Years of living prosperly

National Review, June 22, 1992 by Robert Elegant

The Toyota battles its way through traffic that grows more clotted as the tropical dusk abruptly turns into black night. The air-conditioning sputters, and the needle of the temperature gauge hits the top. With the air-conditioning off to keep the radiator from boiling over, the passengers are soon soaked with sweat. Through the opened windows flow the odors of the street: garlic and hot peppers; cheap perfume and clove cigarettes; gasoline and diesel fumes; frangipani, coconut-milk curry, and goat meat sizzling over wood-fires.

The Toyota is mired among unmoving vans, trucks, cars, and motorcycles. A battered red Nissan makes an illegal left turn up the one-way street, left wheels on the pavement, right fenders brushing the immobilized law-abiding cars. Others follow.

With that maneuver, the gridlock eases enough for a bus to poke its nose into the intersection. An adolescent wearing a baseball cap and a sarong jumps down, smartly gets the traffic moving, albeit very slowly, and jumps back on as the bus pulls away.

Such coagulation is normal for Jakarta at 6 P.M. The capital of Indonesia already counts at least eight million inhabitants. Despite efforts to discourage the influx, Jakarta is growing by hundreds, perhaps thousands, every week.

The Toyota struggles past Clodok, the old Chinatown, toward Medan Merdeka, Independence Square, at the city's center. Under the rainbow glare of neon signs, we pass hastily erected buildings with gaudy facades, which house garages, factories, schools, restaurants, banks, and supermarkets--the exuberant new shoots thrust up by an old agricultural land entering the industrial/information age.

We are coming from the new international airport, diplomatically called Sukarno-Hatta after the two leaders of the fight for independence from the Dutch, who began as allies and ended as enemies. The present administration is eager not to revive the political feuds in which hundreds of thousands died.

Kemayoran, the old airport now engulfed by the city, was dirty, noisy, ill lit, crumbling, and malodorous. Arriving travelers, having finally escaped purposefully rude immigration officers and extortionate customs men, had to fight their way through throngs of idlers who came to watch the airplanes. Many then exchanged their dollars for soiled rupiahs brandished by black-market dealers.

Kemayoran was probably the most unpleasant major airport in the world. Sukarno-Hatta may not be the most efficient, but it works well. Dispersed gates, reached by open walkways under red-tile roofs, are charming--and there are no more idlers. Too much to do. Nor are there any money changers, since there is no more black market. A confident government allows the rupiah to find its own level.

The new Indonesia is, above all, self-confident. "The Javanese deal with even the Japanese as equals," a European diplomat mused to me. "They know their culture is at least as old and distinguished."

Indonesia is foremost in the second tier in Southeast Asia, having moved rapidly from capricious economic and political dirigisme to a modified free-market economy and a modified authoritarian government after over-throwing the tyrant Sukarno in 1966. With Thailand and Malaysia, Indonesia is avidly grasping the opportunities of the New Economic Age created by Japanese leadership and by the energy of the first tier, the "lesser dragons": Singapore and Hong Kong in the region, Taiwan and South Korea farther north.

New international conditions coincidentally accompany the New Economic Age. Marxism-Leninism self-destructed during Southeast Asia's growth throes. Recently even Peking has implicitly acknowledged that the momentum of reform is irresistible.

Another condition is now becoming clear--to the distress of Indonesians and other Southeast Asians. The United States is gradually disengaging. It is just maintaining its investments, while other investors like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea move ahead. Above all, Southeast Asia wants the American military to remain--as a counterweight to a rearming Japan or a resurgent China, and to dampen any recrudescence of old intra-regional conflicts. But when volcanic ash piled on Clark Field in the Philippines, Washington declared with extraordinary alacrity that the chief U.S. Air Force base in Asia was no longer serviceable--and pulled out. The same Filipino intransigence that inspired that disgusted retreat also led to the decision to abandon Subic Bay, the chief U.S. Navy base in Asia.

The first practical effect was seen when China, having acquired mid-air refueling technology from Israel, extended its umbrella over the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Those islands, which could prove rich in undersea petroleum deposits, are also claimed by Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam.

A few years ago, the American response to such a threat to the region's peace would have been, at the least, a strong statement, perhaps an aircraft carrier steaming in the vicinity. But the American ambassador in Manila only said: "The U.S. is clearly going to oppose the use of force."