Island Security
Nations of the Blue Pacific vital to Free and Open Region

FORUM Staff
Papua New Guinea (PNG) celebrates the 50th anniversary of its independence from Australia on September 16, 2025. Buildings will be draped in the national colors of red, black and gold and expect a ceremonial flag-raising; parades; sporting events; and cultural festivals with music, dances and costumes.
Rehearsals began in 2023 when the country’s Department of Personnel Management urged government organizations to use the 48th anniversary to “set the pace for the next two years,” according to news reports. Those attending the 50th anniversary could include the United Kingdom’s King Charles III, head of PNG’s constitutional monarchy, who was invited to officiate at the ceremonies by PNG Prime Minister James Marape. The U.K. colonized Papua in 1884 and turned administration over to Australia early in the 20th century. Australia combined Papua and neighboring New Guinea into one administration after World War II.
PNG is one of the largest Blue Pacific nations and a resource-rich archipelago sitting strategically in the center of the Indo-Pacific. It is an important United States partner, but like other Pacific Island nations, it faces challenging economics and overtures from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which offers risky loans.
The economic growth for a dozen island nations was projected to decelerate in 2024 and 2025 as the boost from the COVID-19 pandemic recovery in tourism, household consumption and money sent home by workers overseas faded, the World Bank reported. The nations are “among the world’s most aid-dependent countries” said the U.S.-based Pacific Forum think tank, and they face substantial needs in education, health and infrastructure spending. The challenges can make developing countries receptive to coercion and debt diplomacy from the PRC as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seeks to extend its influence in the region.

“The whole Pacific is grappling with Beijing’s multifaceted campaign to become the dominant regional power and the pushback from a coalition of nations aligning against China,” analysts Patricia O’Brien, a faculty member in Asian Studies at Georgetown University and in the Department of Pacific Affairs at Australian National University, and Douveri Henao, CEO and founder of a PNG-based geopolitical consulting firm, wrote in a June 2024 essay for The Diplomat magazine.
“The most comprehensive challenge we face … is [the PRC’s] coercive and increasingly aggressive effort to change the status quo of the Indo-Pacific region and the international system to align with its interests,” Siddharth Mohandas, then U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia, testified before the U.S. Congress in July 2023. The PRC “seeks to challenge U.S. alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific and leverage its growing capabilities — including its economic influence — to coerce its neighbors and threaten their interests.”
Blue Pacific nations range in size from 21-square-kilometer Nauru to PNG’s 462,000 square kilometers. They are part of the 18-member regional cooperative agency known as the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) that also includes Australia and New Zealand. The other members are Cook Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, French Polynesia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, New Caledonia, Niue, Palau, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.
Among Pacific Island countries, “climate change remains our greatest security threat,” according to the PIF’s Blue Pacific Plan. It spells out the countries’ strategy to seek a peaceful, safe and secure region that respects national sovereignty and offers people, communities and nations the opportunities to fulfill their potential. It also calls for Blue Pacific-coordinated responses to security challenges. That means, the strategy stated, addressing climate change and its current and future disaster impacts including extreme weather events, cyclones, drought, flooding, and sea level rise and ocean acidification. It also promotes coordinating humanitarian responses to disasters.
The U.S. enhanced ties with Blue Pacific nations in early 2022 with its first Indo-Pacific Strategy, which called for, among other things, expanding diplomatic missions, establishing a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) mission in Fiji, appointing an envoy to the PIF, bolstering resilience, supporting maritime security and boosting economic opportunities. In September 2023, the leaders of Blue Pacific nations gathered at a Pacific Island Countries-U.S. summit in Washington, D.C.

