The Audacity of Hope

Suharto government, alcohol was permitted, non-Muslims practiced their faith free from
persecution, and women—sporting skirts or sarongs as they rode buses or scooters on
the way to work—possessed all the rights that men possessed. Today, Islamic parties
make up one of the largest political blocs, with many calling for the imposition of
sharia, or Islamic law. Seeded by funds from the Middle East, Wahhabist clerics,
schools, and mosques now dot the countryside. Many Indonesian women have adopted
the head coverings so familiar in the Muslim countries of North Africa and the Persian
Gulf; Islamic militants and self-proclaimed “vice squads” have attacked churches,
nightclubs, casinos, and brothels. In 2002, an explosion in a Bali nightclub killed more
than two hundred people; similar suicide bombings followed in Jakarta in 2004 and Bali
in 2005. Members of Jemaah Islamiah, a militant Islamic organization with links to Al
Qaeda, were tried for the bombings; while three of those connected to the bombings
received death sentences, the spiritual leader of the group, Abu Bakar Bashir, was
released after a twenty-six-month prison term.
It was on a beach just a few miles from the site of those bombings that I stayed the last
time I visited Bali. When I think of that island, and all of Indonesia, I’m haunted by
memories—the feel of packed mud under bare feet as I wander through paddy fields;
the sight of day breaking behind volcanic peaks; the muezzin’s call at night and the
smell of wood smoke; the dickering at the fruit stands alongside the road; the frenzied
sound of a gamelan orchestra, the musicians’ faces lit by fire. I would like to take
Michelle and the girls to share that piece of my life, to climb the thousand-year-old
Hindu ruins of Prambanan or swim in a river high in Balinese hills.
But my plans for such a trip keep getting delayed. I’m chronically busy, and traveling
with young children is always difficult. And, too, perhaps I am worried about what I
will find there—that the land of my childhood will no longer match my memories. As
much as the world has shrunk, with its direct flights and cell phone coverage and CNN
and Internet cafés, Indonesia feels more distant now than it did thirty years ago.
I fear it’s becoming a land of strangers.
IN THE FIELD of international affairs, it’s dangerous to extrapolate from the
experiences of a single country. In its history, geography, culture, and conflicts, each
nation is unique. And yet in many ways Indonesia serves as a useful metaphor for the
world beyond our borders—a world in which globalization and sectarianism, poverty
and plenty, modernity and antiquity constantly collide.
Indonesia also provides a handy record of U.S. foreign policy over the past fifty years.
In broad outline at least, it’s all there: our role in liberating former colonies and creating
international institutions to help manage the post–World War II order; our tendency to
view nations and conflicts through the prism of the Cold War; our tireless promotion of
American-style capitalism and multinational corporations; the tolerance and occasional
encouragement of tyranny, corruption, and environmental degradation when it served
our interests; our optimism once the Cold War ended that Big Macs and the Internet
would lead to the end of historical conflicts; the growing economic power of Asia and
the growing resentment of the United States as the world’s sole superpower; the
realization that in the short term, at least, democratization might lay bare, rather than