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View all search resultsA deal that settles nothing
Though the Supreme Court's ruling against Trump's sweeping tariffs has left Jakarta with less clarity regarding the newly signed US-Indonesia ART, it has at least opened a door to the possibility of reworking the deal so its terms are fairer.
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President Prabowo Subianto (left) and United States President Donald Trump (right) hold up signed copies of the US-Indonesia Agreement on Reciprocal Trade on Feb. 19, 2026, as the deal’s witness US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer looks on during the signing ceremony in Washington, DC. (Office of the United States Trade Representative/-)
T
here was no excitement in Jakarta on Friday at the announcement of Indonesia’s finalized bilateral trade agreement with the United States, and the stock market closed the day marginally down.
Some may have hoped that, even if the terms strongly favored the US, the deal would at least finally restore certainty over our country's trade with the world’s largest consumer market.
But any such hopes were dashed just hours later, when the US Supreme Court pulled the rug from under President Donald Trump’s tariff policy. That put everything back in limbo, and the topic that had dominated headlines for almost a year is not going away anytime soon.
It is unclear for now how the court ruling might impact the US-Indonesia Agreement on Reciprocal Trade (ART). What is clear, however, is that there is little reciprocity in a deal that imposes a 19 percent tariff on most Indonesian goods but gives US firms free access to the archipelago.
While a few export products are exempted, what our delegation signed in Washington on Thursday will be hard to sell as a victory back in Jakarta.
Exemptions for certain tropical agricultural commodities, for example, are politically inexpensive concessions for the US to grant, since many of these goods face little domestic competition and already carried zero or low tariffs even before the ART.
To be fair to our negotiators, we should admit that any government has only so much leverage when talking trade with the world’s most powerful country and largest economy.
