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Amy Sood

Indonesian leader Prabowo Subianto and US president-elect Donald Trump expressed admiration for each other during a phone call the former made to congratulate the Republican on his return to the White House.
Prabowo arrived in the United States on Monday following a state visit to China, where he met President Xi Jinping and signed US$10 billion in new deals at a business forum in Beijing.
The 72-year-old shared a video of his conversation with Trump on Instagram and expressed his desire to meet in person.
“I would like to call personally on you wherever you are, I’m willing to fly to congratulate you in person, sir,” Prabowo told Trump, who replied: “We’ll do that anytime you want.”
Prabowo will meet outgoing US President Joe Biden on Wednesday to hold talks on strengthening bilateral cooperation, the White House said in a statement.
In the three-minute video clip of the phone call, Trump said Prabowo was doing an “amazing” job leading Indonesia, adding he would like to make a visit to the Southeast Asian nation “sometime”.
The 78-year-old also praised the Indonesian president’s English speaking skills.
“Your English is so good – very good, the English,” Trump said, prompting Prabowo to explain that his “training is American”.


This is Prabowo’s first foreign trip since being sworn into office in late October. The former defence minister appears eager to enhance Indonesia’s global presence, having travelled to more than a dozen countries during his tenure as president-elect from April to September.
His visits to both China and the US lend to Jakarta’s long-standing non-aligned approach to foreign policy, which Prabowo has committed to maintain amid rising tensions between the two world powers.
During his first term from 2017 to 2021, Trump did not visit Indonesia and earned a reputation for his haphazard Asia policy, notably skipping consecutive East Asia and Asean summits from 2018 to 2020.
Prabowo, a former military general, has some attachment to the US.
He graduated from high school at the American School in London, where his family lived in self-exile due to his father’s political differences with Indonesia’s first president Sukarno in the 1960s.
Prabowo returned to his home country and graduated from the Indonesian Military Academy in 1970 and served in Kopassus, the Indonesian special forces, during Suharto’s authoritarian regime.
He received special forces training in the US at North Carolina’s Fort Bragg (renamed Ft. Liberty in 2022) and officer training at what was then Fort Benning in Georgia (now Ft. Moore) in the 1980s.
But Prabowo was discharged from the military in 1998 following allegations of involvement in the abduction and torture of political activists during protests against Suharto.


Both the US and Australia banned him from entering due to human rights abuses he was accused of committing during Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor – travel bans that were only lifted upon him becoming defence minister in his predecessor Joko Widodo’s cabinet in 2019.
While allegations of rights abuses have persisted, Prabowo has denied them and has never faced formal charges.
After more than a decade as Indonesia’s nearly man, he won the general election in February by a landslide, a victory largely attributed to tacit support from Widodo, whose son ran alongside Prabowo as vice-president.
Widodo defeated Prabowo in the country’s last two presidential elections and stepped down this year after completing his constitutionally mandated two terms in office.
Activists and academics in Indonesia have expressed concerns about democratic backsliding during Widodo’s tenure, particularly regarding the weakening of state institutions like the anti-corruption agency and judiciary, fears they believe may persist under Prabowo.


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The Indonesian leader shared a video of the conversation, where he received warm compliments from the incoming US president


The Indonesian leader shared a video of the conversation, where he received warm compliments from the incoming US president.
