Of the many parting shots that US President Donald Trump’s administration has fired, few can have summed up its characteristics better than its reported offer to increase its development financing to Indonesia by billions of dollars in exchange for Jakarta’s recognising Israel, which a senior Trump official, Adam Boehler, recently revealed in a speech in Jerusalem. The diplomacy involved was shamelessly transactional. Its underlying premise seems to have been that the lure of money will always trump everything, including longstanding principles. It was not only ideologically blinkered but also strategically wrong-headed and politically inept. And it will likely end in failure.
When and how the administration originally made the offer to Indonesia remains shrouded in official secrecy. But it is easy to imagine its being floated during the two visits to Jakarta in 2020 by Boehler, the CEO of the US International Development Financing Corporation (DFC), during which he met President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) among others. It is just as easy to speculate that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also raised it during his late October visit to Jakarta, given his ideological crusade on the Israeli question. And it would be hard to discount the possibility of its having come up during the meeting in Washington on 17 November between Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment Luhut Panjaitan and senior Trump officials, including Boehler, Jared Kushner (Boehler’s former college roommate) and Ivanka Trump, and in a subsequent meeting with Donald Trump himself, in which those officials also participated.
Read the article by David Engel in The Strategist.