This is an expanded version of an article published by Consortium News.
As leaders from across the Pacific gathered this week for much-anticipated regional talks, confidential documents reveal increasing pressure to keep their Pacific countries outside of China’s orbit and enmeshed instead in Western military architecture.
The 53rd annual Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) Summit, being held in Tonga from August 26-30, includes talks on the pressing issues of the impact of climate change, the continued crisis in French colony New Caledonia, and great power competition in the region.
The Forum is a uniquely Pacific organisation. There are 18 full members of the PIF consisting of the major south-western Pacific island nations and Australia and New Zealand.
Observer status is held by Timor-Leste, and the US territories of American Samoa, Guam, and Northern Mariana Islands. The US and France, still possessing colonies in the Pacific. are dialogue partners, along with Canada, China, Indonesia, Japan, the UK, the EU, and 13 other nations.
There is now clear evidence that western nations are urging the Pacific Islands Forum to adopt a more defence-oriented stand against China in the region.
New Pacific military agenda ‘declassified’
A number of confidential New Zealand Defence Ministry briefing documents have been obtained under the Official Information Act (OIA).
These declassified documents reveal Pacific Islands Forum member New Zealand has been pushing for the independent PIF to be structurally linked to the Western-aligned defence body, the South Pacific Defence Ministers’ Meeting (SPDMM).
The SPDMM annually sees regional Defence Ministers, and senior defence officials meet in what it describes as “the only ministerial-level defence and security forum in the South Pacific”. It is broadly focused on maintaining US hegemony across the Pacific, by “coordination of actions against security threats in the region”.
The most recent SPDMM Defence Ministers’ summit, hosted by France in New Caledonia,in December 2023,was attended by senior civilian and military officials from its seven member states: Australia, France, New Zealand, Chile, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and Tonga, as well as observers from the US, the UK, and Japan.
A departmental briefing paper for NZ Defence Minister Judith Collins reveals the purpose of her meeting at the Summit with the Tongan Minister for Internal Affairs was to “convey New Zealand’s position that there should be a link between the SPDMM and the Pacific Islands Forum”.
The heavily redacted Defence Ministry document to the minister, ‘Tonga Bilateral Brief’, noted that:
“The PIF architecture and defence architecture have separate but overlapping countries involved. This reflects that defence responsibilities in the region do not align with political representation…
“Linking the PIF architecture and the SPDMM is likely to enhance security discussion across both organisations.”
Another Defence briefing note, ‘Proposal to Travel’ to the Pacific Defence Ministers summit, also heavily redacted, stated the aim to: “reaffirm the value of Pacific-led solutions to Pacific problems and exchange views on how to improve SPDMM integration into the wider regional security architecture.”
A third Defence document, ‘2023 SPDMM Briefing Pack’, stated “The Indo-Pacific has become the central global theatre of strategic competition.” But it lamented: “Only five of the 18 members of the PIF have defence forces (and defence ministers).”
The document revealed that the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat has now been invited to send an observer to the SPDMM Defence Ministers’ meetings, the next one due in November 2024 in New Zealand.
Whose ‘Blue Pacific’?
The Forum in 2019 developed a ‘Blue Pacific Continent’ strategy to improve regional responses to major challenges including climate, health, education, resources and security.
The Forum’s adopted plan, ‘2050 Blue Pacific Continent’, has as its stated vision, “a resilient Pacific Region of peace, harmony, social inclusion and prosperity’ for all pacific peoples”.
It is considered to be “a remarkable moment” of indigenous solidarity, ambition, and vision, and of strong Pacific regionalism.
In response to the PIF’s Blue Pacific strategy, a new structure was conceived in Washington DC in 2022, titled ‘Partners in the Pacific Blue’ (PBP).
Consisting of Australia, New Zealand, the UK, USA, and Japan, the grouping has committed to energetically address a wide number of what it sees as the Pacific’s challenges, including “growing pressure on the rules-based free and open international order”.
The term ‘Blue Pacific’ is becoming more widespread. Earlier this month, the US Coast Guard, operating a long way from home, completed a fisheries patrol near Northern Mariana Islands in the central western Pacific in a display of what it termed “dedication to maritime safety, security, and stewardship in the Blue Pacific”.
