How Indonesia, Malaysia and Turkey can promote world peace – Fri, January 20 2023

The recent visit of Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim to Indonesia to meet with his counterpart President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo of Indonesia was both important and strategic in three ways. They affirmed the obvious, that Indonesia and Malaysia do have a “special relationship”.

But more importantly they opened the way for other countries who are already a part of the ASEAN process, such as Turkey, all of whom can jointly pioneer new ways of finding solutions to global peace, notably the most-important current global peace issue, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which has triggered Japan to double its defense spending between 2022-2027 for the first time since the end of World War II in 1945.

Should this dyad continue to become even more toxic than it already is, the whole Asia-Pacific would be on the most extreme alert. No amount of goodwill between Indonesia and Malaysia alone can show the way forward. Why? China, India, Russia, North Korea and the United States are all nuclear-weapons states with conflicting claims on what should be their roles in the world’s most-populous continent.