The Chinese caused some alarm this week as they conducted barely announced ‘live fire’ exercises between the east coast of Australia and the west Coast of Aotearoa/New Zealand. These exercises, conducted by three heavily armed Chinese warships, took place less than a week after the Cook Islands, which have a deeply intertwined reciprocal international policy with Aotearoa, unilaterally signed trade agreements with China without consulting Aotearoa’s government. The Cooks are the second Island nation to sign worrying unilateral agreements with China in the last two years, although the Solomon Islands went further by also signing a military agreement, allowing Chinese security forces to build a base on their Islands.
China has shown increasing interest in the South Pacific in the last few years which is causing deep concern amongst many of the Pacific nations, including Australia and Aotearoa, which have, until now, been the nations ‘charged’ with protecting the smaller nations in the region, as well as usually being the island nations’ principal trading partners. This relationship is clearly changing, both quickly and significantly, giving China a foothold in the South Pacific it has sought for some time and previously been unable to secure.
Global media, while reporting on the exercises of the Chinese warships between the two ‘guardians’ of the region, have consistently failed to make one extremely important observation: there is another security partner who is supposed to help the other two guardians protect the region, a partner who has enough might and firepower to do what the much more limited forces of the other two cannot adequately do on their own. This partner is the USA, and this partnership (ANZUS) has been in place since just after the end of World War Two (1951). While the global news understandably concentrates on the way Trump’s America is breaking its alliance with the EU through both tariffs and its decreasing military support for the Ukraine in particular and the EU in general, possibly handing Europe over to a ravening and increasingly empowered Russia, no one is noticing that the US has quietly abandoned its South Pacific allies. This means that it is just as likely that American abandonment of the South Pacific will, if the rapidity of Chinese engagement, both diplomatic and military, is anything to go by, hand that region to the Chinese.
We are seeing, in the withdrawal of America in its current, supposedly ‘America first’ policy, a deliberate carving up of the world. Trump loves his autocratic friends, and while there is some posturing of late about Russia falling into line on the Ukraine, we all know it is only that: posturing. Ultimately, Trump will hand the Ukraine, and much of Europe if possible, to his best buddy, Putin. But while Trump is openly handing the Ukraine, and subsequently quite possibly big chunks of Northern and Eastern Europe to Putin, he also has a gift for his Secret Santa buddy, Xi. While threatening China with increasing tariffs, quietly Trump is handing the South Pacific to Xi , while the US, not quite so ‘America first’ as stated, takes the spoils of the Americas: Canada, Panama, eventually Mexico and, of course, Greenland, so close to North America that it clearly should be part of North America, not far away Europe.
Too few people are paying attention to this partitioning of the West into the orbits of the three large remaining powers. The rest of the world, the global south, is chump change and, increasingly, a liability because it is the global south suffering first, and most, from the depredations of climate change. The prize is the much less affected, and still very wealthy, West, a West that, without the protection of the US military, is frighteningly vulnerable. And quietly, cleverly, behind the scenes in many ways, the world’s three leading autocratic rulers are already dividing the spoils while everyone is understandably distracted by the Ukraine, by Gaza, by Trump’s tariff threats, and few are taking even those threats seriously enough. Meanwhile, under the table, the free world is being divided up to become subservient to and subsumed by whichever of the three autocrats wants it. Unless all of the West starts paying very serious attention and stands together against this aggression, in 20 years time there will be little left, if anything, of the free world to salvage.
(27 February, 2025)
Thanks for this