Indonesia’s growing maritime ambitions challenge Singapore’s unilateral assertiveness and ambiguous jurisdictional practices at sea, making institutionalised joint maritime patrols, real-time intelligence sharing, and targeted capacity-building essential to prevent the fragmentation of regional security. 

As the two leading ASEAN states, Singapore and Indonesia must carefully manage historical sensitivities and transboundary disputes through permanent multi-level structures rather than ad-hoc crisis management, while synchronising priorities such as supply-chain resilience, digitalisation and conflict mediation. 

Transforming their current pragmatic and transactional relationship into a robust strategic partnership is critical to safeguard both countries’ sovereignty and interests, reinforce ASEAN centrality, and avoid the high costs of strategic inaction amid intensifying regional and global competition.

While Singapore can confidently leave Indonesia to look after its national sovereignty and strategic autonomy, Indonesia’s growing maritime ambitions will pose problems for Singapore’s unilateral assertiveness at sea as well as for the ambiguous jurisdictional overlaps that Singapore practices, which have the effect of fragmenting security in the region as opposed to reinforcing it. To address this challenge, the way forward for Singapore is to work with Indonesia to institutionalise joint maritime patrols, real-time intelligence sharing, and targeted capacity building in areas such as counter-piracy, marine environmental protection, and joint humanitarian disaster relief. In addition, by regularising high-level defence dialogues and laying down standard operating procedures, Singapore can reduce the scope for strategic misperception and convert its current mainly tactical cooperation with Indonesia into a routine........

© Eurasia Review