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Penulis
Prabowo Subianto made 127 country stops in 39 countries between 23 October 2019 and 8 October 2026, first as defense minister and then as president. Public debate stops at the count. This paper asks whether the visits strengthened Indonesia’s strategic autonomy in an unstable multipolar order, and how they could be redesigned to do so. It argues that the visits succeeded on diversification but not yet on conversion: they opened many doors, and few were walked through.
Using the framework of the LAB45 monograph Strategic Autonomy in a Multipolar Era, the paper codes each stop and its outcomes against the Autonomy Triangle of vulnerability, buffers and leverage, and tests four working hypotheses. The data are secondary: official releases, press archives, SIPRI and specialist defense reporting.
The visits were widely dispersed. The effective number of partners is 22.4, and the three great powers received 14.2 percent of the stops while holding 51.3 percent of world military spending. Conversion was thin: of thirty coded outcomes, only eight (27 percent) are material, seventeen remain frameworks and five were not realized. Arms procurement shows the same pattern. Of 23 programs that have reached contract or delivery, 22 come from NATO members or a European consortium, so diversification has stayed within one bloc.
A visit without conversion is a signal, not autonomy. Each stop should add one node of indispensability: every memorandum should carry a conversion date, a program owner and a co-production clause; every visit briefing should map the choke points of the sectors on the agenda; and arms diversification should cap platform families and secure a second source for munitions and spares outside the same bloc.
Keywords: strategic autonomy; foreign visits; Indonesia; multipolar order; defense procurement; diversification.
