Top officials from 18 Pacific Island countries wrapped up their annual forum in Tonga on Friday, endorsing a regional policing initiative funded by Australia and urging donor nations to provide more resources to deal with climate change.
In a 16-page communique released Friday, which was viewed by VOA but has been removed from the forum’s website, Pacific leaders “endorsed the Pacific Policing Initiative” and “welcomed Australia’s support for the implementation” of it.
The initiative includes establishing a training center in Brisbane, four skills centers across the Pacific and a force of about 200 police officers that could be deployed across the region to deal with natural disasters or other emergencies.
Some analysts said the outcome was “a win for Australia.”
“The result shows that Pacific leaders broadly continue to desire Australia as their partner of choice on policing,” Parker Novak, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council's Global China Hub, told VOA by phone.
Other experts said the policing initiative was Australia’s attempt to consolidate the regional security architecture as China tries to increase its security ties with Pacific Island countries.
“Australia is seeking to lock down the policing architecture in such a way that China isn’t able to make any further inroads,” said Anna Powles, an associate professor in security studies at Massey University in New Zealand.
Since 2022, China has signed security-related deals with some Pacific Island countries, including a police deal with the Solomon Islands in 2023 and an arrangement to provide policing support for Kiribati.
Despite endorsements from all regional countries, some Pacific leaders still worry that Australia might use the policing deal to push China out of the security space. Vanuatu’s Prime Minister Charlot Salwai said the Pacific Islands Forum needs to ensure the policing initiative is not developed to “suit the geostrategic interests and geostrategic denial security postures of our big partners.”
Powles told VOA the regional policing initiative would not affect existing bilateral policing arrangements between certain Pacific countries and China. “The deal is seeking to train and develop a cadre of Pacific police officers, but it doesn’t preclude other external arrangements, such as Solomon Islands’ policing arrangement with China,” she said.
In response to Pacific countries’ endorsement of the policing deal, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said during a regular press conference Wednesday that Beijing asserts “various parties should make [a] joint effort to promote the development and prosperity of Pacific Island countries.”
In a video filmed by Radio New Zealand journalist Lydia Lewis on Wednesday, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell described the policing initiative as “fantastic” and told Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese the U.S. had contemplated a similar initiative but that Australian Ambassador to the U.S. Kevin Rudd told Washington it was not necessary.
“We’ve given you the lane, so take the lane!” Campbell told Albanese in the video.
Combating climate change
In addition to endorsing the regional policing deal, Pacific leaders also highlighted some pressing climate-related challenges that regional countries face.
In the final communique, Pacific leaders said sea level rise is a “severe manifestation of climate change that threatens Pacific communities, especially in low-lying nations” and strongly called for “the inclusion of sea level rise as a standalone agenda item” in the U.N. General Assembly and other U.N. processes.
Earlier this week, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the rate of sea level rise in the Pacific region as “a crazy situation” that will soon “swell to an almost unimaginable scale.”
“A worldwide catastrophe is putting this Pacific paradise in peril,” he warned during a tour in Tonga and Samoa on Monday.
Some experts say while the warning from Guterres has helped put the climate threats against Pacific Island countries into focus, conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have reduced the global discussion of climate change over the last two years.
“Given everything else that’s going on in the world, the focus on climate change has slipped in the last 12 to 24 months, and that is a matter of concern for Pacific leaders and the U.N. secretary-general,” Tess Newton Cain, an adjunct associate professor at Griffith Asia Institute in Australia, told VOA by phone.
Pacific Island countries’ decision to reject the Solomon Islands’ proposal to prevent Taiwan from participating in the forum has triggered angry reactions from Beijing.
“The situation is obvious, among the 18 members of the PIF, 15 countries have diplomatic relations with China, and 15 countries have categorically stated they stand by the One China principle,” Chinese Pacific envoy Qian Bo told journalists following the meeting on Friday.
Great power competition
While major democracies and China have engaged in an intense competition for influence in the Pacific region since 2022, observers say Beijing and Washington have adopted a less competitive tone throughout this year’s forum, a development welcomed by regional leaders.
The prime minister of Papua New Guinea, James Marape, commended the U.S. and China “for their pledges to work together with the nations of the Pacific,” describing seeing Beijing and Washington laying aside their differences at the forum as “one of the highlights of the moment.”
Newton Cain, who is in Tonga for the forum, said it remained to be seen whether Beijing and Washington could work more collaboratively in the Pacific region after the summit in Tonga. “If we were to see more efforts put into contributing jointly to the Pacific, that would be something welcomed by regional leaders,” she told VOA.
Despite the less competitive approach adopted by Beijing and Washington, Novak from the Atlantic Council said geopolitical competition between big countries was “here to stay” in the Pacific region.
“China is going to continue focusing on bolstering bilateral relationships with Pacific Island countries, while democratic countries will work together to strengthen their presence in the region,” he told VOA.
