Indonesia’s China exercise was a judgement failure, not an alignment shift

The exercise reveals China's strategic exploitation of Indonesia's non-aligned posture to normalize military operations in the Taiwan Strait without Indonesian strategic intent to accommodate China. For Australia, this underscores the vulnerability of Indo-Pacific partners to Chinese normalization tactics and the risk that Indonesia's non-alignment, while not a shift toward Beijing, creates procedural openings for China to claim operational legitimacy near Taiwan—indirectly weakening the regional coalition against Chinese coercion.