The Pacific faces a rapidly evolving security environment. Foreign partners increasingly compete for comprehensive partnerships, engagements, coordination and influence. Security risks are also evolving, with a greater emphasis on climate- and disaster-driven security threats, and increasing transnational crime and hybrid threats. As a result, it is necessary to understand the drivers and implications of security partnerships in the Pacific.
Pacific leaders now have an unprecedented opportunity to extract foreign support for security development. But this brings challenges in identifying a development path that builds internal capacity, doesn’t impinge upon sovereignty, doesn’t create additional future security risks and doesn’t threaten relationships crucial to economic development. Many Pacific nations want to remain ‘friends to all and enemies to none,’ as they like to say. But, in some cases, partners such as Australia are making it clear that, for Pacific security forces and regional security initiatives to reach their full potential, they should choose a primary partner to maximise the effectiveness of communication, training and use of equipment.
Australia has made a flurry of agreements over the past two years across the region designed to ensure stability and security while remaining Pacific nations’ security partner of choice. Several security-focused bilateral agreements have been signed alongside the establishment of regional security initiatives that are heavily supported by Australian infrastructure and funding, such as the Pacific Policing Initiative and Pacific Response Group. These agreements build upon Australia’s existing efforts to build capacity and resilience and directly meet the stated needs of Pacific island countries as outlined in the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific.
Some of the agreements Australia has signed have changed the way competition is playing out. Australia is developing or has reached agreements with Tuvalu, Nauru and Papua New Guinea that guarantee those countries will not expand or enter into new security partnerships with other nations without Australia’s approval. These terms have not come cheap. But they ensure that agreements achieve their intended outcomes, contributing to stability and security, and that Australia’s investments don’t contribute to a bidding war with foreign partners seeking to exploit geostrategic competition to further their own interests.
In other countries, including Vanuatu, Kiribati and Solomon Islands, competition in the security space will likely grow as partnership opportunities are fiercely contested. The main enabler of competition is the appetite and ambition of Pacific island political and security leaders. Ultimately, it is these decision makers who will either choose to entertain offers from multiple partners—and perhaps even leverage them to maximise personal and strategic benefits—or push back against competition, preferring the stability and simplicity of a single, like-minded partner. Both paths, uniquely navigated by each country, must be appreciated and respected.
Security force partnerships are underpinned by what support Pacific countries need for their security development and what foreign partners want in exchange for providing that support. Pacific island countries depend almost entirely on foreign assistance to develop their security forces and their partners are aiming to balance meeting those security needs while achieving their own goals in the region. This may include influence, interoperability, reducing transnational crime or ensuring stability in the region.
For most Pacific island countries, needs can’t be fully met by a single partner, due to the scale and complexity of the challenges they face. So, some degree of openness to multiple partnerships is required and encouraged. But this opens the space to competition, which can harm the region. Several Pacific leaders have said that geopolitics is causing domestic turmoil, burdening governments and distracting from real regional issues.
Even Solomon Islands, a country that seemingly encourages competition between partners, lists geopolitical competition in the highest risk category in its national security strategy, equal with domestic instability and environmental threats. The uptick in Pacific island national security strategies and foreign policy white papers released in recent years is itself a sign that countries are seeking to navigate the challenges that geopolitics brings to the region.
The region’s traditional partners should be tracking how and why security partnerships are developing in order to anticipate and offer the best support. This article is the first in a series, Friends to all: Competing for Pacific security partnerships, that aims to examine these trends across nine Pacific island countries: Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. The series won’t cover dependent territories and countries in free-association arrangements, since they have limited ability to independently seek international agreements.
The analysis in the series will show how, where and why partnerships are evolving by drawing on statements from Pacific leaders, engagements with foreign partners, the acceptance of assistance and the signing of new agreements. The country-level analysis accounts for their unique circumstances to suggest how partners should respond to maximise the benefits of their support.
ASPI’s Friends to all: Competing for Pacific security partnerships series can be found here.