The more I'm thinking about it, the more I'm not convinced that the U.S. will hit us with economic embargo for CAATSA violation.
Hitting us hard with economic embargo will only mean one thing, kicking us out of the U.S. orbit and pushing us more towards China's. This would create even stronger argument for the supposed to be a new informal bloc called The Golden Ring (China, Iran, Russia, Turkey, etc).
China & co. will have no major problem helping Indonesia's economy under embargo. China themselves have been in bilateral talks with Iran to invest about $400 billion in many various sectors (they will get cheap oil/gas supply for 25 years in return). That's small amount compare to their total foreign reserves of around $3300 billion
Indonesia under huge China influence will also destabilize the region and puts the likes of Australia, and to lesser extend Singapore and India, in jeopardy. Indonesian straits under China ISR will bring major setback to their security and economy.
That's the huge risk that the U.S. would have to face if they decided to punish us with embargo. All of that just for preventing Indonesia from owning SU-35 fighters. It's not like we plan to buy 50 jets either. It's just 11 jets.
Technically, we can assume that the U.S. will have the same perspective as the U.S. fan boys in this forum, that the presence of SU-35 itself will not destabilize the region. The aircraft that's deemed to be really lousy and much weaker version of the original. The aircraft that's so expensive to operate and to maintain making Indonesia could barely fly them. Surely if the U.S. fan boys here are right, then there's no reason for anyone including Australia & Singapore, who both have plenty of F-35s, to worry about SU-35s, never mind just 11 jets.
So in the end, the U.S. is the one who'd be taking huge risk embargoing Indonesia, than Indonesia taking the risk buying SU-35.
Huge risk with so little in return.
I hope this is one of the cards that Indonesia have been playing to get F-35. So far there's no official confirmation that the SU-35 is off. Our ambassador for Russia at the end of last month still saying that the deal is still on.
While we're still focusing our resources to buy used jets for interim program, I think we still need to keep the Russian fleet. Just in case we failed to get the F-35, just proceed with our original plan to buy SU-35 + F-16V after this interim program being taken care of.
Good to know that a fellow poster is sharing the same sentiment... I too have been posting more or less similar opinions here for some time now... That we also have cards to play, but some posters here seems to prefer we submit entirely to the US and become a sort of another Japan or Korea... Even though our national policy has always been "Non-Aligned" and "Free and Active".