The Strait of Hormuz crisis has done more than raise Indonesia’s fuel bill. Between late March and early April, President Prabowo Subianto visited Japan, South Korea, and Russia in a sequence difficult to dismiss as routine scheduling. The three visits were bound by a common set of priorities: energy security, industrial supply chains, and strategic resilience. Taken together, the visits suggest a more coherent energy playbook taking shape.

At home, Jakarta moved quickly to cushion the disruption through subsidies, fuel management, and supply diversification. On March 12, Prabowo ordered an acceleration of the energy transition and a diversification of oil sourcing. By March 31, the government had capped fuel sales, kept subsidized fuel prices unchanged, and imposed demand-management measures. By April 8, Prabowo was explicitly linking energy self-sufficiency to sovereignty and stability.

None of these measures alone is remarkable; governments across Southeast Asia and beyond adopted similar steps. Indonesia’s distinction lies in pairing domestic intervention with an active search for external buffers against future disruption. Through summit diplomacy and state visits, Prabowo widened Indonesia’s options across oil, gas, minerals, industrial inputs, and energy-transition technologies. The result is a pragmatic effort to leverage partnerships to reduce strategic vulnerability across energy, industry, and supply chains. Jakarta is working both ends of the problem: absorbing the shock at home while widening strategic room abroad.

Prabowo’s trip to Japan provided the clearest longer-horizon signal. The March 31 summit placed energy security coordination alongside a wider agenda that included LNG, critical minerals, geothermal cooperation, civil nuclear collaboration, and the acceleration of major upstream and downstream projects. A suite of business agreements, including the Masela gas field, the Rajabasa and Hululais geothermal projects, and a Bontang methanol project using captured carbon dioxide, underscored how much ambition was already in motion. 

Many of these initiatives predated the current crisis. That is precisely the point. Hormuz gave urgency to priorities Jakarta already had reason to pursue. 

Prabowo’s time in Seoul reinforced the same direction. His South Korea visit elevated the bilateral relationship to a Special Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and linked clean energy, critical minerals, and industrial cooperation to a high-level Energy Resources Security Dialogue. Indonesia and South Korea will now hold regular coordination over energy and essential goods flows. That gives crisis response a standing mechanism and begins institutionalizing channels for managing future shocks more systematically.

Russia belongs in this picture as well, though on more immediate terms. Prabowo’s visit centered on possible oil and gas purchases, downstream cooperation, and fertilizer-related concerns. Those priorities reflect Indonesia’s most immediate exposure, but they also fit the broader diversification instinct visible in previous visits. The latest Moscow visit also built on an already active relationship: Prabowo and Russia’s Vladimir Putin had met five times over the previous year.

Taken together, the three visits show a government learning quickly under pressure. The Strait of Hormuz crisis does not stop with disrupted energy supplies. Its second- and third-order effects run through shipping, gas, fertilizers, industrial feedstocks, and the technologies underpinning future energy systems. Any government that treats those domains as separate policy files will respond too late and too narrowly. 

With that in mind, three features of Indonesia’s emerging playbook deserve emphasis.

First, Indonesia is distinguishing itself within Southeast Asia through the combination of domestic and foreign policy activism. Much of the region has remained in immediate-relief mode, with governments focused on tax relief, consumption management, and domestic stabilization. A smaller group had more diplomatic room and used it actively. Malaysia engaged Tehran to secure vessel passage through Hormuz, while Singapore leveraged its position as a refining and fuels hub in energy security coordination with Australia. Indonesia is unusual because it is operating on both fronts, cushioning the domestic shock while sending the president abroad to build external resilience.

Second, the policy horizon is layered. Some of what Jakarta is pursuing may ease short-term pressure. More important is the long-term architecture taking shape through diversification, critical minerals, industrial cooperation, and technologies that could reduce future dependence. The current shock helps accelerate a wider reorganization of Indonesia’s energy thinking.

Third, the diplomatic pattern is significant. Prabowo’s itinerary points to a strategy operating beyond the familiar China-West binary. China remains central to clean tech manufacturing and energy system deployment, yet Jakarta’s response has moved through a different mix of major and middle powers. That gives practical form to bebas aktif – Indonesia’s “free and active” diplomacy – by turning multi-alignment into diversified channels of cooperation without tying Indonesia to any single external center.

None of this means Jakarta has solved the short-term problem. As the Israel-Iran-U.S. war goes on, Indonesia remains exposed. Many of the initiatives unveiled so far remain preliminary, and even successful oil and gas arrangements would not meaningfully reduce import dependence overnight.

But Jakarta is laying the scaffolding for more durable resilience, even though the government itself may not yet have fully articulated its strategic logic. The Hormuz crisis has pushed Indonesia toward a wider understanding of security, one that treats exposure in the energy system as inseparable from exposure in trade, industry, and infrastructure. The response has been to build more options, more partners, and, even, more redundancy