sovereign wealth fund, Danantara, which is beautiful. This is brilliant. This is a beautiful idea. And in my opinion, every global South country needs to go in this direction. And I've talked about this before.

The sovereign wealth fund is the right idea. We're talking about a fund that Indonesia controls, that that can deploy capital for national development rather than for, foreign investors' profits. That's exactly right. That's exactly the right direction. But the fund is was partially built by cutting $44,000,000,000 worth of public services, including education.

Okay? You cannot build a national wealth project by cutting the services that your people depend upon. Now I understand that this is a long horizon project, and I and I understand that short term sacrifices have to be made, but this is just something to keep in mind. It's something to keep in mind. And the governance of Danandara needs to be ironclad.

It needs to be transparent and accountable to the parliament. It needs to be independent from day to day political direction, from day to day political control. Talk about the Singapore model. Professional, independent, reputationally accountable, and so forth. The Singapore model should be your reference point for their sovereign wealth fund.

A fund that is that powerful without safeguards isn't going to be a true sovereignty tool. It's a corruption case waiting to happen. There are several priorities in terms of sovereignty that every country needs to look at. Monetary and financial sovereignty, resource sovereignty, food sovereignty, technological or or technology development, industrial development sovereignty, and so on. And, like I say, collective sovereignty.

So when you're talking about monetary sovereignty, financial sovereignty, this maybe should be the first priority. Because when your reserves are in dollars when your reserves are in dollars, your trade is in dollars, your debt is in dollars, your trade is priced in dollars, then US Monetary Policy subordinates you. It subordinates you. The Federal Reserve can raise interest rates to manage American inflation, but you get capital flight in your country. The US Treasury, extends sanctions against some third country, your whole payment system is threatened.

You didn't have a vote in that. You didn't have any say in that, but you pay for it anyway. So Indonesia is grappling with this, the same way that every other country is grappling with this who's been stuck on the dollar. I mean, think about it. The rupiah in, 2025, they hit a five year low.

But, Bank of Indonesia had to hold the interest rates at 5.75 to defend their currency because the US Federal Reserve had raised their interest rates. Okay? That's your monetary policy being subordinated to external exposure rather than serving domestic development. That's the trap that you're in, and you can't function like that. No country can function like that constantly at the mercy of the US Federal Reserve policy.

So you need to move to dedollarizing your trade. You need to start with your largest trading partners, with China and so forth. You need to build or join alternative payment rails. Indonesia should be in SIPs. They should be in Enbridge.

And they should be in every bilateral swap arrangement that's available because swift dependency is absolutely a strategic liability, and they proved that in Iran. They proved that in Russia, and they proved it again somewhere else if you just wait a few minutes. And you need to implement capital controls wherever necessary, not permanently, not as a doctrine, but as a strategic tool. Malaysia has done this. Singapore does this.

The fact is that the record shows that countries that maintain capital controls have always been able to weather financial crises better than those that liberalized. This is well established. Then in terms of resource sovereignty, well, like I say, you have the nickel example, which is a very good example. And Indonesia is rapidly moving in the right direction in this regard to tweak the the policy to make it better. Now as I mentioned with that with that issue, the issue of China's, ownership, China's ownership of refining capacity.

Let me be clear about this. I'm not saying that China is being predatory. I'm not saying that they're being predatory. No. China is not trying to cheat Indonesia.

China is willing to comply with whatever rules you put. But they're also not there to protect you. China isn't coming there to protect you if you don't protect yourself. They're not gonna tell you what policies you need to put. They're not gonna tell you what policies or what rules, you need to implement for your own benefit, but they will comply with whatever rules you put in place.

But that's on you to come up with those rules. That's literally one of the most important differences between Chinese investment versus Western investment. The West always tells you what to do. They insist upon telling you what to do and it's always against your interest. Well, China doesn't tell you one way or the other.

You have to figure it out for yourself. See, I'm not saying get rid of Chinese investment. Not at all. In my opinion, Chinese, state directed capital is the preferred option. It's the preferred option for foreign investment, in my opinion, for the global South, for the Muslim world.

Precisely because it does not come with all the demeaning conditions that Western capital attaches to their investment. But the evaluation either way, the evaluation has to be the same regardless of who's investing, regardless of who's investing, meaning whether it's Western money or whether it's Chinese money or Gulf money or whatever, you have to ask, does this transfer a genuine capability or does it build a balanced interdependence between us or does it create a new dependency? A Chinese company that controls your refining sector through shell companies, a Chinese company that prices your ore, a Chinese company that repatriates the margin, the profit margin to Shenzhen is not your development partner. They're your extractor because you allow them to behave that way because of the rules that you put. South South investment is obviously the preference.

