Is President Trump Provoking A War? Robin Wright

In 1957, Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, took a 36-hour boat trip across a river to the small city of Palangkaraya, soon to be christened as the capital of the Central Kalimantan province on the island of Borneo. Sukarno dreamed that the city could be the capital for “Maphilindo,” an imagined future confederation made of a never-realized union with Malaya and the Philippines.

But in the meantime, Sukarno thought it might also do as a capital for Indonesia, a nation that with its 260 million people and sprawling islands has always had trouble determining exactly where the center should be. Jan Pieterszoon Coen, an officer with the Dutch East India Company, placed the capital in Batavia, the administrative center of the Dutch colony. It later took a new name: Jakarta. After the declaration of independence from the Netherlands in 1945, the new government bounced around the islands, avoiding Dutch retribution and solidifying local rule, to cities as far-flung as Yogyakarta on Java and Bukittinggi on Sumatra, nearly 1,000 miles away from each other. It was not until 1964 that Sukarno declared Jakarta as the official capital.

Palangkaraya stayed a sleepy provincial city of a couple of hundred thousand people—compared with Jakarta’s 10 million-plus. The idea of it being the capital faded from memory—until now.

On April 29, the newly reelected president, Joko Widodo (also known as Jokowi), proposed a $33 billion shifting of the capital to another city—an idea that hadn’t come up in his campaign. Citing traffic congestion, overpopulation, and flooding, Indonesia’s planning minister, Bambang Brodjonegoro, said the new capital would strictly be administrative; economic and business epicenters would remain in Jakarta. Palangkaraya tops the short list of possible sites.

But this isn’t the first time Indonesia has hoped to change things up. The idea of shifting the capital away from Jakarta keeps coming up—and it keeps failing. So far, there are not a lot of signs that this latest proposal will be any more likely to materialize than the failed attempts of the past.

Jakarta certainly has plenty of problems. Its endemic traffic makes even short journeys potential nightmares, and congestion is estimated to cost the government $7 billion a year in lost productivity. There are also problems with pollution: Jakarta is the most polluted city in Southeast Asia, according to a Greenpeace report. Social inequality translates to slums and illegal land occupation.

Most of all, it’s sinking. Rising sea levels are bad enough, but the capital also suffers from serious subsidence. Buildings and citizens extract most of their water from underground, rendering it susceptible to collapse. The land subsidence expert Heri Andreas told the BBC last year that submersion might be imminent. “If we look at our models, by 2050 about 95 percent of North Jakarta will be submerged,” he said.

So the idea of getting critical government functions out of Jakarta—and thus either shrinking the city or limiting its growth—is tempting. In a lengthy Instagram post, Jokowi asked his followers to give him recommendations for the prospective new capital. In a message of intent, he arrived on Tuesday for a three-day trip in the East Kalimantan city of Balikpapan to “scout for locations,” according to a tweet by Indonesia’s cabinet secretariat.

Moving the capital would also stoke growth in areas outside of Java, where Jakarta sits. Indonesia’s colonial past has backed Java’s—or western Indonesia’s—dominance. Almost 60 percent of Indonesia’s population is on Java, thanks to a mixture of good fields and political closeness to past colonizers. The island is a magnet—and Jakarta its strongest pole.

This dominance continues in the present. Enny Sri Hartati, an economist at the Jakarta-based Institute for Development of Economics and Finance, told Foreign Policy that infrastructure is predominantly built on Java, where it dominates most sectors other than extractive industries. “Infrastructure follows the people, so people gravitate towards Java,” she said, adding that it also meant better services like health and education.

These might all seem like good reasons for getting the capital out of Jakarta. But the idea has been proposed plenty of times before—and never happened. Many cities have been pitched: Jonggol in West Java (Suharto) and Sidenreng Rappang regency in South Sulawesi (B.J. Habibie). Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Jokowi’s predecessor, formed a special team called Vision Indonesia 2033 to measure the approximately $7 billion plan.

“Big projects in Indonesia generally develop in one of two ways: as a boondoggle that attracts corruption but eventually gets done or as a ‘clean’ project that never gets done,” said Aaron Connelly, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “The challenge for Jokowi is to ensure it doesn’t turn into a boondoggle, but … he’ll have trouble attracting support if patronage networks don’t see themselves benefiting from the project.”

Nirwono Joga, an urban analyst, added that building a new city from scratch could take up 20 years—exceeding Jokowi’s second and final five-year term. “We can plausibly fear inflation. If it’s [$33 billion] today, what do you think it will cost in 20 years?” he said.

