A COLUMN WRITTEN BY KALIOPATE TAVOLA, PUBLISHED IN ISLANDS BUSINESS, MAY-JUN 2022

Security is a priority in the region. It has been so since 1971, when the earlier version of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) – the South Pacific Forum (SPF) first met in Wellington on 5-7 August that year. At that first meeting, ‘attention was drawn to the forthcoming series of nuclear tests to be conducted by France in the South Pacific.’

Forum Leaders obviously chose to be proactive in this matter as best as they could. They ‘expressed deep regret that atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons continued to be held in the islands of French Polynesia despite the partial Test Ban Treaty and the protests repeatedly made by a number of countries attending as well as other Pacific countries….They addressed an urgent appeal to the Government of France that the current test series should be the last in the Pacific area. The Forum requested the New Zealand Government to transmit this.’

It can be appreciated that security’s concern at the time was essentially related to threats that could be militaristic in nature or military-related like nuclear tests. The SPF Leaders did raise their concern about health, safety and marine life as a result of the testing and the potential hazards that atmospheric tests posed. At the time, climate change, as a non-military threat, had not evolved as existential for Pacific Island Countries (PICs) and for Pacific regionalism as a whole. That came later in 2018.

However, since those early days, the Forum had been concerned about security. So much so that it passed a number of security agreements and frameworks to guide its work, namely: Treaty of Rarotonga or South Pacific Nuclear-Free Zone Treaty (1985), Aitutaki Declaration on Regional Security Cooperation (1997), Biketawa Declaration (2000), Nasonini Declaration on Regional Security (2002), Forum Declaration on Solomon Islands (2003), and Boe Declaration (2018).

These regional agreements have worked at the regional level as they were intended to do. Like many resolutions of the Forum, they have worked since Forum members see ‘political significance’ in their conduct and effect. Members are not legally obliged to implement these regional resolutions as is the nature of Pacific regionalism.

Given the voluntary nature of Pacific regionalism, members are not legally obliged to reflect aspects of these regional edifices in national policies or policy instruments. At the national level, politicians make policies on security on the basis of their own sovereignty and on their own assessments of security threats – whatever these threats may be. Some members, like Fiji and Solomon Islands for instance, have pursued bilateral security-related agreements with Australia. These may be carried out on the basis of connectivity to regional agreements – either as in pursuance for the fulfillment of aspects in the regional agreement or as a means to extending certain aspects of some related regional aspirations.

The Solomon Islands Government’s bilateral security agreements have been in the news lately and proffering much food for thought and speculation by regional politicians, security gurus and the like. The furore that it has created has given rise to the opportunity for passionate debate across the region. Hopefully, from all these discussions, a way forward will emerge to render common sense and balance in the critical narratives relating to regional security.

As far as Solomon Islands, and other PICs as well, are concerned, they determine their own foreign relations with partners of their own choice. They may opt to be guided by ‘friends to all and enemy to none.’ They are exercising their own sovereignty in any case. Solomon Islands’ choice to switch from relations with Taiwan to China was an exercise of such sovereignty.

The fact that this free and independent choice infracted imposed geopolitical sensibilities as per the Indo-Pacific geopolitical remapping of a good part of the globe, was not of their making. It was ill-fated. When all the furore started up and PM Sogovare was backed into a corner, he was castigated. He needed help and direction. However, none came from PIF. Both the PIF Chair and PIF/Secretary General were silent. Any hope of how to proceed forward guided by PIF’s Blue Pacific, for instance, remained a desolate hope. Note that the Blue Pacific, as a homegrown political platform critical for PICs, was PIF’s direct response to the Indo-Pacific geostrategy.

All this is instructive. The political upheaval in the Solomon Islands was what received a lot of political flak and airtime. Previous breaches of security guidelines hardly made the headlines.

Australia is playing its South Pacific sheriff’s role in trying to broker a resolution for the Solomon Islands political situation. However, Australia is hardly the independent umpire that the situation requires.

The Boe Declaration encapsulates security as a broad-based concept that includes all forms of security presenting threats to PIF members. It includes therefore non-military security threats. But climate change ‘remains the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific…’ This is at the regional level.

At the national level, however, Australia has found it problematic to honour this commitment because of its national policies on the use and promotion of fossil fuel. The gulf between PICs leaders and the Australian PM, for instance, has been unbridgeable. If the PIF were to be effective in its global drive to solve climate change, then Australia has to make extra efforts to honour and comply with the Boe Declaration. Australia failed to do so at COP26. Prospects for compliance in COP27 do not currently appear to be promising.

Australia is a member of the QUAD that together with the US, created Indo-Pacific in 2018, without any consultation whatsoever with PICS. PICs were essentially pawns in the geopolitical game being played.  Later, with the United Kingdom and the US, they formed AUKUS, as a special appendage to the Indo-Pacific.

For Australia, these additional layers of extra-regional security agreements bring their own commitments. One can imagine the likely contradictions that can result; and the more contradictions that Australia has to contend with the greater it is likely to distance itself from its regional responsibilities.

And it is being played out now. AUKUS has a nuclear component. As such, it contradicts and undermines PIF’s Treaty of Rarotonga of 1985. How can Australia reconcile with this, it being a signatory of the regional Treaty?

Under Indo-Pacific, Australia has placed itself with the US, in direct confrontation with China: the geopolitical battle for a bipolar world! This, as we have seen above, is putting Australia directly against PICs that opt to align with China bilaterally. Australia’s South Pacific sheriff role violently clashes with its PIF’s membership role and commitment. Furthermore, should bipolar tensions escalate to actual confrontation, it can be imagined that the PICs will become the meat in the proverbial sandwich. Prospects of collateral damage can be unfathomable.

Australia’s membership of ASEAN as its first Dialogue Partner and also as a Strategic Partner creates its own security responsibilities to that collective, or to specific members of the collective. Meeting these requirements on top of those to PIF’s own can be problematic.  Australia’s cavalier stance on West Papua, which also reflects that of PIF, as a whole, speaks volumes about inspiration to support decolonization that is muffled by inflated bilateral sensitivities.

Beyond G20 is the G7 and there is the global order that is undergoing massive power shifts. In Ian Bremmer’s view, we may already be in what he calls as the ‘G-Zero world’ – the new global order – that lacks effective global leadership and thus: every nation is for itself. To re-view Solomon Islands and its choices of bilateral partners through this new lens would be an interesting exercise to contemplate.

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© Kaliopate Tavola and kaidravuni.com, 2025. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kaliopate Tavola, kaidravuni.com and Islands Business with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.