It is the preference, but it should not be immune from scrutiny and due diligence. In my opinion, also, Indonesia needs to try to build what I've talked about before, an organization of rare and essential commodities, OREC, modeled on OPEC, but for the full, critical minerals portfolio. An OPEC style organization, but for minerals and mining and essential commodities. There's no reason why you shouldn't build this. You need to build this.

And Indonesia, in my opinion, is the perfect country to anchor something like this. Like I say, you've got 62% of global nickel production, masha'allah. With the with The Philippines, with The DRC, with the Lithium Triangle countries of South America. Well, you could set the terms for the entire energy transition. This is in your hands to do that.

The the whole modern world runs on the periodic table, and the periodic table is concentrated in the global South. They need your minerals for their technology. Without your nickel, their electric cars don't run. So you should not be negotiating like you need them, and they don't need you. And second, with regards to minerals, obviously, you need to keep climbing the the value chain, which Indonesia, alhamdulillah, is doing.

They've already moved from, raw ore to refined nickel in just five years. The, Hyundai LG battery cell plant that opened in 2024, this is the beginning of the of the the next stage. The goal is Indonesia doesn't just mine the nickel. Indonesia doesn't just refine the nickel. Indonesia manufactures the batteries.

Indonesia assembles the EVs. So every technology transfer agreement, every joint venture contract, every industrial park agreement should have binding milestones for capability transfer to Indonesian engineers, to Indonesian technicians, and so forth. The knowledge has to stay in Indonesia when the foreign companies eventually leave. That's building real resource and real financial sovereignty. Once you build the products, once you build the batteries, once you build the EVs and so forth, sell them in your own currency.

Sell them in the rupiah. So again, first priority, monetary, financial sovereignty. Second priority, resource sovereignty. And the third priority is food sovereignty because, obviously, a country that cannot feed itself is a hostage. You're a hostage.

Full stop. You can have the most sophisticated mineral policy in the world, but if your food supply depends upon supply chains that you don't control, then you're still gonna be vulnerable to the most fundamental form of coercion, the most fundamental form of coercion. You can be starved into compliance. Okay? Indonesia imports all of its wheat, all of it, large volumes of soy, significant amounts of beef and dairy, and now The US trade deal in July 2025 committed Indonesia to purchasing $4,500,000,000 in American agricultural products, wheat, soy, corn, and so forth.

And they agreed to remove import licensing protections for American food products. Like I said, I understand the concession. I understand the situation that you were in, but the strategic direction is wrong. Every commitment that you make to increase US agricultural import dependency is a step towards vulnerability in your food sovereignty. So that's a very dangerous trade off.

Like I said, that deal should be canceled. Indonesia has, Probouos free meals program that's providing school school children and, pregnant women with food, with meals. Okay. That's a food security policy, making sure that people can eat. That's food security, making sure people can eat.

But if you wanna turn that from a food security policy into a food sovereignty policy, then the procurement has to prioritize Indonesian local production. If the program is is buying imported commodities, imported food to feed the people, then you're just deepening dependency, not building sovereignty. So, again, I think that that trade agreement needs to be scrapped. Then the fourth priority is industrial development. Industrial development and technology sovereignty.

So monetary sovereignty, resource sovereignty, food sovereignty, now industrial development and technology sovereignty. Because every country that has successfully industrialized in the modern era, has used state directed industrial policy. You're talking about Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, and so forth. Every single one protected their infant industries. Every single one forced technology transfer.

Every single one subsidized, strategic sectors of their economy. And they used global, global markets selectively, not submissively, selectively. Now during that same period, the advice that was given to the global South was liberalized, privatized, let so called comparative advantage decide who wins and who loses on the mythological level playing field. Well, the countries that followed that advice the countries that followed that advice remained suppliers of cheap labor and raw materials. And the countries that ignored that advice built themselves into industrial economies.

So the lesson is quite clear and it's not controversial or it shouldn't be controversial to anyone, who is just looking at the record, the actual historical record rather than looking at some economics textbook. The countries that got rich are the countries that did what they told everyone else not to do. You understand? They built their wealth behind the walls that they now tell everyone else to tear down. So for Indonesia specifically, you have a problem.

You do have a problem. There's an industrial emergency happening in the background of the success story of the, nickel export ban. Since 2022, more than 60 textile factories have closed in Indonesia, and that's something like 250,000 manufacturing jobs that have been lost. 250,000 manufacturing jobs. The broader manufacturing sector in Indonesia is not growing, at least not commensurate with your development ambitions.

