US Destabilization of Indonesia

I want to begin with a sequence of events, stated plainly and in order, because the sequence is the argument.

On 13 April 2026, Indonesia signed a Major Defense Cooperation Partnership with Washington at the Pentagon. The same week, the United States pushed for blanket overflight access for US military aircraft through Indonesian airspace — a request that would have given Washington effective surveillance command over the Strait of Malacca and its alternative routes. Indonesia’s Foreign Ministry rejected it. “There is no policy granting unrestricted access for any foreign party to utilise Indonesia’s airspace,” it stated. An Indonesian military colonel published a formal assessment calling the proposal an “entrapment risk” to national sovereignty.

Eight days later, at the IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington, Indonesia’s Finance Minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa was offered between $20 and $30 billion in loans. He turned it down. “Thank you for the offer,” he said, “but right now the budget condition is still good and I don’t need that debt yet.” Jakarta was sitting on a $25 billion cash reserve and a $26.4 billion budget surplus. It did not need the money. What it did not need even more were the conditions attached to it.

Two sovereign refusals. Two clear messages to Washington.

Seven weeks later, on 12 June, hundreds of students in yellow university jackets flooded Jakarta’s streets, calling the protest “Heading to Bankrupt Indonesia,” demanding Prabowo roll back state spending, lower fuel and food prices, and end the expanding role of the military in civilian affairs. 

I am not saying the protests were manufactured. I am saying the sequence deserves serious examination — and that anyone familiar with the documented history of American covert regime change operations will find it impossible to examine that sequence without asking questions that mainstream coverage is conspicuously avoiding.

The book that explains the pattern

In 2018, Lindsey A. O’Rourke, professor of political science and published through Cornell University Press, produced the most rigorous academic study of American covert regime change operations ever compiled. Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War drew on thousands of declassified documents from multiple presidential libraries to document sixty-four covert American regime change attempts during the Cold War, including forty-five more than any previous dataset had captured.

Her core finding: the United States systematically targeted foreign governments that refused to align with American strategic interests — not primarily because they were communist, not primarily because they were undemocratic, but because they made independent decisions about their own resources, their own foreign policy, and their own sovereignty.

The instruments she documents are precise. The CIA funded “foreign political parties, dissident movements, student groups, labour unions.” It used “propaganda, economic warfare, preventative direct actions, including sabotage, anti-sabotage.” It manipulated foreign elections, backed coup plotters, and engineered the economic conditions that made populations receptive to the narrative that their own governments had failed them.

The playbook is not secret. It is published in a peer-reviewed book from an Ivy League university press. What makes it effective is not its secrecy but the systematic unwillingness of mainstream analysis to apply its lessons to current events.

Indonesia 1954–1965: the documented case

O’Rourke’s dataset lists Indonesia (1954–58) as a US covert regime change operation. The target was President Sukarno — a genuinely popular, democratically elected leader who pursued economic nationalism, refused to subordinate Indonesian foreign policy to Washington’s Cold War framework, and was moving toward non-alignment at a time when Washington demanded loyalty.

When fearing that the Indonesian Communist Party might win Indonesia’s next election, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said in 1958: “They [the Indonesians] cannot turn over their country to communism without something being done about it by the free world.” Note the logic: an Indonesian election producing a result Washington did not prefer was characterised as Indonesians “turning over their country” — rather than Indonesians making their own democratic choice.

O’Rourke documents that Eisenhower ordered the United States to “employ all feasible covert means to strengthen the will, determination and cohesion of anti-Communist forces” inside Indonesia. Dulles simultaneously told Congress while the operation was underway: “We are pursuing what I trust is a correct course from the point of international law. We are not intervening in the internal affairs of the country.” The plausible deniability was explicit and deliberate. It always is.

The 1958 operation failed to dislodge Sukarno. The 1965 operation did not fail. What followed the US-backed coup that removed Sukarno was the systematic killing of between 500,000 and one million Indonesians — members of the Indonesian Communist Party and anyone associated with them. The CIA provided lists of names. This is not disputed history. It is documented in declassified US government records and confirmed by American officials who participated.

This is the history President Prabowo inherited when he took office. It is the history that shapes every Indonesian government’s calculation about American intentions and American requests.

