Pacific Islands Security in the Asian Century: New Developments in the International Relations

Pacific Islands Security in the Asian Century: New Developments in the International Relations of the Pacific Islands

Two new developments are shaping international relations in the Pacific Islands. The first is the American response to the rise of China, and the second is the coming of new external players. Each development is having consequences for the place of the Pacific Island countries in the international community.

The United States is rediscovering the Pacific Islands that lie beyond its own Island sphere, having largely forgotten them since the end of the Cold War. The United States’ ‘strategic turn to the Asia-Pacific’, which includes the Pacific Islands, is designed to preserve the strategic primacy which it has held since the end of World War II. Officially the United States has no objection to the growth of China’s influence in the Pacific, but its actions, which include rotating troops through northern Australia and restoring full defence relations with New Zealand, suggest a concern to defend the strategic status quo against a potentially revisionist power. Australia, New Zealand, and the Forum Island states, on the other hand, are beneficiaries of China’s booming economy and tend to see China’s rise in the Pacific Islands as strategically benign.[1]

New external players – Russia, Georgia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – have entered the Pacific Islands region with their own political objectives. The Russians and Georgians are using the Pacific Islands to compete with each other over the recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as sovereign states. The UAE, among other things, seeks support for pro-Palestinian causes. Indonesia, an old player with new diplomatic energy, is using development assistance to thwart Pacific backing for the independence of West Papua.

The American Response to the Rise of China

High-level visits characterised American and Chinese diplomacy in the Pacific Islands in 2012. Hillary Clinton became the first US Secretary of State to attend a meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum when she flew to the Cook Islands in August. In Rarotonga she promised that American contributions to maritime surveillance of Pacific exclusive economic zones would grow and that the American shiprider program would be extended from the Coast Guard to the US Navy so that Pacific countries would be able to ‘take advantage of U.S. Navy ships that are already in the region or are transiting through the region to get help enforcing their own laws.’[2] The United States now has shiprider agreements with eight Pacific Island nations. These allow Island governments to place their law enforcement officers on board US vessels to extend authority for seizing vessels and patrolling exclusive economic zones to the Americans.

A few weeks later Leon Panetta visited New Zealand, the first American Secretary of Defence to do so since the 1980s. At that time the Lange Labour government’s ban on visiting nuclear vessels triggered a crisis in the ANZUS defence alliance and consigned New Zealand to the status of an uncooperative ally of the United States. In 1986 George Schultz, Secretary of State in the Reagan administration, famously withdrew US defence guarantees from New Zealand and declared that the two countries parted company as friends, but parted company nevertheless.[3]Now the mood was different, softened by years of New Zealand involvement in American-led military ventures such as Afghanistan, as well as the new strategic situation in the Pacific. The United States and New Zealand signed the 2012 Washington Declaration, promising closer cooperation on defence and security, and the Americans announced that, for the first time in more than a quarter of a century, New Zealand naval vessels would be welcome to dock at US military ports such as Pearl Harbour in Hawai’i.[4] The United States did not demand a change in New Zealand’s ship visits policy in return.

At the same time Fiji received a visit from the highest-ranking Chinese leader to come to the Pacific since Wen Jiabao in 2006. He was Wu Bangguo, the chair of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, and he assured Frank Bainimarama that he considered Fiji a good friend of China in the Pacific and wished to ‘elevate Sino-Fijian relations to a new and higher level’.[5] In a clear and critical reference to Australia and New Zealand, Wu was reported as saying China was ‘opposed to the bullying of big region strong countries over the small or weak countries. The Chinese are opposed to the imposition of isolation by some countries over Fiji, and China will continue to talk to relevant countries to engage in constructive and equal footing engagement and on the basis of equality and solidarity of differences.’[6]

The American and Chinese leaders were at pains to play down the strategic significance of their Pacific visits. In Rarotonga the Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai stressed China’s peaceful intentions. ‘We are here’, he said, ‘not to seek any particular influence, still less dominance. We are here to work with the island countries to achieve sustainable development because both China and the Pacific island countries belong to the rank of developing countries.’[7] Da Wei, an expert on the United States at the China Institute of International Relations, cautioned against playing up ‘the China factor in US re-engagement in the Pacific’ and stressed that China was ‘still not a major player in the South Pacific’[8]. For her part, Clinton stressed that the Pacific was ‘big enough for all of us’, meaning both the United States and China.[9] Yet the evidence pointed to an implied caveat on that statement, namely, that the United States would welcome all countries to the Pacific for as long as it remained an American strategic monopoly.

