'Any hint of high handedness that seems to stem from moral posturing or grabbing the high moral ground when dealing with Pacific islands issues will not work, as the Asian powers have cleverly found out’


Not since World War II has the Pacific region gained such geopolitical importance as now. Beginning last year, the United States of America has sent consistent signals to the region and the world at large that it intends to firmly drop anchor in the world’s single largest geographical feature, the Pacific Ocean.

After sending top officials on country tours and regional forum meetings, it announced this year would be the “Year of the Pacific” and took 20 islands leaders for a meeting in Washington DC, the first to be held on the mainland, in a bid to underscore the importance of the region to its own administration and to make clear its intentions to the leaders.

Having ignored the region for decades, it is clearly in a hurry to recover lost ground. But it may already be too late to make any effective impression. For the region has long been crowded with other players from near and far who have dug in their heels deep. And their reasons are varied, ranging from a commercial interest in tapping oceanic resources to maintaining existing colonies; and from establishing a new, chequebook powered geopolitical hegemony to apparently benign altruism.

All that churning in the placid Pacific is bound to bring in a whole new dynamics in the region: something that is bound to be a new experience even for the region’s two seasoned majors—Australia and New Zealand.

Until two decades ago, the nations of the Pacific had only Australia and New Zealand to look up to for nearly all kinds of assistance. But since then, Japan, China and Taiwan have steadily poured in resources both in financial and, importantly, infrastructure terms, eating into the ANZAC nations’ mindshare in the Pacific. Besides, cheap Chinese and Asian imports are continuing to hurt ANZAC exporters who have traditionally supplied wares to the islands.

But that’s not all. A number of smaller players, equally far removed geographically, are waiting in the wings or have already sailed quietly and hitherto unnoticed into Pacific waters. Cuba, for instance, has capitalised on its most successful export: medical doctors. It has sent hundreds of its medical practitioners to work in the region and is now beginning to build on that success. It is now working with Fiji offering its expertise in sport and sports medicine.

Fiji is looking at the world’s largest democracy, distant India, to offer its expertise on its next elections instead of falling back on its traditional sources like Australia and New Zealand for such help. Then again, Venezuela is offering oil refining facilities in the Pacific region based in Fiji and dangling the carrot of cheap petroleum products to gain entry.

This is to say nothing of the French Pacific, to which France has been paying greater attention in recent years. If the world’s sole superpower knew what competing forces it is up against in the region, its first exercise to woo the islands leaders en masse last month certainly did not show it.

Its obsession with it own security and its over enthusiasm in perpetrating its brand of democratic principles saw some Pacific leaders boycott one of the meetings when it brought up country-specific political discussions into the agenda, much against their will. Other leaders have gone on record expressing disappointment at the Washington DC meet.

The United States will have to do much more than sermonise on how Pacific islanders must run their countries. Its great material wealth and military power alone are unlikely to win over the islands regimes that are known to be famously fractious—especially in the face of long entrenched powers that have over the years forged long and successful relationships with most of them while at the same time driving deep wedges between them.

Any hint of high-handedness that seems to stem from moral posturing or grabbing the high moral ground when dealing with Pacific islands issues will not work, as the Asian powers have cleverly found out.

On the other hand, Australia and New Zealand have shown far less restraint in dealing with the internal crises of small islands states—attitudes that may have actually led to quicker and deeper entrenchment of the Asian influence in the Pacific.

Neither will the Pacific islands states be impressed by America’s economic and military muscle—or for that matter even its natural alliance with the two regional metropolitan nations.

If anything, islands leaders will be extra cautious, given the history of its troubled and painful engagements in different parts of the world, most recently in the Middle East.

To succeed, the United States will need to carefully weave Pacific sensibility into its strategies in the region.
It will need to look at each nation’s deepest individual concerns and aspirations—both economic and ecological—and suggest ways of addressing them. Most of all, it will need to understand doing business with the islands in the difficult to describe ‘Pacific Way’.

But it will be really up to the Pacific islands—individually and collectively—to shape the geopolitics of the region on their terms in the decades to come by holding their heads high and laying their rightful claim to the ocean’s fast depleting resources in the interests of their sovereignty and that of their diversely colourful peoples.