Among his many defects, Donald Trump is a vengeful obsessive. Which is why poor Indonesians (that’s about 40 million of the 285 million rice-eaters) could soon be paying more for their essential starches.

President Prabowo Subianto, 73, has just joined BRICS, a troupe of traders hated by the US president because China leads it and it has more members.

So he’s hitting the wee folk next door to us — originally with a 32% tariff, now apparently down to 19% – with Trump claiming, “the US would pay no tariffs to Indonesia as part of a trade deal".

“Great deal, for everybody, just made with Indonesia. I dealt directly with their highly respected President. DETAILS TO FOLLOW!!!”

Indonesia is the world’s largest exporter of palm oil – 46 million tonnes last year. It also sells coffee, tea, along with broadcast equipment. Coconut production has almost doubled to US$114 million in the past two years with China as the big buyer.

Meanwhile, Prabowo has been in Brazil echoing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s call to reform the UN, advocating for greater representation of emerging countries and consolidating the BRICSI deal.

Imagine two big clubs that loathe each other and are continually slanging off. One calls itself the G7. Although its headquarters depend on the meeting place (the leaders’ summit was held last month in Alberta), its putative boss is Washington. The BRICSI show is based in Shanghai.

The names reflect the membership: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the US are in the G7; the others are Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Both have minor states like Australia hanging around – but Indonesia joined this year creating the cumbersome BRICSI.

That’s quite a coup because the archipelago nation is already the tenth largest economy in the world and rocketing fast. BRICSI is bigger with 35% of the world’s GDP compared to 30% in the G7.

Had Indonesia been in the older outfit, it would be top dog, and has already been invited to take a look by the Canadians. But the other members who’ve been around for half a century tend to sneer at upstarts from the Asian region.

Some commentators claim Prabowo has joined BRICSI because he wants to lead the Global South. Maybe, but he’s also vengeful.

Late last century as an army general he was banned from the US for almost two decades under Clinton, Bush and Obama — blacklisted for his alleged roles in human rights abuses in Papua, East Timor and Jakarta — robustly denied and never charged.

Prabowo was discharged as head of Kopassus, Indonesia’s special forces command; he fled to exile in Jordan, a history rarely mentioned in his homeland.

The bans have been lifted but the wound kept suppurating, particularly as the bonds of his formative years were made in the US.

Prabowo graduated from the American School in London, where his family lived in exile. He got special forces training, at what’s now Fort Moore, in the 1980s.

These years he exercises by striding China’s red carpets. In 2024, he went to Russia after touring China, Japan, France, Serbia, and Turkey. Places visited, status of hands shaken and in which order are the punctuation points of foreign policy. Also noted by protocol staff are the names of places overflown and faces overlooked.

Apart from Paris, Western capitals were off the list. International policy analyst Dr Dafri Agus Salim vacillated:

“This visit seems to signal or indicate that our political orientation might be shifting slightly. Previously, it was somewhat West-oriented, but now we might be leaning more towards the East … to countries that are not always on friendly terms with Western countries, especially the US.”

Because of its size and geographical location, Indonesia has been wooed by world powers since its independence from the Dutch 80 years ago. First president Soekarno steered the Republic towards Russia, terrifying the UK and the US.

His successor Soeharto brought back Western love after the mass murder of real or imagined Reds in 1965 and 1966 with applause from Australia. In Washington, then prime minister Harold Holt said:

“With 500,000 to a million communist sympathisers knocked off, I think it is safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.” This drew the comment that Australia was “an accomplice to brutality”.

Successive presidents have enlarged their language about neutrality into three dimensions: “Choosing a free and active, non-aligned path”, “sailing between two reefs” and getting airborne “between the Dragon and Eagle.”

Said Prabowo last year: “Indonesia will not join any military pacts and will opt for a friendly approach with all countries,” adding the rider: “Nevertheless, Indonesia maintains an anti-colonialism principle."

In Beijing, speaking in Mandarin, he repeated the tired cliché of “a thousand friends are too few, one enemy is too many”, adding that he’d learned much from Chinese philosophers, embracing the principle of fostering friendships over rivalry. Perhaps a message here for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute hawks.

The notion behind G7 and BRICSI is that they should separately get together now and again and sort out trade hassles amicably.

That ideal is now off the agenda because Trump doesn’t want tariffs against his country, but enjoys using them to bash others. These are taxes on imports to raise revenue, protect domestic industries, or exert political leverage.

Canberra and most balanced economists prefer free trade because tariffs are a blunt economic weapon usually delivering higher consumer prices and setting nations at each other’s throats.

How much further towards the East will Prabowo take the Republic? Maybe unintended, but it should have been foreseen: Getting a shove from Trump helps move the Indonesian compass away from the Land of the Free.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.