SENIOR CHIEF PETTY OFFICER CHARLY TAUTFEST/U.S. COAST GUARD
The engagements have ranged from sending the U.S. Naval Academy rugby teams to Fiji, Samoa and Tonga for exhibition matches and youth programs to a 20-year, $6.5 billion economic assistance package for the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau.
In PNG, the engagements include:
An April and May 2024 visit by a U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM) team to develop joint infrastructure to expedite disaster response, enhance security cooperation and improve the PNG Defence Force’s (PNGDF) capabilities.
The U.S.’s May 2024 announcement that it would spend up to $25 million on three projects at the PNGDF’s Lombrum Naval Base on the island of Los Negros: building a regional maritime training center and small-boat facility; and renovating a jetty. Australia also is collaborating in the base revitalization.
Most significantly, PNG and the U.S. signed a Defense Cooperation Agreement in May 2023 as well as a pact on countering transnational maritime threats including illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, drug trafficking, migrant smuggling, and illicit transport of weapons of mass destruction. Under the bilateral maritime law enforcement agreement, PNG and U.S. Coast Guard officers cooperate on maritime patrols to protect PNG’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), encompassing more than 2.4 million square kilometers.
“This is just not a conversation on military-to-military engagements,” Marape told reporters in July 2023. From PNG’s perspective, the agreements are a step toward economic independence and will boost “protection of our waters from illegal fishing and illegal forest transportations, protection of our economy from transnational crimes, keeping secure our borders, and [ensuring] we account for every visitor into our country and step up our own defense force,” Marape said.
Longtime security ties
Blue Pacific nations have security partnerships that date to World War II, when Solomon Islanders worked side by side with U.S. and Allied troops to build airfields; Papuans and New Guineans carried supplies for Australian Soldiers on the Kokoda trail, and the Fijian Infantry Regiment aided the New Zealand and U.S. forces at Bougainville. International attention to the region may have diminished after the Cold War, but global partners are renewing their focus on the Pacific Islands to enhance maritime security, protect resources and prevent IUU fishing.
“IUU fishing and related harmful fishing practices are among the greatest threat to ocean health and contribute to the collapse or decline of fisheries that are critical to the economic growth, food systems, and ecosystems of numerous Pacific Island nations,” the White House stated in advance of the September 2023 Pacific Islands summit. “These practices undermine the sustainability of fish stocks, circumvent conservation and management measures, and often go hand in hand with the use of forced labor and other illicit activities.”

Twelve Pacific Island countries have bilateral maritime law enforcement agreements with the U.S. Key for maritime security, the pacts are sometimes referred to as shipriders. A provision in many of the agreements allows law enforcement officers from one party to be placed on board vessels of the other party with authority to conduct fishing surveillance and certain law enforcement operations. The Cook Islands and the U.S. established the Indo-Pacific’s first shiprider effort in 2008. The agreements, through which the U.S. Coast Guard assists in enforcing host-country laws, are now a staple of USINDOPACOM’s Theater Security Cooperation initiative, which seeks to enhance regional stability and security.
The bilateral maritime law enforcement agreements are “very valuable,” Dr. Al Oehlers, a professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, told FORUM. “All these nations have extremely large oceanic exclusive economic zones so maintaining sovereignty over these EEZs is always a very big challenge. They’re all small nations. They’re all resource constrained.”
The bilateral agreements allow U.S. assets, notably Coast Guard vessels and crews, to assist Blue Pacific nations to protect their sovereign rights. Each nation benefits. The U.S. develops deeper relationships by working in conjunction with an individual country’s ministries of defense, justice and resource management, potentially smoothing the way for further engagements. The Blue Pacific nations, faced with policing expansive EEZs frequently poached by IUU fishing, benefit from the additional protection for their maritime resources. The PRC’s distant-water fleet of 4,600 vessels is the world’s largest, and Chinese fishing vessels often encroach on other nations’ EEZs, experts have said.
The Pacific Ocean is one of the most important assets that can sustain economic development. Allies such as the U.S. can promote maritime domain awareness and build partner capacity of Blue Pacific nations to increase development.
The U.S. is reinvigorating its commitment to the region.
“U.S. reengagement with the Pacific region has been aimed not just at creating new initiatives and assistance but also institutionalizing U.S. presence and commitment in ways that speak to continuity,” Charles Edel and Kathryn Paik of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, wrote in March 2024. Among the changes, the U.S. reopened its Solomon Islands embassy in February 2023.

