But with the end of the Cold War, Washington’s attitudes began to change. The State Department began pressuring Indonesia to curb its human rights abuses. In 1992, after Indonesian military units massacred peaceful demonstrators in Dili, East Timor, Congress terminated military aid to the Indonesian government. By 1996, Indonesian reformists had begun taking to the streets, openly talking about corruption in high offices, the military’s excesses, and the need for free and fair elections.
Then, in 1997, the bottom fell out. A run on currencies and securities throughout Asia engulfed an Indonesian economy already corroded by decades of corruption. The rupiah’s value fell 85 percent in a matter of months. Indonesian companies that had borrowed in dollars saw their balance sheets collapse. In exchange for a $43 billion bailout, the Western-dominated International Monetary Fund, or IMF, insisted on a series of austerity measures (cutting government subsidies, raising interest rates) that would lead the price of such staples as rice and kerosene to nearly double. By the time the crisis was over, Indonesia’s economy had contracted almost 14 percent. Riots and demonstrations grew so severe that Suharto was finally forced to resign, and in 1998 the country’s first free elections were held, with some forty-eight parties vying for seats and some ninety-three million people casting their votes.
On the surface, at least, Indonesia has survived the twin shocks of financial meltdown and democratization. The stock market is booming, and a second national election went off without major incident, leading to a peaceful transfer of power. If corruption remains endemic and the military remains a potent force, there’s been an explosion of independent newspapers and political parties to channel discontent.
On the other hand, democracy hasn’t brought a return to prosperity. Per capita income is nearly 22 percent less than it was in 1997. The gap between rich and poor, always cavernous, appears to have worsened. The average Indonesian’s sense of deprivation is amplified by the Internet and satellite TV, which beam in images of the unattainable riches of London, New York, Hong Kong, and Paris in exquisite detail. And anti-American sentiment, almost nonexistent during the Suharto years, is now widespread, thanks in part to perceptions that New York speculators and the IMF purposely triggered the Asian financial crisis. In a 2003 poll, most Indonesians had a higher opinion of Osama bin Laden than they did of George W. Bush.
All of which underscores perhaps the most profound shift in Indonesia — the growth of militant, fundamentalist Islam in the country. Traditionally, Indonesians practiced a tolerant, almost syncretic brand of the faith, infused with the Buddhist, Hindu, and animist traditions of earlier periods. Under the watchful eye of an explicitly secular Suharto government, alcohol was permitted, non-Muslims practiced their faith free from persecution, and women — sporting skirts or sarongs as they rode buses or scooters on the way to work — possessed all the rights that men possessed. Today, Islamic parties make up one of the largest political blocs, with many calling for the imposition of sharia, or Islamic law. Seeded by funds from the Middle East, Wahhabist clerics, schools, and mosques now dot the countryside. Many Indonesian women have adopted the head coverings so familiar in the Muslim countries of North Africa and the Persian Gulf; Islamic militants and self-proclaimed “vice squads” have attacked churches, nightclubs, casinos, and brothels. In 2002, an explosion in a Bali nightclub killed more than two hundred people; similar suicide bombings followed in Jakarta in 2004 and Bali in 2005. Members of Jemaah Islamiah, a militant Islamic organization with links to Al Qaeda, were tried for the bombings; while three of those connected to the bombings received death sentences, the spiritual leader of the group, Abu Bakar Bashir, was released after a twenty-six-month prison term.
It was on a beach just a few miles from the site of those bombings that I stayed the last time I visited Bali. When I think of that island, and all of Indonesia, I’m haunted by memories — the feel of packed mud under bare feet as I wander through paddy fields; the sight of day breaking behind volcanic peaks; the muezzin’s call at night and the smell of wood smoke; the dickering at the fruit stands alongside the road; the frenzied sound of a gamelan orchestra, the musicians’ faces lit by fire. I would like to take Michelle and the girls to share that piece of my life, to climb the thousand-year-old Hindu ruins of Prambanan or swim in a river high in Balinese hills.
But my plans for such a trip keep getting delayed. I’m chronically busy, and traveling with young children is always difficult. And, too, perhaps I am worried about what I will find there — that the land of my childhood will no longer match my memories. As much as the world has shrunk, with its direct flights and cell phone coverage and CNN and Internet cafés, Indonesia feels more distant now than it did thirty years ago.
I fear it’s becoming a land of strangers.
IN THE FIELD of international affairs, it’s dangerous to extrapolate from the experiences of a single country. In its history, geography, culture, and conflicts, each nation is unique. And yet in many ways Indonesia serves as a useful metaphor for the world beyond our borders — a world in which globalization and sectarianism, poverty and plenty, modernity and antiquity constantly collide.
Indonesia also provides a handy record of U.S. foreign policy over the past fifty years. In broad outline at least, it’s all there: our role in liberating former colonies and creating international institutions to help manage the post — World War II order; our tendency to view nations and conflicts through the prism of the Cold War; our tireless promotion of American-style capitalism and multinational corporations; the tolerance and occasional encouragement of tyranny, corruption, and environmental degradation when it served our interests; our optimism once the Cold War ended that Big Macs and the Internet would lead to the end of historical conflicts; the growing economic power of Asia and the growing resentment of the United States as the world’s sole superpower; the realization that in the short term, at least, democratization might lay bare, rather than alleviate, ethnic hatreds and religious divisions — and that the wonders of globalization might also facilitate economic volatility, the spread of pandemics, and terrorism.
In other words, our record is mixed — not just in Indonesia but across the globe. At times, American foreign policy has been farsighted, simultaneously serving our national interests, our ideals, and the interests of other nations. At other times American policies have been misguided, based on false assumptions that ignore the legitimate aspirations of other peoples, undermine our own credibility, and make for a more dangerous world.
Such ambiguity shouldn’t be surprising, for American foreign policy has always been a jumble of warring impulses. In the earliest days of the Republic, a policy of isolationism often prevailed — a wariness of foreign intrigues that befitted a nation just emerging from a war of independence. “Why,” George Washington asked in his famous Farewell Address, “by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?” Washington’s view was reinforced by what he called America’s “detached and distant situation,” a geographic separation that would permit the new nation to “defy material injury from external annoyance.”