Pushing the limits of Australia’s strategic imagination in the Pacific Islands

6 September 2021

Australia has long identified itself as having ‘significant responsibilities as leader and regional power’ in the Pacific Islands. While its ability to exercise influence in the region has always been more imagined than real, it is being further tested as the geopolitics of the region become more ‘crowded and complex’. ‘Traditional’ external powers are conducting ‘resets’, ‘pledges’, and ‘uplifts’. ‘Non-traditional’ external partners are seeking to strengthen their ‘bonds’, including by ‘acting east’, and drawing the region into the ‘belt and road’.

Conscious that this increased activism is potentially diminishing its role, Australia is seeking to be the region’s ‘principal security partner’. Since 2018 it has implemented a substantial policy ‘step-up’ to improve its relationships in the region. This has included significant pledges for infrastructure financing, increased labour mobility opportunities, greater security cooperation, and enhancing people-to-people links. But two problematic assumptions underly Australia’s step-up, and its broader strategic policy in the Pacific Islands. This suggests that Australia needs to push the limits of its strategic imagination about the region.

Problematic assumptions

The first assumption is that Pacific Island states are ‘small’, ‘fragile’, and ‘vulnerable’ to external influence. This has long underpinned Australia’s strategic imagination, generating ongoing concern about ‘state fragility’. Over the last 15 years, Australia has led interventions of varying intrusiveness and effectiveness in the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea (PNG), and Nauru, ostensibly to strengthen these states. As grey-zone activities become more common, there are concerns about the resilience of Pacific Island states to withstand coercion.

Pacific Island leaders have developed ‘tactical, shrewd and calculating approaches’ towards using their agency to exploit strategic competition between powers to pursue their own priorities, including greater access to aid, concessional loans, military assistance, and international influence.

The second assumption stems from the first. It holds that the increasing presence of the Chinese state, corporations, and people is generating influence for China, and creating conditions for the potential coercion of Pacific Island states and/or people. Although frequently debunked, claims that China could engage in ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ by instrumentalising its civilian infrastructure projects in the region for military purposes is the most notable example. This assumption is increasingly driving Australia’s strategic policy. While Australia’s step-up has been framed as deepening its relationship with its ‘Pacific family’, it has admitted that it is seeking to ‘compete’ with China.

But while Pacific Island states are benefitting from increased investment, it is unclear whether their priorities are driving Australian policy, or whether Australia is primarily reacting to Chinese initiatives. Indeed, Australia’s approach often resembles a game of ‘whack-a-mole’. For example, after China expressed its intent to re-develop the Black Rock military base in Fiji, Australia instead stepped-in. And after Chinese company Huawei bid to lay the undersea cable to link PNG and Solomon Islands to Australia, Australia instead funded the project. Earlier this year, after rumours that a Chinese company planned to build a fisheries park on Daru in PNG, Australia signed a memorandum of understanding with PNG to conduct an ‘economic empowerment program’ on Daru. And more recently, there are reports that Australia could fund its telecommunications company, Telstra, to take an equity stake in Digicel Pacific, the largest telecommunications business in the region, to prevent a takeover by China Mobile.

The Blue Pacific narrative

So how can Australia overcome these assumptions and push the limits of its strategic imagination in the Pacific Islands? Fortunately for Australia, Pacific Island states and people have already done a lot of reimagining for it. Since 2017 Pacific Islands Forum leaders have been framing of the region as the ‘Blue Pacific’ that can act as a ‘Blue Continent’. A key element of the Blue Pacific narrative is that Pacific Island states should be ‘exercising stronger strategic autonomy’, ‘understanding…the strategic value of our region’ and ‘maintain[ing] our solidarity in the face of those who seek to divide us’.

Australia has recognised the Blue Pacific narrative and Australian leaders use it regularly. If Australia substantively — rather than merely rhetorically — incorporate key elements of the Blue Pacific narrative into its strategic imagination this could challenge the — at times — counterproductive assumptions on which its current strategic policy is based. The Blue Pacific framing emphasises the agency, autonomy, and potential of Pacific Island states. This could help Australia recognise the resilience of Pacific Island states and people, and the ways in which they are exercising their agency to shape their own futures, including in their relations with other powers. This would also help to combat the assumption that Pacific Island states are passive dupes to Chinese influence. Indeed, Pacific Island leaders have developed ‘tactical, shrewd and calculating approaches’ towards using their agency to exploit strategic competition between powers to pursue their own priorities, including greater access to aid, concessional loans, military assistance, and international influence.

Australia also needs to recognise that structural (including the influence of globalised neoliberalism) and historical factors (including the legacy of colonialism) have contributed to widespread economic underdevelopment, underdeveloped public services, and chronic infrastructure shortages in the region. In their efforts to respond to these challenges, Pacific Island states are seeking engagement with both traditional and non-traditional powers. That this may exacerbate Australia’s strategic anxieties is understandably not their primary concern.

Australia has legitimate strategic interests in the Pacific Islands — it cannot simply imagine them away, nor the potential threats it may face over the coming decade. But to advance those interests it needs to overcome key assumptions that are limiting the scope of what it can imagine possible.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Author biography

Joanne Wallis, Professor of International Security, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Adelaide. Image Credit: Flickr/Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.