Like Trump, Australia attaches strings to helping small nations, but it’s a tangle

Australia provided the Solomon Islands a massive uplift to its law-enforcement assistance, also announced in December, in exchange for something of a gentleman’s agreement with Prime Minister Jeremiah Manele that his country wouldn’t look to China as a security partner of choice. Too bad that Chinese police are already training the Solomon Islands force.

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Papua New Guinea was promised an NRL team in return for security assurances. Then, this month, it was revealed that Australia would provide a further loan of $570 million for budget support, the sixth since 2019 and bringing the total to over $3 billion, amid speculation that PNG agreed not to build a Chinese-funded undersea cable.

These deals are not inherently bad. Each, in isolation, may make strategic sense. But they reflect a deeper shift: Australia is now explicitly buying influence, one deal at a time.

And to be perfectly frank: it is Pacific governments that are fuelling this transactionalism, as they have become diplomatic price-setters amid intense geopolitical competition for strategic access to their sovereign spaces. If larger countries have found themselves jumping through hoops to curry local political influence in the region, it is Pacific leaders themselves who are holding those hoops.

Where does this unbridled transactionalism lead? By placing itself at the front of the queue as the security partner of choice for vulnerable Pacific nations, Australia is doing more than just securing diplomatic wins – it is also assuming responsibility for their stability and prosperity in ways that hark back to colonial-era paternalism. But for Australia, it may be a case of buyer beware.

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Guaranteeing Tuvalu’s security from an implausible foreign invasion and agreeing to resettle 280 climate refugees annually is affordable. So, too, is keeping Nauru economically afloat, even if Canberra must overlook the nation’s governance challenges.

But Solomon Islands is orders of magnitude larger in both population size and the scope of the problem set. Australia’s $2.7 billion peacekeeping Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) from 2003 to 2017 apparently did not leave Honiara with the means to secure itself. If that sum was not enough then, it is hard to see how the $190 million package offered in December will suffice.

Papua New Guinea presents an even greater challenge. With a PNG population of about 12 million, no single external partner can fulfil all its security needs. Australia’s bilateral aid program to the nation is large, at almost $700 million per year. But as one former senior Australian official liked to note, that’s about what it costs to run Canberra Hospital for a year. Australian aid is not necessarily ineffective, nor is it misspent, but the scale of PNG’s needs means Australia cannot go it alone.

Will this new conditionality be enough to keep China at bay? The commitments secured range from binding treaties with Nauru and Tuvalu, to “assurances” from Papua New Guinea, to “an understanding” with Solomon Islands PM Manele. Australia would have preferred legally binding instruments across the board, but diplomacy is often a game of getting the best deal available on the day.

Yet the fragility of these arrangements is already apparent. If Cook Islands is able to sign a comprehensive strategic partnership with China, despite its constitutional obligations to New Zealand, what does that say about the strength of Australia’s security assurances from Pacific nations? It underscores a simple reality: in diplomacy, politics trumps policy. And self-interest reigns above all.

Mihai Sora is the director of the Pacific Islands program at the Lowy Institute.