Indonesia's industrial growth has lagged behind Vietnam and all of your other, regional competitors. So this is a problem. And then you have, again, this this US trade deal that gave an exemption to US companies from, local content requirements. That's a direct attack. That's a direct attack on Indonesia's primary industrial policy tool.

Local content requirements, like I say, are how you leverage domestic market access. That's how if you if you wanna use you wanna come to our market, then these are our requirements. If you wanna sell here, manufacture here. If you wanna sell here, you train Indonesians here. You transfer technology here.

That's the mechanism. If you wanna sell here, then this is our conditions. Exempting US companies from that mechanism means that that mechanism doesn't work anymore for the portion of investment that comes from The United States. That's a serious mistake in my opinion. That's a serious mistake.

So, again, you need to scrap that deal. No. You need to enforce local content requirements on everybody, on everybody. Build the value chain. Build the value chain.

Invest in technical education. Make every industrial park in Indonesia teaching a institution as well as a production facility. And build South South technology networks. Malaysia and Indonesia have agricultural processing expertise. Right?

Brazil has great, skill in, tropical agriculture. China, India, Turkey, they have excellent engineering capacity. You need to cooperate and and coordinate together. You don't have to get your technology from the entities that are gonna attach demeaning conditions upon sharing it. We won't share it with you unless you do thus and so.

No. You need technology partnerships with countries that have similar development interests as you, that have similar structural positions as you in the global economy. That's what South South cooperation in the in in the technology domain should look like. Again, collective sovereignty. Collective sovereignty.

Because individual countries doing individual things, however correctly they may be doing them. However, rigorously, they may be implementing their policies, the the the same types of policies that I'm describing here. The sovereignty policies this is still not gonna be sufficient against a coordinated global adversary, the international OCGFC. You have to answer architecture with architecture. Look.

Indonesia is the largest economy in ASEAN by a considerable margin. And ASEAN is a block of six six hundred and eighty, 700,000,000 people with a combined GDP exceeding $3,800,000,000,000, $4,000,000,000,000. That's not a small or a powerless entity. ASEAN is one of the major economic regions in the world. So the 2025 US tariff episode exposed the cost of ASEAN disunity.

You understand? Trump threatened 32% tariffs on Indonesia, different rates on Vietnam, different rates on Thailand, different rates on, Malaysia, on Cambodia, and so forth. He applied different rates to different countries, and he played them against each other. He negotiated individually. He negotiated separately with each one, while the common theme, the ASEAN trade surplus with The US, which they have a trade surplus, that was the structural basis for the threat against all of them.

You sell us so much that we can tariff you because, well, because you sell us so much. You export to The US so much that now a a tariff threat is very dangerous for you. A coordinated ASEAN response to that, if if if they were a block that was presenting a unified position rather than competing for the most favorable individual deal that they could get with The US, that would have fundamentally changed the whole power dynamics of those negotiations. And Indonesia, as I say, as ASEAN's largest economy and now as its most internationally active member diplomatically, Indonesia is positioned to push for exactly that. I'm talking about a collective ASEAN tariff response framework that how how we're going to deal as a block with that.

You need common investment screening standards for strategic sectors. Maybe you need an ASEAN currency swap network and so forth. ASEAN should Indonesia should lead with these these types of ideas. That's collective sovereignty at the regional level. And that takes everyone in the in in ASEAN out of the corridor of aggression, the corridor of coercion.

And then there's the potential relationship with the GCC, with The Gulf that Indonesia could look for could could pursue. Gulf sovereign wealth funds, ADIA, PIF in Saudi Arabia, the Qatar Investment Authority, and so forth, these are among the most strategically aligned pools of capital available to the global South right now. They invest with long time horizons, and they don't have any ideological conditions that they attach to their investment. No privatization requirements, no liberalization demands and so forth. They mostly just want reciprocal alignment, agenda alignment.

So for Indonesia, you have a shared Islamic identity that already creates a a foundation for a relationship. That that can be activated beyond purely financial relationship. Prabo has already been diplomatically active in The Gulf, and that's good. He's been active in The Gulf. The next step is to convert that diplomatic activity into specific investment pipelines, infrastructure, manufacturing, agricultural processing, and so forth, where Gulf capital is deployed in support of Indonesia's industrial development, their industrial sovereignty agenda, their whole national sovereignty agenda.

I don't see any reason why this couldn't happen. South South investment is obviously the preferred form of FDI. So build the pipeline. Build the pipeline with The Gulf. Don't wait for them to find you.

Present your projects to them. Design the terms and go and get it.