I am delighted that my book Indonesia’s Foreign Policy under Suharto: Aspiring to International Leadership (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1996) is now reissued with a postscript.

When the original edition of the book was published, I received feedback from many Indonesian scholars. I was pleasantly surprised. Not long after that Lembaga Penelitian, Pendidikan dan Penerangan Ekonomi dan Sosial (LP3ES), a leading academic publisher in Jakarta, asked for my permission to translate the book into Bahasa Indonesia. I gladly consented. The Indonesian version (Politik Luar Negeri: Indonesia di Bawah Soeharto) was to be published in early May 1998, a few weeks before the downfall of President Suharto. Therefore, I included a short postscript for the Indonesian edition, covering the last two to three years of his rule. I was informed that Politik Luar Negeri had become a major reference book for the politics and international relations courses at least at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta and Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta. I was so pleased that when I met some lecturers and graduates from these universities, they often discussed the book with me. I felt very honoured and encouraged.

In 2019, I received an unexpected request from an editor of the LP3ES in Jakarta that they wanted to reissue the Indonesian version of the book. He told me that there were still demands on the book. Students and scholars are still looking for the book. They asked me to write a new postscript for the book, but I did not have the time to do so as I was busy with my projects. I proposed to write a new preface, explaining briefly why the book, without revision, is still relevant to the present situation. The LP3ES agreed and the book was eventually republished in October 2019.

The reissuing of Politik Luar Negeri made me re-read the original version of Indonesia’s Foreign Policy under Suharto. The book was published when I was still teaching in the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS). It took me several years to complete writing the book. Two chapters had been published in Asian Survey before the book was published. I benefited from the discussions with friends and colleagues in writing the manuscript.