What Washington actually wants from Indonesia

President Prabowo himself articulated the stakes clearly in April: “70% of East Asia’s energy needs and trade pass through Indonesian waters.” Indonesia controls the Strait of Malacca — through which 40% of global trade and 80% of China’s oil imports pass. It controls the Lombok Strait, the primary alternative route when Malacca is congested or threatened. It controls the Sunda Strait. It is the world’s largest nickel producer, supplying the raw material essential for EV batteries and the renewable energy infrastructure that both Washington and Beijing are competing to control.

A compliant Jakarta gives Washington the ability to threaten China’s energy lifelines without firing a shot — by extending the same maritime containment architecture it is building through the Iran war and the US-Indonesia defence partnership to the chokepoints on China’s other flank. An independent Jakarta — one that rejects IMF debt conditions, refuses blanket military overflight rights, and whose population surveys 80.1% pro-China in the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s 2026 regional survey — makes that entire architecture unworkable.

The ISEAS survey is worth dwelling on. 80.1% of Indonesians would choose China over the United States if forced to choose — the highest proportion in all of Southeast Asia. 67.8% identified US leadership under Trump as their top geopolitical concern. These are not numbers that suggest a population receptive to Washington’s strategic priorities. They are numbers that suggest a government under sustained structural pressure to align with American preferences despite the wishes of its own people.

Washington knows these numbers. What it does next is what the historical pattern predicts.

The economic conditions that made the protests possible

I want to be precise about what the June 12 protests reflected, because honest analysis requires separating legitimate grievance from manufactured pressure — and acknowledging that both can exist simultaneously.

The protests were held after fuel prices jumped 32% the week of June 12 — for the first time since the United States launched its war against Iran more than three months earlier. Protesters wearing yellow university jackets voiced frustration over living costs, which have risen as a result of higher fuel costs since the US launched its war against Iran.

This is important. The immediate economic trigger for the protests — a fuel price spike — is a direct consequence of the Iran war’s disruption to global energy markets. That disruption was caused by Washington’s decision to launch Operation Epic Fury on 28 February 2026 without Congressional authorisation, without consultation with allies, and without calculating its global economic consequences. The same government that created the conditions for Indonesia’s fuel crisis is now presiding over a geopolitical moment in which Indonesian popular frustration with those conditions creates pressure on the Indonesian government that refused to serve American strategic interests.

The protests, called “Heading to Bankrupt Indonesia,” outlined five key demands including the lowering of fuel and food prices, cancellation of flagship spending programs, and an end to expanding military roles in civilian affairs. These grievances are real. The free meals programme has been subject to a corruption probe. The military’s expanding role in civilian governance is a legitimate democratic concern for a country that lived through Suharto. The rupiah at 18,000 to the dollar represents genuine economic pain for Indonesian families.

None of that makes the timing coincidental. And none of it resolves the question of whether the economic conditions being exploited were deliberately engineered, passively permitted, or simply opportunistically observed.

O’Rourke’s book documents that the CIA historically used exactly this combination: real economic grievances, amplified through media and organisational networks, channelled toward political outcomes that served American strategic interests rather than Indonesian popular welfare. The 1965 operation against Sukarno did not manufacture the PKI. It used the existence of the PKI — and the genuine social tensions around it — to justify and enable a military coup that served American interests in ways that had nothing to do with communism and everything to do with Indonesian oil, Indonesian geography, and Indonesian refusal to subordinate its foreign policy to Washington.

The colour-coded warning

O’Rourke’s research establishes that covert regime change operations targeting countries that refused American strategic demands consistently involved a common toolkit: student movements, economic pressure, media manipulation, and the cultivation of military factions willing to act when civilian politics proved resistant.

Ukraine 2004 had orange jackets. Georgia 2003 had roses. Serbia 2000 had clenched fists. Lebanon 2005 had red and white cedar flags. Each of these movements had genuine domestic grievances. Each also had documented organisational and financial links to American democracy promotion infrastructure — the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, Open Society networks, and the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.

The Indonesian students who took to Jakarta’s streets on June 12 were wearing yellow university jackets. Their grievances — fuel prices, government spending, military interference in civilian life — are real. The question is not whether they felt what they felt. The question is whether those feelings are being organised, amplified, and directed in ways that serve purposes beyond what the students themselves intend.

That question cannot be answered yet from open sources. It is exactly the kind of question that will only be answered, if at all, through declassified documents examined decades from now — the same way O’Rourke answered the questions about Sukarno.

But we do not need to wait for declassification to recognise the pattern. We need only read the book.

