Indonesia remains one of the few countries in the world where a significant percentage of its population still thinks positively about North Korea despite the burgeoning relationship between Indonesia and South Korea. This phenomenon can partly be explained by looking at the formation, strengthening, and the peak of Indonesia-North Korea relations, which took place during Indonesia’s own tumultuous period of the 1960s. In this period, Cold War politics, notably the Sino-Soviet split that led to China’s aggressive policies in East and Southeast Asia, converged with both Indonesia and North Korea’s foreign policy goals, leading to a deepening relationship between these three countries. Conversely, once these three countries—Indonesia, North Korea and China—no longer shared the same foreign policy objectives due to the dynamics of their own domestic politics, the tripartite relationship cooled, and as a result, the relationship between Indonesia and North Korea has been on the doldrums since then.