New Zealand official says Western neglect of Pacific Islands let other nations boost their influence

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Western nations, including the United States and New Zealand, failed to understand swiftly enough the geopolitical importance of island nations in the South Pacific, leaving a power vacuum that allowed other countries to increase their diplomatic influence, New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters said.

Peters made the remark in an interview with The Associated Press in his parliamentary office in the capital, Wellington, on Thursday, ahead of an annual summit in Tonga next week of leaders of Pacific nations, including Australia and New Zealand. Crises of sovereignty, climate change and foreign influence in some of the world’s smallest and most remote nations are expected to take center stage.

The region of tropical islands and atoll nations, once overlooked by many Western governments, has become a focus of competition in recent years among the world’s largest governments for influence, resources and power. The Pacific Islands Forum has exploded in importance as a result, drawing diplomatic and civil society observers from across the globe.

Leaders of tiny Pacific nations are being courted by China with bilateral sweeteners such as infrastructure funding, export markets and security help, leading Australia and New Zealand in recent months to push for the Pacific-style consensus diplomacy of the forum. But they are facing a different landscape than before -– in part, Peters said, because of the failures of previous governments of which he was not a part.

“If you are not there as an influence, then other influences that don’t share your values might seriously fill the vacuum, and that has happened,” said Peters, 79, who is also deputy prime minister, a former foreign minister and the country’s longest-serving current lawmaker.

Peters did not name China as the subject of his remarks. But he decried what he termed the rise of “checkbook diplomacy” that has swept the Pacific -– funds with political stipulations or which must be repaid, leaving tiny island nations struggling under crushing debt -- a strategy by which China has solidified its influence in recent years.

“Like-minded countries like New Zealand will have to deal with that issue, because I know that some of these countries cannot pay it back,” he said. Small island nations in crushing debt to foreign powers give the larger country “the influence that was the design behind the loans in the first place,” Peters said.

New Zealand, with a population of 5 million — trifling on the world stage, but large compared to most Pacific Island nations, which have as few as 1,500 people -- does not challenge the independence of other Pacific countries, Peters said. “We say small states matter and their voice has the right to be respected as much as ours or any larger country,” he said.

Peters has in the past six months visited 14 of the 17 other member states of the Pacific Islands Forum. A constant connection is vital, he said, to ensure geostrategic pressures “are handled together in concert by like-minded countries.”

However, exhortations from Australia and New Zealand for the island nations to remember their part in what is often called the “Pacific family” have at times irked leaders seeking to forge their own paths -– often with China’s help. This week, Kiribati announced it was suspending diplomatic visits for the rest of the year, citing its ongoing elections -– but provoking questions from some analysts about whether its closer ties with Beijing, and increasingly aloof relations with Australia, were partly responsible.

Peter didn’t comment on what he believed had prompted the move. But he said the region’s “DNA connection” — the Polynesian navigators who traveled through the Pacific thousands of years ago before finally reaching New Zealand -– would prevail.

Peters said his travels this year showed him that the citizens of Pacific islands “have not been seduced” by the bilateral wooing of some leaders.

“Go and ask the ordinary people in the hamlets, the villages, the small towns and hills of the Pacific and they’ll tell you what they prefer,” he said.

One focus of this year’s forum is ongoing unrest in New Caledonia, a French territory where violence between pro-independence residents and French-backed authorities flared in May, killing nine civilians and two gendarmes.

The Indigenous Kanak people have long sought to break free from France, which first colonized the Pacific archipelago in 1853 and granted citizenship to all Kanaks in 1957. The latest unrest exploded over attempts by the French government to amend its own constitution, expanding voting lists in New Caledonia and granting more French residents the right to vote than before.

Kanaks feared that would further marginalize them and denounced a final vote on the matter in 2021 as illegitimate -– which France has vehemently rejected. The matter threatens to boil over at the forum.

Peters has not stated a view, although he expressed the need for “major economies to stay engaged in the Pacific,” underscoring New Zealand’s and Australia’s fears that France giving up New Caledonia would open a new vacuum and further threaten an economy that until recently was one of the Pacific’s most successful.

“There are other models of what can work,” he said. “How about exploring one which keeps friends together?”

He was scathing, however, of Paris’ claim that the final vote in New Caledonia was legitimate.

“I did have to remind the ambassador to New Caledonia from France that some of us have been around thousands of years before she ever got near this place, so would she just kindly remember that,” Peters said.

He had similar sentiments for the U.S., which invited Pacific leaders to a White House summit for the first time in 2022 and had, he said, underestimated the region before that.

Peters said he had advised “Eurocentric” American officials to “please get engaged and try to turn up,” although he added, “But not with the uniform on.”

As the leaders converge on Tonga this weekend to confront the existential challenges facing them, such as climate change, Peters will invoke the old friendships of the Pacific family, while urging something more.

“Everything now is an inflection point,” he said. “More urgency, more action and more unction.”