JAKARTA: The Foreign Ministry has a new leader; more importantly, the right one.
President Prabowo Subianto announced on Thursday (Oct 1) a sweeping cabinet reshuffle that, among its many moves, handed the foreign affairs portfolio to Arrmanatha “Tata” Nasir, a rising diplomatic star. The appointment matters not just for what it does but also for what it restores.
For 23 months, the post was held by Sugiono, a loyal Gerindra Party politician and trusted aide to Prabowo. His tenure had its merits: He listened to seasoned diplomats, including his second deputy Tata, and showed a rare willingness to defer to deep expertise.
Yet placing a political appointee at the helm of a government bureau built on institutional memory carries risk, nowhere more so than at the Foreign Ministry on Jalan Pejambon.
That risk was evident in the first two years of the Prabowo presidency. Foreign policy analysts flagged a familiar pattern: presidential commitments made unilaterally, including on joint maritime development in the South China Sea, on Gaza evacuations and on military hardware, that forced the ministry into damage control afterward.
When the Foreign Ministry becomes "a cleanup crew rather than an engine room", as one analyst put it, Indonesia's standing suffers in every capital that was not consulted.
Tata is a welcome correction. He has spent 27 years at the ministry, with postings in Geneva at the WTO, in Paris as ambassador to France and Unesci and in New York as permanent representative to the United Nations, where he chaired the ECOSOC Coordination Segment and vice-chaired the Palestinian Rights Committee.
Before all that, he was the face of Indonesian diplomacy as ministerial spokesman under Retno Marsudi, the first woman to lead the foreign service. In an era when the palace showed little appetite for global affairs, she held the line on country’s long-standing values: bebas-aktif (free and active) foreign policy, multilateral engagement, compassion toward the dispossessed.
Tata absorbed all of it. He is not simply a career diplomat, he was Retno's man. His promotion means normalcy returns to the ministry.
The President will rightfully continue to call the shots on foreign policy. Tata’s job is to ensure that Prabowo's ambitions translate into positions that are consistent, defensible and aligned with Indonesia’s long-upheld principles. He is not there to resist the President's instincts; he is there to give them form.
Prabowo deserves credit for a change of guard long advocated across the foreign policy community, including our own editors.
We thank Sugiono for his service and his willingness to empower the career diplomats around him, and we wish him well in his new role as coordinating human development and cultural affairs minister.
To Tata, now at the helm of a ministry that has reclaimed its voice, we wish fair winds as the nation sails the following seas. - The Jakarta Post/ANN