‘Security’ is the issue
It is becoming clear that a parallel or overarching securitised regional architecture is being created, on the back of a ‘China panic’.
Ahead of this week’s PIF summit attended by the 18 leaders of strategically important islands, think-tank analysts and politicians from sub-imperial western nations sounded alarm over supposed dangers of malign Chinese influence in the region.
Some of these experts have openly argued that colonialism is instrumental in keeping China’s power in the region contained.
Many Pacific nations have close trade and development ties with China and some, like the Solomon Islands, have signed security agreements. The issue has been a key focus at the PIF summit.
New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Winston Peters in particular has been keen to discourage its members from pursuing relationships with China, his own country’s biggest trading partner.
He told Associated Press on August 23 that the US and its allies, including New Zealand and Australia, had failed to engage enough in the region, leaving a power vacuum for others to fill, meaning China.
Prior to this week’s summit, Peters had visited 14 of the Pacific countries this year. New Zealand is increasingly exercising sub-imperial power in the region on behalf of the United States. At the same time New Zealand isoffering an olive branch to other members of the ‘Pacific family’, trading on its image as an honest broker with an anti-nuclear constitution and an independent foreign policy.
That image is unravelling fast with New Zealand’s increasing alignment with US-led military architecture and Australian defence posture, articulated by Prime Minister Chris Luxon in a speech to the Lowy Institute in Australia this month.
“Strategically, we are strongly supportive of the indispensable role played by the United States in the region, and the broader array of alliances and partnerships that buttress the region’s prosperity and security,” he said.
He cited ANZUS, AUKUS, the Quad, NATO’s Indo-Pacific Partners, Partners for the Blue Pacific, as playing central roles, but still “while respecting the centrality of regional organisations like ASEAN and the Pacific Islands Forum”.
However the Pacific Islands Forum has observed this trend with concern, fearing that “the renewed interest of major powers may compromise the Pacific Islands community’s approach to non- alignment, symbolised by the motto ‘Friends to all, enemies to none’.”
Challenging colonialism in the Pacific
A definite focus of the summit was the French colony New Caledonia. A dozen people have been killed in clashes between indigenous Kanaks and French security forces since May.
Protests erupted after a vote in the French National Assembly on May 13, passing a constitutional amendment to increase the number of French ex-pats eligible to vote in the island’s elections, hence diminishing decolonisation provisions of the Nouméa Accord.
The PIF leadership was scheduled to visit the archipelago on a fact-finding mission amid a crisis made worse after French police arrested and deported independence figures to prisons in France as an increasingly militarised presence takes hold. France now has thousands of troops and police stationed across its dependency.
The PIF mission was postponed over what it said were “issues regarding due process and protocol that will need to be addressed”. French President Macron had said the mission needed to be within certain “guiding principles” of addressing issues like social and economic stability.
Fears have been expressed publicly about where New Caledonia would sit geopolitically if it gained its independence.
China critic Professor Anne-Marie Brady this month argued for the merits of colonialism as a bulwark against hidden Chinese influence in a report for Western defence-aligned think-tank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). Brady is a Global Fellow of the Kissinger Institute on China and the US, and a Senior Fellow at ASPI.
She argued it would “weaken regional security in the Pacific” if New Caledonia were to become independent without France’s continued financial and security support. The independence movement’s political coalition, Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste (FLNKS), would align closer with China, she said.
“French military assets are one of the factors standing in the way of China changing the power balance in the Indo-Pacific, and in the South Pacific more specifically,” Brady wrote.
“France and the US are the only actors in the region with networks of military bases worldwide, and with global military communications networks based on sovereign territory.
“If France were to lose any of its Pacific territories, and access to the vast maritime area they provide, its global influence and status would decline significantly. That situation would suit the interests of China and Russia.
“France’s Pacific territories of New Caledonia and French Polynesia provide a major logistics base for NATO military assets and the European Space Agency.”
From within New Caledonia itself, Jimmy Naouna, a leading figure in the FLNKS pro-independence alliance of political parties, in an exclusive interview told this writer, that decolonisation would make it much harder for great powers to use his country as a pawn in the great power game now underway.
