US President Barack Obama has made a serious mistake in postponing - twice - his state visit to Indonesia. Obama, his political advisers and the pundits of Washington are seemingly unaware of the far-reaching effects of the snub to Indonesian national pride.
Spokesmen for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono sought to downplay the rebuff, saying their president looked forward to leisurely conversations with Obama in Jakarta in June.
The immediate consequences appeared to include a setback in Obama's effort to communicate with Muslims, Indonesia being the world's most populous Islamic nation. Indonesia is arguably the most influential member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and the postponement has probably damaged the United States in its dealings with that organisation.
Indonesia's strategic location alongside the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea, through which more ships pass than through the Panama and Suez canals combined, has made Jakarta the object of quiet but assiduous US efforts to encourage operations against pirates and terrorists. Postponing the state visit at the last minute may well have undercut those efforts.
But the deeper and more subtle consequence is the message sent not only to Indonesia but to all Asian nations that have spent the past 50 years shucking the effects of 501 years of Western colonial domination. The message of the abrupt, ill-mannered Obama postponement, in its rawest form, says to Asians: 'You don't matter as much as we do.'
The legacy of that anti-colonial drive has been the emergence of a robust nationalism that seeks, more than anything else, to be respected by Asia's former colonial masters.
