Urgency, Agency, and Great Power Competition in Small Island Countries

• In Event: The Foreign Policies of Small States

Abstract

In April 2022, government leaders in Washington DC had one of the periodic hard lessons in distant geography that characterizes US foreign policy: China was signing a security pact with the Solomon Islands. The next month, Samoa signed a diplomatic pact with China, as Beijing then sought to create an agreement with ten Pacific island countries. The US and its allies Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, suddenly focused their attention on the Pacific and stepped up efforts in what appears to be yet another area of great power competition. Yet observers seem divided on who has the advantage: in 2022 Damien Cave of the New York Times declared “China is Miles Ahead in a Pacific Race for Influence,” yet a year later Derek Grossman wrote in Foreign Policy “America is Winning Against China in Oceania.” Perhaps if observers considered the island nations not as bets to be handicapped but as international actors, their analyses might have greater insight.
The small island developing states (SIDS) were recognized as a grouping in 1992, sharing (mostly) characteristics of small populations and thus small markets, limited resources and thus small export potential, low per capita income, remoteness, high communications and infrastructure costs, and most of all, environmental vulnerability. Many of these islands are atolls, low-lying coral structures. The highest point on the Maldives is 5 meters above sea level. Little wonder that the Maldivian cabinet staged a mock meeting in scuba gear in 2009 to make the point about the need to address rising sea levels due to climate change. For much of the world, global climate change is a serious long-term problem. For the SIDS, it is an urgent existential problem, and many of these governments fear that their disappearance might go unnoticed.
Yet the small island countries of the world do have agency. Officially, there are 39 of them, and each has a vote in the United Nations General Assembly, one fifth of the total. For China, these were some of the last states to recognize Taiwan instead of the PRC, and of the last 13 states world wide to recognize Taiwan, 9 are SIDS. Each switch has been rewarded with foreign aid, São Tomé and Príncipe switched from Beijing to Taipei in 1997 and back again in 2016. Some such as St. Lucia, have switched multiple times, and some very briefly: Papua New Guinea switched for 16 days in 1999, and Vanuatu for a week in 2004. In the Indian Ocean, the Maldives have sought to play India and China off of each other.
Even those island countries which are not fully independent still have agency: direct communication with another larger and more powerful sponsor. American Samoa and Guam are American territories, Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands and Palau have “Compacts of Free Association” agreements with the United States. The Cook Islands and Niue are self-governing New Zealand territories, France has New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Réunion, and Mayotte, the British and Dutch have several others with a variety of dependent relationships.
SIDS may not have much land, but many of them do have enormous marine areas in the form of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) and the Pacific and Indian Ocean SIDS have control over some of the richest tuna-fishing areas. In the Pacific, these countries have cooperated through the Nauru Agreement and the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, seeking to make one of the regions’ main exports sustainable. The challenge is to monitor their huge EEZs against illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing with miniscule marine enforcement resources. Some islands have great tourism potential, and several such as the Maldives, Bahamas, Seychelles and Fiji have well-developed sectors.
This paper will explore the interaction of these small island states with great powers (including major regional powers such as Australia, New Zealand, and France) through quantitative and qualitative measures: bilateral trade percentages (the ranking of top export and import destinations), foreign aid, foreign direct investment, military arms sales and security programs, foreign leadership visits to capitals and regional organizations’ meetings, frequency count of mentions in major media outlets. Qualitative assessment will use analysis of leadership speeches, paying particular attention to great powers’ focus on sea level rise and associated problems of global climate change, frequency of media mentions of individual SIDS and collective terms. The primary question is not “who is winning” between the US and China, but rather, who – big and small – is influencing whom and on which agendas: strategic, economic, and environmental? What mechanisms appear to have the most effect?

Author

• Steven F. Jackson, Wilson Center