President Rodrigo Duterte’s may have rowed back from his shock decision to ‘separate’ from the United States announced during his recent visit to China, but the bizarre episode reinforces the picture of a very different …
Articles by: "John McBeth"
She’s back! Six years after being run out of town over the 2008 Bank Century bailout debacle, Sri Mulyani Indrawati is back as finance minister in a newly-reshuffled Indonesian Cabinet that provides further evidence President …
Indonesian President Joko Widodo may have finally come of age as a leader with his decision to ignore seniority—and Indonesian Democratic Party for Struggle (PDI-P) chairperson Megawati Sukarnoputri—in choosing counter-terrorism guru, Tito Karnavian, as Indonesia’s …
Tired of the humiliating dictates of Indonesian Democratic Party for Struggle (PDI-P) leader Megawati Sukarnoputri, Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo now has a new option—running for the former ruling Golkar Party in the 2019 elections. Describing …
It has been 50 years since the Indonesian military crushed the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) in a bloody pogrom that’s widely believed to have taken at least 500,000 lives—many of them innocent victims of …
When Washington dispatched a joint special operations task force to the southern Philippines in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, it was motivated by evidence that the Abu Sayyaf (ASG) militant group had links with …
Last Sunday’s incident north of Indonesia’s Natuna islands, in which two armed Chinese Coastguard ships forced an Indonesian patrol craft to release an intruding Chinese trawler, shows once again that Jakarta must confront the reality …
Australians will notice an interesting parallel between oil giant Woodside and its impasse with the Timor Leste government and an internal conflict within the Joko Widodo administration over how to develop what will be Indonesia’s …
Indonesia’s worst terrorist attack in six years may have set Jakarta on edge and introduced a troubling new tactical dimension to Southeast Asian terrorism, but the pistol-wielding militants failed to live up to what’s normally …
President Joko Widodo knows better than anyone that the reason he chose Sudirman Said as mines and energy minister last October wasn’t because of Said’s knowledge of mining and oil and gas but because Widodo …
The haze from land-clearing fires blanketing Sumatra, Kalimantan and peninsular Southeast Asia for the past two months has now extended to Papua, with the blame falling on an agriculture development project aimed at turning the …
It’s been 10 months in the planning, but when Indonesian President Joko Widodo flies to the United States next week the agenda for his 26 October meeting with President Barack Obama will be considerably different …