For the move to actually work, then, it needs networks of patronage and a real impetus behind it. Jokowi may have extra impetus to get it through, thanks to his desire to build a legacy—one based largely on ambitious infrastructure policies. The suddenness of Jokowi’s announcement could mean the urgency of the ecological crisis has really hit. Or it could mean that the plan is a cynical, attention-grabbing move that, like those before it, will dissolve into bureaucracy and nothingness.

The United States has a long history of provoking, instigating, or launching wars based on dubious, flimsy, or manufactured threats. In 1986, the Reagan Administration plotted to use U.S. military maneuvers off Libya’s coast to provoke Muammar Qaddafi into a showdown. The planning for Operation Prairie Fire, which deployed three aircraft carriers and thirty other warships, was months in the making. Before the Navy’s arrival, U.S. warplanes conducted missions skirting Libyan shore and air defenses—“poking them in the ribs” to “keep them on edge,” a U.S. military source told the Los Angeles Times that year. One official involved in the mission explained, “It was provocation, if you want to use that word. While everything we did was perfectly legitimate, we were not going to pass up the opportunity to strike.”

Qaddafi took the bait. Libya fired at least six surface-to-air missiles at U.S. planes. Citing the “aggressive and unlawful nature of Colonel Qaddafi’s regime,” the U.S. responded by opening fire at a Libyan patrol boat. “The ship is dead in the water, burning, and appears to be sinking. There are no official survivors,” the White House reported. In the course of two days, the U.S. destroyed two more naval vessels and a missile site in Sirte, Qaddafi’s home town. It also put Libya on general notice. “We now consider all approaching Libyan forces to have hostile intent,” the White House said.

The most egregious case was the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in 2003, which was based on bad intelligence that Baghdad had active weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. The repercussions are still playing out sixteen years (and more than four thousand American deaths) later. The beginning of the Vietnam War was authorized by two now disputed incidents involving U.S. warships in the Gulf of Tonkin. In response, Congress authorized President Johnson, in 1964, to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” The war dragged on for a decade, claiming the lives of fifty-seven thousand Americans and as many as a million Vietnamese fighters and civilians.

The pattern goes back even further. In 1898, the Spanish-American War was triggered by an explosion on the U.S.S. Maine, an American battleship docked in Havana Harbor. The Administration of President William McKinley blamed a Spanish mine or torpedo. Almost eight decades later, in 1976, the American admiral Hyman Rickover concluded that the battleship was destroyed by the spontaneous combustion of coal in a bunker next to ammunition. In 1846, President James Polk justified the Mexican-American War by claiming that Mexico had invaded U.S. territory, at a time when the border was not yet settled. Mexico claimed that the border was the Nueces River; the United States claimed it was the Rio Grande, about a hundred miles away. One of the few voices that challenged Polk’s casus belli was Abraham Lincoln, then serving in Congress. Around fifteen hundred Americans died of battle injuries, and another ten thousand from illness.

Today, the question in Washington—and surely in Tehran, too—is whether President Trump is making moves that will provoke, instigate, or inadvertently drag the United States into a war with Iran. Trump’s threats began twelve days after he took office, in 2017, when his national-security adviser at the time, Michael Flynn, declared, in the White House press room, “As of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice.” Flynn, a former three-star general, was fired several weeks later and subsequently indicted for lying to the F.B.I. about his contacts with Russia. The Administration’s campaign against Iran, though, has steadily escalated, particularly in the past two weeks.

On May 5th, a Sunday, the White House issued an unusual communiqué—from the national-security adviser, John Bolton, not the Pentagon—announcing that a battleship-carrier strike group, led by the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, and a bomber task force, including B-52s, were deploying off Iran’s coast. The Lincoln was headed to the Middle East anyway, but its deployment was fast-tracked, U.S. officials told me. Bolton claimed that the Islamic Republic was engaged in “a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings,” but did not provide specifics. The Administration’s goal, he said, was “to send a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime that any attack on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force.” Bolton, who was a key player behind the U.S. war in Iraq, advocated bombing Iran before he joined the Trump White House.

Five days later, on May 10th, the Pentagon announced a second display of force: the U.S.S. Arlington and a battery of Patriot missile systems would join the Abraham Lincoln. The Arlington carries U.S. Marines and an array of aircraft, landing craft, and weapons systems to support amphibious assault, special-operations teams, and “expeditionary warfare.” A Patriot battery defends against ballistic missiles and aircraft. Both are meant to respond to “indications of heightened Iranian readiness to conduct offensive operations against U.S. forces and our interests,” the Pentagon said.