Pepe Escobar, Glenn Diesen, and the strategic logic

Pepe Escobar has been writing about Indonesian strategic sovereignty for years. His reading of the US-Indonesia relationship is consistent with O’Rourke’s historical framework: what Washington cannot achieve through bilateral negotiation, it seeks to achieve through the management of domestic political pressure inside target countries. The defence partnership signed on 13 April was not, in his reading, primarily a military arrangement. It was the opening of a leverage channel — a formal relationship that creates domestic interlocutors, military-to-military ties, and institutional dependencies that gradually shift the political calculus of Indonesian decision-makers.

Glenn Diesen, whose analysis of American covert pressure on states that refuse strategic alignment has been consistently rigorous, noted the pattern in the context of the Iran war: the United States does not need to win military confrontations to achieve political objectives. It needs to create enough domestic instability in target countries that their governments choose the path of least resistance — which is compliance with American strategic requirements. Economic pressure is the mechanism that transforms strategic refusal into domestic political vulnerability.

Indonesia refused the overflight request. It refused the IMF loan. The rupiah weakened. Fuel prices rose, partly because the Iran war Washington caused disrupted global energy markets. Students took to the streets seven weeks after the refusals. The sequence is complete. Its interpretation is a matter of political will.

What this means for Malaysia

Malaysia has watched this sequence play out before. Not in Jakarta — in Kuala Lumpur.

The 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal, whatever its domestic origins, became a vehicle for extraordinary American legal and financial pressure against a Malaysian government that had not sufficiently aligned with Washington’s regional strategic priorities. The Department of Justice’s Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, launched during the Obama years and accelerating under both subsequent administrations, reached into Malaysian politics through legal mechanisms that had nothing to do with justice and everything to do with leverage. Goldman Sachs paid fines. The Malaysian government fell.

I am not suggesting that what happened to 1MDB was fabricated. I am suggesting that the choice of which governments to investigate, which financial crimes to prosecute, and which legal mechanisms to deploy internationally follows a pattern that is recognisable once you have read O’Rourke carefully.

Malaysia controls the Strait of Malacca. Malaysia has not signed Pax Silica. Malaysia’s ISEAS survey results, while not as dramatically pro-China as Indonesia’s, reflect a population that is deeply uncomfortable with the coercive dimensions of American strategic policy. These are facts that Washington’s strategic community registers. They are facts that the Malaysian government should register in turn — because the Indonesian case shows what happens when a government makes two clear sovereign refusals in rapid succession without having built the institutional, diplomatic, and economic architecture to withstand the consequences.

The lesson from the book

O’Rourke’s central conclusion in Covert Regime Change is both precise and devastating: American covert regime change operations failed more than 60% of the time to overthrow their immediate targets — but even when they failed to produce regime change, they succeeded in imposing costs on target governments, weakening their domestic political positions, and extracting concessions they would not otherwise have made.

The goal was never exclusively to remove Prabowo. The goal is to make being Prabowo sufficiently uncomfortable that the next set of Indonesian decisions — on overflight rights, on IMF loans, on Pax Silica, on military basing arrangements for the maritime containment of China — go differently than the April decisions did.

John Foster Dulles admitted the mechanism while trying to overthrow Sukarno: “You reach a point where it is extremely difficult to do much more without showing your hand.” The hand is not shown. The pressure is applied. The domestic politics of the target country do the rest — if the economic conditions are right, if the student networks are active, if the media framing positions the government as the obstacle to the population’s economic welfare.

The Iranian war’s fuel price shock created the economic conditions. The student networks exist. The media framing is already running. The hand is not shown. It never is, until decades later when a political scientist gets access to the archives.

The Indonesian government, the Malaysian government, and every ASEAN government watching what is happening in Jakarta right now need to understand what they are looking at. Not to claim certainty about covert involvement — the evidence for that remains classified. But to recognise the pattern, build the resilience, and make the political calculations that protect their sovereignty before the pressure becomes irresistible.

O’Rourke’s book ends with a warning that is directly relevant to this moment. Covert regime change, she writes, is “a false promise” — it does not produce the outcomes it claims to pursue. But its failure does not stop it from being used. It is used because the costs are borne by the target country, not the intervening one. Because plausible deniability insulates the intervener from accountability. And because the domestic political dynamics it exploits are real, even when the exploitation is manufactured.

Jakarta is reading the playbook right now. The question is whether it has prepared well enough to close the book on Washington’s chosen ending.