The Pacific Islands have mirrored changes in the global balance of power since the 19th century. The global dominance of the Royal Navy made Britain the major Pacific power from the late eighteenth century until after World War I. World War II briefly delivered hegemony over a large part of the Pacific Islands to Japan, whose wartime territories extended as far south as New Guinea and the Solomons, and since 1945 strategic ascendancy in the Pacific has belonged to the United States. American military bases in Hawai’i, Guam, Japan and South Korea, together with a web of military alliances, guarantee the United States unquestioned predominance in the region.

While that predominance of American power remains intact, the rise of China in the Pacific Islands has prompted the Americans to re-assert their strategic supremacy and remind the world that they are a Pacific power. China is far from new to the Pacific, having established diplomatic relations with Fiji and Samoa as long ago as the mid-1970s, but its impact in development assistance, trade, investment, diplomacy and people has burgeoned in recent years.[10] Chinese aid projects can be seen all over the Pacific and they come without good governance conditions. When China builds a stadium or government building in a Pacific capital, Chinese officials say the project is from one developing country to another, a form of South-South cooperation that cannot be matched by traditional donors. New Chinese-owned mines in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Fiji are evidence of large-scale investment and the scores of thousands of new entrepreneurial migrants who have settled in the Pacific in the last twenty years are investing in small-scale tradestores, restaurants, bakeries and clothing stores, creating a highly visible and sometimes resented Chinese presence.

The rise of China in the Pacific is a phenomenon of commerce, investment, development assistance, migration and diplomacy rather than one of strategy or military power. A mere 4% of Chinese development assistance flows to the Pacific Islands, compared with almost 80% to South-East Asia, Central Asia and Africa.[11]China’s Sinohydrocompany built the Nadarivatu Dam in Fiji, opened in 2012, which will ensure that 90% of Fiji’s power is generated by renewable sources of energy. China’s investment in PNG, its largest in the Pacific, is worth $1.5 billion, a tenth of the investment in liquefied natural gas by the American resource company ExxonMobil and its partners. Commentators have seized upon remarks made by the American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in testimony to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2011, as evidence of emerging Sino-American antagonism. Giving the example of PNG, she said: ‘We are in competition with China’, she said, ‘ExxonMobil is producing it [natural gas]. China is in there every day, trying to figure out how it’s going to come in behind us, come in under us.’ But the context of her comments was a threat that the US Congress would reduce American foreign aid, and her intention was to dramatise the need for that aid. In the same vein, Clinton said China was expanding its links with the ‘dictatorial regime’ in Fiji.[12] The United States is certainly re-asserting its position in the Pacific but without openly anti-Chinese intentions.

America’s Pacific focus is customarily on those parts of the Pacific that lie within its strategic and financial orbit: Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) and the Marshall Islands. After years of minimal interest in the rest of the Pacific Islands, the Americans began to re-discover them in 2010. The American return to the Pacific Islands – exemplified in military arrangements, development assistance and high-level visits – is part of what Hillary Clinton calls ‘the strategic turn to the Asia-Pacific’. So far the evidence seems to suggest that it is best understood as reasserting the status quo rather than issuing a strategic challenge to China.

Clinton visited a number of Pacific countries in 2010, and a top-level American team led by Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell and the US Pacific Fleet Commander has held annual talks with Pacific leaders for the last two years– in 2011 with Kiribati, Samoa, Tonga, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands and with the same countries in 2012 except for Samoa. Campbell described the 2011 tour of the region as ‘unprecedented’ and underscoring ‘our whole-of-government commitment by the United States to fulfill our moral, strategic, and political, and indeed, long-standing interests in the Pacific’.[13]Interviewed in Nuku’alofa in August 2012, Campbell said that among the issues discussed with King Tupou VI were ‘upgrading the Tongan Navy, combating illegal fishing, assisting Tonga in patrolling its territorial waters and the possibility for Tongan soldiers to participate in international peace keeping operations, which could mean expanding the Tonga Defence Services.’[14]In different forms, including $US66 million in infrastructure aid to Vanuatu from the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a small amount of American development assistance continued to flow to Pacific Island countries after the end of the Cold War. The American aid agency USAID, however, was absent for 16 years until its return – to a regional office in Port Moresby – in 2011. Visiting PNG in 2012, the USAID Mission Director for the Philippines and the Pacific Islands, Gloria Steele, declared that ‘As the United States ramps up its engagement with the Pacific, USAID will be partnering with other donors and organizations to assist countries in the Pacific region’. USAID assistance has included funding for ‘party strengthening and candidate debates’ at the time of the 2012 PNG elections, for the PNG national HIV/AIDS program and for flood victims in Fiji and PNG.[15]