In 2022, the Solomon Islands signed a secretive security agreement with the PRC, the first between Beijing and a Pacific country. The five-year pact allows Honiara to request PRC police and armed forces to maintain social order and provide humanitarian assistance. It’s an indication of the PRC’s objective to expand its presence in the Indo-Pacific. The most concerning aspect for the region is that the pact allows Beijing to establish a military presence within 2,000 kilometers of Australia.
Solomon Islands is one of three Pacific Island nations to switch its diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to the PRC since 2019, joining Kiribati the same year and Nauru in 2024. The reasons were financial. After Kiribati acted, the PRC said it would upgrade an airstrip and bridge on Kiribati’s remote island of Kanton. The actions by Nauru marked the third time it had flipped its diplomatic allegiance between Taiwan and the PRC since 2002.
In September 2023, just three months after the PNG-U.S. security agreement, the CCP offered Port Moresby assistance with training, equipment and surveillance technology for its police force. Instead, PNG signed a security agreement with Australia in December 2023 under which Canberra pledged $200 million to enhance PNG’s police force. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese later said his country was PNG’s “preferred security partner.”
Opaque economics
Financial ties to the CCP come with substantial risk. Analysts call it debt-trap diplomacy — predatory loans that erode sovereignty and aim to secure PRC access to natural resources, new markets or potential facilities for its military.
The CCP’s policing agreements in the Pacific are “opaque and deeply concerning” and Blue Pacific nations should be “careful and clear-eyed” about economic agreements with Beijing, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Kritenbrink told a U.S. Senate committee in March 2024. “China often makes many promises that remain unfulfilled, and that can have negative consequences.”
In Vanuatu, for instance, the May 2024 collapse of the national airline was linked to the country’s indebtedness to the PRC, the Australian Financial Review newspaper reported. The airline shut down as government officials made across-the-board cuts to meet loan repayments for PRC-financed infrastructure. At the time, the PRC was Vanuatu’s second-biggest financial benefactor, after Australia, providing $483 million in aid and loans, including $90 million for the South Pacific’s biggest wharf.
Allies and Partners such as Australia and the U.S. offer a different economic plan that aims to help Pacific Island enterprises grow. The U.S.’s Pacific Partnership Strategy includes $50 million to expand financial access for small and medium businesses, with an emphasis on climate resilience as well as women-owned enterprises. The U.S. also wants to encourage financing from the World Bank Group and the Asian Development Bank to spur investments to address climate change and other global challenges. And, in Kiribati, a U.S.-backed $29 million program promotes safe, accessible and inclusive employment opportunities, strengthens workers’ rights, and provides job training.
By contrast, PRC projects in the Blue Pacific include unfinished multistory buildings deteriorating in Fiji and PNG, and a convention center in Vanuatu that officials said is too expensive to maintain, the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank, reported in January 2023. The report noted that Tonga also struggled to repay PRC-backed loans. “These outcomes have reduced the appetite for new Chinese infrastructure lending in the Pacific,” the institute said.
Among the Blue Pacific nations pushing back against Beijing’s financing schemes is Samoa. In 1962, it became the first Pacific island nation to gain political independence. It formally changed its name in 1997 from Western Samoa.
In 2021, newly elected Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa canceled a $128 million Chinese-backed port development project, calling it excessive for a small nation that was already heavily indebted to the PRC.
“It’s very difficult to imagine that we would need the scale that’s being proposed under this particular project,” she told Reuters, “when there are more pressing projects that the government needs to give priority to.”
Blue Pacific nations will see opportunities for future growth via bilateral engagements with the U.S. and other partners that will allow the countries to balance their interests and protect their sovereignty. The 10th Pacific Islands Leaders meetings among Japan and the PIF nations in July 2024, for instance, brought an agreement for future consideration of investments and trade links, and new accords for greater cooperation on regional security.