If ever there was a blatant statement of realpolitik masquerading as friendliness, the latest US-Pacific Island declaration must count as one of them. The Biden administration has been busy of late, wooing Pacific Island states in an effort to discourage increasingly sharp tilt towards China. It has been spurred on, in no small way, by…
If the non-stop dancing duo Biden and Blinken is seriously seeking to validate its view that the United States of America is and should be the world’s hegemon, they are going about it the wrong way. They should be taking their lead from Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky by turning their press conferences into entertainments with…
What is it about Australian diplomacy that makes it so clumsy and dunderheaded? Is it the harsh delivery, the tactless expression, or the inability to do things with subtle reflection? On September 6, Australian diplomacy gave another display of such form with Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s remarks about the Solomon Islands elections. Things have been…
On August 26, 2022, news broke that the Solomon Islands had refused to allow a US Coast Guard ship to refuel in its port. In the history of the South Pacific, only New Zealand did so in 1985, when it barred a US nuclear-powered naval vessel from visiting its port. In 1987, Wellington declared the…
Last week, US Vice President Kamala Harris gave a video address to the Pacific Islands Forum – a multilateral meeting consisting of the archipelago nations of the South Pacific, commonly grouped as ‘Polynesia’ and ‘Melanesia’. In the exchange, Harris vowed to increase US cooperation with the island nations, warned of ‘bad actors’, and pledged to re-open…
In April 2022, the world learned that China and the Solomon Islands had concluded a framework security treaty allowing China to deploy its naval forces in a small but strategically important nation in Oceania, just 2,000 km off the coast of the largest state in the South Pacific, Australia. At this point, however, the Chinese…
