As Prime Minister Albanese heads to Honiara for the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders meeting this week he won’t find one big happy family.

Solomon Islands Prime Minister, Jeremiah Manele, may well have undermined efforts by the Forum leaders to manage increasing geopolitical pressures by imposing what was essentially a unilateral decision on the region’s most important political organisation.  

In order to avoid meeting his obligations as an international host, Manele ducked the issue of issuing visas for the Taiwanese delegation to participate in an important side bar event by deferring the post-Forum Dialogue Partners meeting. 

All 21 current dialogue partners including China, Taiwan, major Pacific littoral powers and European donors were excluded by Manele’s opt out decision.  

The controversial move has been papered over by begrudging acceptance by his regional counterparts. But the kowtow to Beijing by the most China-affiliated member of the regional family is particularly significant for this year’s Forum. 

The concession to China is more than symbolic as the Forum is considering two key agenda items intended give the region greater agency in an increasingly uncertain international environment.  It is precisely the risky geopolitical pressures that Fiji’s Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka hoped to minimise with his November 2023 proposal to the Forum make the Pacific an “Ocean of Peace”. 

Working through the details for putting muscle on the bones of the concept have occupied the Forum’s internal consultative processes for nearly 18 months with it confirmed by the leaders this week as their most important policy decision.  Achieving the aims of the Ocean of Peace to manage strategic competition and resolve differences peacefully may depend on the institutional reform agenda item intended to strengthen trust in the robustness of regional institutions to deliver the Ocean of Peace.

The Forum’s second key agenda item is to accept the recommendations of a report by an eminent persons’ panel designed to put the Forum leaders more firmly in control of a streamlined regional system.  

The importance of these two new items on the Leaders agenda is what have made Manele’s action and the reaction, both internally and extra-regionally, a potential inflection point for Pacific regionalism. 

They have underscored the depth of the practical difficulties involved in implementing the sweeping aspirations embodied in the Ocean of Peace concept.  

Taiwan’s three Forum allies resisted any notion that Taipei could excluded at the whim of a single member state after more than three of decades active and productive participation in the post-Forum Dialogues. 

A threat to boycott the Honiara Forum if Taiwan was excluded could not be treated as an empty gesture. 

A perceived slight against a Micronesian member in 2021resulted in all the Micronesian members exiting the Forum temporarily.   Their return was not assured until compromises were made to procedures and to recognition of subregional interests.

The Micronesian walk-out revealed an inherent fragility in the Forum that has beset the organisation since its establishment in 1971. As an organisation founded on decolonisation, the tension between protecting national sovereignty and projecting strength through collective action has been a factor in Forum decision-making.  

Nevertheless, the Forum has successfully made progressively more expansive claims to become a rule maker for the region within a broadly supportive international system.  The Forum, in collaboration with other regional agencies, has extended the ambit of regional interests due to the predictability of operating within this larger rules-based order. 

China’s increasing challenges to the international rules-based order and its exertion of influence means prioritising Beijing’s interests over Pacific Island interests, including on issues like climate change, resource protection and economic integration. 

And China’s pursuit of a security relationship in and through the Pacific region under President Xi Jin Ping has brought the regional system under pressures not seen since the end of the nineteenth century when the federation of Polynesian monarchs failed to stop European encroachment. 

China egregiously intervened in last year’s Forum Leaders Meeting in Tonga pressuring a redrafting of the official communicate to write Taiwan out. 

This year China has physically eliminated a Taiwanese presence by forcing an equality between its individual interests with those of the 20 other participants in the Dialogue process. (Next year the Forum leaders meeting will be in Palau and they recognise Taiwan.)

The challenge the Forum leaders face in making their region an Ocean of Peace has been made even more difficult by the region’s demonstrated weakness even before they have debated its implementation. 

Dr Richard Herr is an expert on Pacific Island affairs at the University of Tasmania and he has served as a consultant to many Pacific regional organisations. Dr Anthony Bergin is a senior fellow at Strategic Analysis Australia and an expert associate at the National Security College.