When Donald Trump rose to power in 2016, the world didn’t just get a new U.S. president, it inherited a new kind of global order. With little regard for diplomatic conventions or multilateral institutions, Trump rebranded American foreign policy under the banner of “America First” and launched a wave of trade tariffs that rippled across the globe. His economic nationalism disrupted long-standing alliances and cast doubt on the durability of globalization itself.

But Trump’s trade war was never just about economics. It was a geopolitical maneuver, one that recognized a truth too many policymakers still ignore: that global influence hinges not just on military strength, but on who controls the supply chains, the semiconductors, and the rare earths.

For Indonesia, this should have sounded alarms. Our continued dependence on imported military hardware leaves us vulnerable in a world growing more fractured and less predictable. Indonesia’s dependence on foreign defense systems mirrors a broader pattern across the Global South from Brazil’s delayed fighter jet program to Nigeria’s overreliance on imported surveillance tech where strategic sectors remain externally dependent.

The 1999 arms embargo, imposed by Western allies in the wake of the East Timor crisis, was a painful lesson in vulnerability as it temporarily paralyzed our defense capabilities. That should have triggered a lasting national strategy for defense independence. Yet two decades later, the same fragility persists.

Contrast this with South Korea, which in the same time frame has transformed from a defense importer into a global defense innovator. The KF-21 fighter jet, the K9 artillery system, and a growing export portfolio are the result of not just industrial ambition, but deliberate national strategy. South Korea’s model shows what is possible when political will meets consistent investment in research and development.

Indonesia has similar potential. Our state-owned defense firms; PT PAL, PT Pindad, PT Dirgantara Indonesia have the capacity to build. What they lack is the political support and policy clarity to scale. Bureaucratic inertia, inconsistent funding, and overreliance on foreign procurement have left them adrift.

We need to reframe defense self-reliance not as a lofty ideal, but as a strategic necessity. And that requires more than assembling foreign-made components on Indonesian soil. It demands an ecosystem, one where government, industry, universities, and civil society work in sync, where defense research is a national priority, and where regulations empower rather than hinder.

South Korea spends more than 4% of its GDP on research and development (R&D). Indonesia spends just 0.2%. That gap is not just numerical, it’s philosophical. It reflects how little we trust our own potential to innovate, and how much we continue to rely on external validation and imported expertise to solve domestic challenges. While countries like South Korea treat R&D as a pillar of sovereignty and economic resilience, Indonesia continues to treat it as an optional add-on valuable, perhaps, but not essential. Without reversing this mindset and investing accordingly, we risk remaining perpetual adopters of others’ technologies, never originators of our own.

Trump will be out of the White House one day, but the world he helped shape might remain: less cooperative, more cutthroat. In this world, self-reliance is not an ideological luxury. It’s a geopolitical lifeline.

Indonesia has a narrow but critical window. We don’t need to become the next South Korea overnight. But we do need to believe in our capacity to build and to start now. The longer we wait, the more likely it is that we’ll be left behind, not just as a consumer nation, but as a geopolitical afterthought. In doing so, Indonesia should consider targeted tax breaks for defense R&D, revive strategic cooperation with fellow Global South producers like India and Turkey, and prioritize local supply chain resilience over flashy foreign procurements.