Indonesia is entering a world where economic openness no longer guarantees stability: conflicts, chokepoints, export controls, sanctions, and securitised supply chains increasingly shape whether trade and investment remain usable under stress. At the same time, Indonesia’s preference is not total securitisation or autarky, but a calibrated form of economic security – one that preserves openness where it still delivers welfare and upgrading capability, and intervenes only where concentrated dependencies become binding constraints. This is why this report departs from an assumption that the emergence of “strategic diversification” in Indonesia’s foreign policy discourse matters: it signals an intent to manage dependency risks deliberately, without abandoning Indonesia’s free and active tradition. Over the past year or two, from Trump's return to the escalation of conflict in Iran, Indonesia has been pushed toward a more honest national conversation about economic security. The old assumption that interdependence guarantees the uninterrupted flow of mutually beneficial economic engagement has not held up well. In practice, economic ties can just as easily become pressure points that more powerful states can exploit, especially in an era when great powers act increasingly on their own terms, with diminishing regard for others.

Much of the anxiety over the past decade has centred on how great powers have shown a growing willingness to politicise economic relationships, using market access, investment, and supply chain position as instruments of foreign policy pressure. Scholars of international political economy have a term for this: weaponised interdependence. The concept describes how global networks, financial systems, supply chains, and digital infrastructure create chokepoints that dominant states can exploit for strategic ends. What was once framed as mutual gain becomes an instrument of coercion.