When Australia and Indonesia signed the Jakarta Treaty on Common Security in February, the central question was never whether it sounded historic. It did. The real question was whether it would matter once a genuine crisis arrived.
The treaty commits both sides to regular consultation on matters affecting their common security and, in the event of adverse challenges, to consult and consider measures ‘if appropriate’. That makes it politically important, but still well short of a mutual-defence pact.
Rather than a joint deployment or dramatic military coordination, the treaty’s success was always more likely to appear in something subtler: how Canberra and Jakarta begin to speak about instability when they are confronted by the same crisis. The current Iran crisis may be the first example of that.
Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles’s visit to Jakarta on 12 March underlined that the immediate bilateral agenda would operationalise the treaty. In his public remarks, Marles focused on embedding an Indonesian colonel in Australia’s 1st Brigade in Darwin; sending an Australian Army survey team to Morotai to scope infrastructure work for an Indonesian training facility; expanding military exercises; convening a meeting between the foreign and defence ministers later this year; and continuing trilateral defence cooperation with Papua New Guinea. This was about giving practical shape to the treaty.
The Middle East entered the conversation only when journalists raised it. But precisely for that reason, the episode is analytically revealing. It offers a glimpse of how ‘common security’ may begin to operate even when Australia and Indonesia are not jointly managing a crisis.
Australia’s position has been relatively clear. In Jakarta, Marles confirmed that Australia was deploying an E-7 Wedgetail to the Gulf at the request of the United Arab Emirates, while noting that requests had also come from the United States. He also confirmed Australia would provide the UAE with advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles. Canberra’s framing has been defensive and stabilising.
Indonesia’s position has been different. Jakarta called on the US and Israel to stop attacks on Iran, while also urging Iran to halt strikes against neighbouring Gulf states and stressing restraint, de-escalation and diplomacy. This was not support for Australia’s position. But neither is it the kind of singular, frontal anti-US condemnation that many would historically have expected from Indonesia in response to US military action in the Middle East.
That difference in tone matters. Indonesia is still not aligning itself with Canberra or Washington. It is still speaking the language of non-alignment, sovereignty and diplomacy. But on Iran, its rhetoric has been more calibrated than reflexively oppositional. Rather than directing outrage solely at Washington, Jakarta has framed the crisis as a wider escalation problem requiring all sides to step back.
This may be the first politically meaningful sign of what ‘common security’ under the Jakarta Treaty actually looks like. Not common security as an alliance, or as identical foreign policy. Instead, it may mean something more modest but still strategically significant: a gradual convergence in behaviour, in which Australia and Indonesia do not choose the same instruments but increasingly recognise the same risks and seek to prevent the same forms of regional disorder.
Seen in that light, the current crisis reveals a loose but real division of strategic labour. Australia has responded through alliance-backed military assistance and defence stabilisation. Indonesia has responded through diplomatic restraint and de-escalatory messaging. The tools are different, and the political vocabularies remain different. But the underlying concern is becoming more compatible: preventing a wider breakdown in regional order.
The significance of the Jakarta Treaty may thus lie less in its legal text than in the habits it begins to encourage. The treaty’s architecture is intentionally light: consultation, consideration, cooperation. Yet light architecture can still matter politically if it starts to narrow the distance between how two states interpret crises.
The treaty’s practical effect, then, may not be found in Darwin or Morotai alone. It may be found in whether Indonesia, when confronted by crises involving US force, begins to respond in ways that are less rhetorically adversarial and more strategically compatible with Australia. That would still fall well short of alignment, and one carefully worded response should not be overread as evidence of structural transformation. A single crisis does not remake a bilateral relationship, but it can reveal the direction of travel.
And the direction worth watching is this: the Jakarta Treaty may not bind Australia and Indonesia to fight the same wars, but it may begin to shape how they speak about the same instability. If so, the measure of its success is not military at all; it is rhetorical.