Is Anyone Listening to the Pacific Islands?

In April 2022, Solomon Islands and China signed a security deal that, according to a leaked draft, read in part: “Solomon Islands may, according to its own needs, request China to send police, armed police, military personnel and other law enforcement and armed forces to Solomon Islands to assist in maintaining social order” and “China may, according to its own needs and with the consent of Solomon Islands, make ship visits to, carry out logistical replenishments in, and have stopover and transition in Solomon Islands, and the relevant forces of China can be used to protect the safety of Chinese personnel and major projects in Solomon Islands.”

The collective response from the global strategic community was essentially the one expressed in an internal email from Ryan Washburn, USAID mission director to the Philippines, the Pacific Islands, and Mongolia, to colleagues: “Yikes!”

It wasn’t that China’s strategic ambitions in the Pacific Islands were a surprise; it was that they now could no longer be ignored or explained away.

In capitals all over the world, bureaucrats who had the Pacific Islands as one of their many files (the Philippines, the Pacific Islands, and Mongolia?), where it often languished near the bottom of the pile, were suddenly called into the boss’ office to answer the question: “What are we going to do about it?”

A View of the Pacific

There was an ostentatiously visible flurry of activity after the news broke. In spite of Solomons still technically having a COVID-19 quarantine for visitors, waves of international delegations washed up on its shores.

Days after the signing was confirmed, a U.S. delegation led by the National Security Council’s Indo-Pacific Coordinator Kurt Campbell arrived. Among other announcements, the delegation reiterated the United States’ intention to open an embassy in Solomons. Washington hadn’t had one in the country where thousands of Americans died in World War II – including at the brutal battle of Guadalcanal – since 1993.

The Australians sent their two “spy chiefs,” the minister for the Pacific and, after the election, the new foreign minister.

The Japanese delegation was led by Parliamentary Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs Kentaro Uesugi.

India, after apparently being slow-rolled at the behest of China, finally got to send their high commissioner.

But it turned out the Solomon Islands security deal was only the start for Beijing. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and a large delegation also made an eight-country tour through the Pacific Islands, just after the Australian election and the Quad leaders meeting. They floated a “China-Pacific Island Countries Common Development Vision,” supported by a “China-Pacific Island Countries Five-Year Action Plan on Common Development (2022-2026).”

Those deals weren’t signed, but it’s unlikely Beijing thought they would be. The largely virtual meeting discussing the deals with 10 Pacific Island countries (PICs) was held in the middle of Wang’s trip. Had he been serious about seeing the documents signed, it would have been held at the end, after he had met as many leaders as possible in person.

What Wang did get out of circulating the deals was the chance to identify supporters and opponents of Chinese plans – allowing China to refine its already very extensive political warfare operations in the region.

At the same time, in each of the Pacific Island countries Wang visited, he achieved a range of goals, including signing other deals that, at China’s request, remain secret; muzzling the local press; and blithely ignoring national quarantine restrictions that have for two years kept local families apart – all indications of Chinese influence at the national level.

This also made it clear in those already nervous capitals that China’s plans extended well beyond Solomon Islands, and their responses would have to be similarly far-reaching if they wanted to give the PICs real options.

One of the major initiatives – Partners in the Blue Pacific – was mentioned by Campbell at a June 23 event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. We’ll get to that. But first, what do those coveted partners, the people of the Pacific Island countries, think about all this?

To start to understand, we need to take a step back and talk a bit more about the PICs themselves.

The Pacific Island Countries: Similarities…

In some ways, there are similarities across the region. Even Pacific Islanders living in countries with relatively larger populations tend to live in functionally small communities. For most people in the region, any time you walk down the street, you can run into someone you’ve dated, worked for, lent money to, went to school with, are related to, and so on. As any Tongan or Tuvaluan or Palauan teenager looking for a quiet moment with a special someone can tell you, there is no privacy – an aunty can be lurking behind any bush.

This means that, generally, on difficult topics people speak carefully (or not at all), leaving themselves “outs” if things go the wrong way. Bad quarrels can last generations – and in a village there can be no escape. This creates a discussion and negotiation style that is often more similar to what you’d find in Kyoto or Kochi than Canberra or Chicago. Silence or lack of disagreement doesn’t mean consent.

Additionally, for most people living in the Pacific Islands, the two most important things are family and faith – they are the latitude and longitude of people’s identity. These two values link and divide them, to and from each other.

A diplomat from D.C. might look at Solomons’ Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare and see someone cozying up to China and antithetical to Australia. Someone from Vanuatu might see that, too, but what is more likely to define him for the Vanuatuan are Sogavare’s family links to Papua New Guinea and that he is a Seventh-Day Adventist.

Another aspect of identity in many PICs is status in local culture. It could be your position in the church or a hereditary title. The man who drives a visiting diplomat to meet a local government official might have more cultural respect and importance than the bureaucrat.

Given the roles of important families there is also deep, and often generational, experience with major power politics. The current king of Tonga is a direct descendent of the king who negotiated treaties with the Americans, French, and British in the 19th century. In such a context, geopolitics is family history.

The USAID mission director covering the Philippines, the Pacific Islands, and Mongolia can’t be expected to know about the negotiations involved in the 1886 U.S.-Tonga Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation, but the person in Tonga on the other end of the Zoom call certainly does. She’s probably related to the person who negotiated it, and grew up hearing stories about it.

… and Differences

While socially there may be similarities, the countries themselves are very, very different. Tuvalu has a population of around 12,000 people. They live on very low-lying islands, with the highest point about 4.6 meters above sea level. The country has a total land area of around 26 square kilometers. Papua New Guinea (PNG) has around 9 million people and is around 462,840 sq km; it has more people and more land than New Zealand.

New Caledonia is legally a part of France, has French as its official language, and hosts French military facilities. The independent country of Marshall Islands speaks Marshallese and English, is home to the U.S. military’s Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site, and has a higher percentage of its citizens serving in the U.S. military than do most U.S. states.

From Palau it is easier to get to the Philippines or Japan than it is to get to Fiji. From Tonga, it is easier to get to New Zealand or Australia than to get to Palau.

While the PICs have many common concerns, such as climate change, fisheries, and transnational crime, where they can work together well, lumping them all together in a top-down way on broad issues risks drowning out the sort of granularity that makes for effective solutions.