Over the past few days, much ink has been spilled about Indonesia’s rhetoric on the South China Sea disputes as the United States finally conducted a freedom of navigation operation near China’s artificial islands there.

While paying attention to what the world’s fourth largest country thinks is important, observers would do well to look beyond the words of a few individual officials to get a sense for Indonesia’s South China Sea approach.

A case in point was the brouhaha over the comments of Luhut Pandjaitan, one of Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s top advisers. On Tuesday, according to Kyodo News, Pandjaitan said that Indonesia disagreed with the U.S. “power projection,” equating the move with ineffective wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To some, such comments make it seem like Indonesia’s South China Sea position is slightly anti-U.S. – perhaps even pro-Chinese – and that Jakarta may not view Chinese assertiveness there with much alarm. In fact, that could not be further from the truth.

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Pandjaitan’s exact comments, which were given offhand in response to a few reporters, ought not to be viewed as an official articulation of Indonesia’s South China Sea policy, which I have detailed at length previously (See: “No, Indonesia’s South China Sea Approach Has Not Changed”). More generally, parsing comments by individual Indonesian officials makes for good headlines but is a bad way to assess policy change because of the diversity of views that can emerge even within a few weeks. Indeed, just last week, Indonesian Defense Minister Ryamizard Ryacudu made the news when he suggested in Beijing that that if regional countries can manage the South China Sea on their own, “there’s no need to involve other parties in resolving the dispute.”

http://thediplomat.com/2015/10/whats-behind-indonesias-south-china-sea-rhetoric-amid-us-china-tensions/