The ‘strategic turn to the Asia-Pacific’ entails the building of new alliances and/or the consolidation of old ties with the Pacific Island states as well as those in East Asia. ‘As we update our alliances for new demands’, Clinton wrote in 2011, ‘we are also building new partnerships to help solve shared problems…we have worked hard to create and launch a number of "minilateral" meetings, small groupings of interested states to tackle specific challenges, such as the Lower Mekong Initiative we launched to support education, health, and environmental programs in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, and the Pacific Islands Forum, where we are working to support its members as they confront challenges from climate change to overfishing to freedom of navigation.’[16]When President Obama addressed the Australian Parliament in 2011 this strategic turn was the core of his message. Obama reminded everyone that the USA is a Pacific nation. ‘As we consider the future of our armed forces’ Obama said, ‘we have begun a review that will identify our most important strategic interests and guide our defence priorities and spending over the coming decade. And here is what this region must know. As we end today’s wars, I have directed my national security team to make our presence and missions in the Asia Pacific a top priority. As a result, reductions in US defence spending will not - I repeat, will not - come at the expense of the Asia Pacific… Our enduring interests in the region demand our enduring presence in this region. The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay’.[17]

The Australians and New Zealanders, while they welcome the US turn to the Asia-Pacific, view China’s rise in the Pacific more favourably than the Americans. China, it has to be remembered, is Australia’s largest export market and New Zealand’s second largest. China underpins their prosperity. Australia and New Zealand would like to see China co-ordinate its aid to the Pacific with other donors. The Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai ruled this out at the 2011 Auckland Forum, claiming that China was not another ‘donor’ to the Pacific Islands but instead contributes to their development as an expression of solidarity with fellow developing nations.[18] Nevertheless, Australia and New Zealand welcome Chinese aid and investment in the region. Richard Marles, Australian Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Island Affairs, told Radio Australia in 2012 that ‘China’s increased presence in the Pacific is fundamentally welcomed by Australia. The Pacific is a difficult place in which to do development assistance work…So, with that in mind, if any country out there wants to lend a hand in the development assistance work of the region we think that is fundamentally a good thing.’[19] In New Zealand the foreign minister Murray McCully, in a major speech in 2011 on ‘New Zealand, Australia and China’s Rise’, said he did not attribute ‘unwholesome motives’ to Chinese activity in the Pacific Islands: ‘China is simply doing in our neighbourhood what it is doing in every neighbourhood around the globe: undertaking a level of engagement designed to secure access to resources on a scale that will meet its future needs, and establishing a presence through which it can make its other interests clear. Minerals, timber and fish are all commodities that Pacific is able to trade, and that China wants to buy.’[20] New Zealand is the first developed nation to enter into a cooperative agreement with China to deliver development assistance in the Pacific Islands – in this case a water supply project to the Cook Islands.’[21]

Pacific Island countries also favour China’s engagement. When the Samoan prime minister TuilaepaSaileleMalielegaoi was asked in 2012 about the American role in the Pacific he replied that ‘the U.S. president can say whatever he wants but the reality is that the U.S. cannot match what China is doing to help the Pacific.’[22]Malielegaoi told a Xinhua reporter in Rarotonga that the ‘uniqueness of the Chinese assistance is its flexibility and very quick response by the authorities in China… The other thing which I’m always impressed by is that when we come to China there’s always that readiness among the leaders to meet with us and to listen. You have to find that in many, many, many big countries – they’re always busy and the leaders are not able to meet with us’. [23] Niue prime minister TokeTalagi had a similar view of China, saying ‘we’re very happy that China’s in the Pacific…We’ve had the airport terminal built with Chinese money; we’ve had the security of the airport also secured with Chinese money; we’re looking at building a hotel in Niue with Chinese money – so all those things will add up’.[24]

New External Players

Independent Pacific Island countries are familiar with the sovereignty game. Their own sovereign status gives them the capacity to recognize the sovereignty of other states, and they are accustomed to the entreaties of foreign governments seeking to make use of that capacity. In the past China and Taiwan competed for recognition in the Pacific, and used development assistance to attract and keep allies. Some Pacific countries switched sides in order to extract more aid, as Nauru did when it changed from China to Taiwan in 2004. Since the election of the Ma Ying-jeougovernment in Taiwan in 2008, China and Taiwan have worked together and the rivalry between them has moderated significantly. These days Taiwan maintains official relations with six Pacific countries (Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu) whereas China is recognised by eight (Cook Islands, FSM, Fiji, Niue, PNG, Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu), and there is little desire on either side to change the situation.