“That’s why we in FLNKS are calling for our independence, so that we are able to manage our own affairs, both at national and international level,” he said.
“Taking into account this Indo-Pacific strategy that France is pushing ahead with in the region, they are basically using New Caledonia and French territories as its forward posting in the region.
“We believe that when we are able to manage our affairs we will be able to also manage geopolitical competition in the region and be able to align ourselves according to our national interests. But the fact that we are not fully sovereign means we don’t have that capacity.
“It’s very important for us that we’re able to play a leading role in negotiations. We don’t want to be used by the players in this political game between the two major powers, China and the US.”
Interventionist attitudes
Such Western interventionist attitudes were stopping the Pacific region from becoming a ‘zone of peace,’ says Van Jackson, a former US Defense security advisor and geopolitical analyst of the strategic research centre, Security in Context, phrase championed by Fiji’s Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka at last year’s PIF summit.
He told the writer that Western talk of maintaining a “free and open Indo-Pacific” is rhetoric masking the true nature of relationships in the region.
“The existence of a non-sovereign Pacific approximately a third of the region lacks sovereignty in some way – is actually the region’s primary source of insecurity,” Jackson said.
“Outside powers want the Pacific to serve as a geopolitical buffer, but they think the only way to do that is by exercising exclusionary control themselves. It’s that dynamic that’s leading to a carve-up of the Pacific.
“But if the Pacific were truly independent, cohesive, and self-determining then the region could credibly be a buffer that limits impositions by outside powers. Colonialism is what is currently standing in the way of great-power stability.”
A peaceful Pacific’s new challenge
Western political messaging and news media narratives have cast China’s “increasing assertiveness” as a challenge to the “geostrategic balance” in the region that must be checked.
The BRICS country has invested heavily in the Pacific, with its global infrastructure development strategy, the Belt and Road Iniatiative, also extending to the region.
Ahead of the summit, Australian think-tank the Lowy Institute released a report pointing to China becoming a major player in development aid, including ports, finance, airports and telecommunications and that it had sought a greater role in the military, policing, digital infrastructure and media.
It warned that the 18 Pacific Island Forum members faced challenges of compromised good governance and transparency amid “unbridled strategic rivalry” between the US and its Western allies and China.
“Faced with this new ‘Great Game’, Pacific countries have become diplomatic price-setters and are leveraging increased competition to maximise development benefits,” the report said.
China hosted leaders of the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji ahead of the PIF summit. The visit of Fiji’s Rabuka, who met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing last week, came after Google announced it would build a $US200 million data centre in the country to support a new subsea cable.
Overshadowing aid assistance and investment is a battle over who has access to their strategic locations, with rival nations seeking to monitor and control naval movements across the Pacific Ocean.
The Lowy report pointed out even seemingly benign and altruistic offers to mobilise naval and air assets for disaster response involves securing rights to use ports, airstrips, and maritime routes around Pacific Islands, and US allies and China are keen to offer assistance.
The US and its allies have long wanted to turn the region’s nations into sentinel states, joining the likes of Japan and the Philippines in encircle China with military assets as the increasingly belligerent nation seeks to contain a growing challenge to its imperial ‘rules-based international order’.
Western security architecture in the region is likely to have a significant bearing on any resolution of New Caledonia’s crisis of sovereignty, ultimately responsible for the current bout of instability and violence.
The next SPDMM summit of Pacific defence ministers is due to take place in November hosted by New Zealand, with the independence struggle in New Caledonia also a key focus.
With that military grouping set on maintaining the colonial dynamics of the region as a means of maintaining the geopolitical status quo, prospects for an immediate just settlement may be low.
The Pacific Islands Forum, and other traditional regional power structures, are facing a growing challenge to what has been their revitalised aim of developing a harmonious peaceful and safe Pacific.
_
Before you go…
If you appreciate Declassified Australia’s investigations, remember that it all costs both time and money. Join more than 9,000 followers and get our Newsletter for updates. And we’d really appreciate if you could subscribe to Declassified Australia to support our ongoing investigations. Thank you.
