Why China's Security Pact with the Solomon Islands Threatens Australia

Recent news about the?Solomon Islands’ new security agreement with China?sent Americans scrambling for their atlases. Not so in Australia, which has been watching this issue closely for years and sees this issue as?potentially existential. To understand why harkens back to World War II.

When I was the U.S. defense attache in Canberra, around this time of year I found myself giving speeches and laying wreaths at the annual?Battle of the Coral Sea events. To be honest, I had to get a lot smarter on the Coral Sea, as I hadn’t previously assigned as much importance to it as to other Pacific naval battles–Pearl Harbor and Midway, for example. But for the Aussies, who had just seen their primary security partners (the British) surrender in Singapore, the fact that the Yanks showed up and stopped the Japanese fleet before it reached Australian shores meant everything, and we became their new best “mates”.

Thus do the Aussies make it a point to remember Coral Sea, as well as the fact that Imperial Japan sought to cut their sea line of communication to the US by taking the islands that lay along it. That’s why?rumors of a Chinese base in Vanuatu?four years back — barely noted in the U.S. — constituted a five-alarm fire for Australia.

Since that time, both the U.S. and Australia have increased their attention to the South Pacific islands, though in very different ways. The U.S. has largely concentrated its efforts on the?Compact States, with which we have our own security agreements, while letting Australia take the lead for those places closer to its shores. This was for two very simple reasons: (1.) we can’t be everywhere (we don’t even have an Embassy in the Solomons at present), and (2.) Australia just knows these places better.

The basic problem, simply put, is that Beijing practices a corrupt form of diplomacy called “elite capture“, which in its simplest form is the willingness to pay bribes to a country’s decision-makers, a phenomenon last reported in then Solomons when the?government was enticed to switch diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China?in 2019. In fact, when 60 Minutes Australia sent a camera crew to Honiara that same year, they found leaders willing to talk on camera about the Chinese?bribery attempts?they’d personally experienced. Prime Minister Sogavare knows his people aren’t exactly crazy about relations with China, but Beijing knows that people like money, so …

Australia isn’t done, and may yet avert a full Chinese military base (and it's not clear China wants or needs one -- mere access may be sufficient). Just last year Canberra provided the Solomons with?new patrol boats under a?successful program?they’ve run for three decades with nearby island nations. Australia retains substantial influence and leverage.

The book on China's military encroachment into Oceania is far from written, but the opening chapters have been ominous.