Security Without Consent: Pacific Island States and the Architecture They Were Never Asked to Design

The Pacific Islands Forum's 2018 Boe Declaration on Regional Security was a deliberate act of reclamation: fourteen independent Pacific Island states asserting, collectively, that climate change — not military competition between external powers — was "the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific." The declaration did not deny that other security threats existed. It insisted on Pacific peoples' right to define their own security hierarchy. Four years later, as the AUKUS announcement restructured the strategic architecture of the region without consultation, as China signed a security agreement with the Solomon Islands government of Manasseh Sogavare, and as the Hormuz crisis of April 2026 stretched US naval attention to its operational limits, the Boe Declaration's assertion of Pacific-led security looks less like aspiration and more like a warning that went unheeded.

This is the central paradox of Pacific security in the mid-2020s: the region is more intensely securitised than at any point since the Cold War, and Pacific Island peoples have less influence over the terms of that securitisation than they did a generation ago. The competition between great powers — the United States and its AUKUS partners on one side, China on the other — has effectively converted Pacific Island sovereignty into a prize to be contested rather than a principle to be respected. Pacific leaders have been placed in a position that Teresia Teaiwa's framework of "militarism and commodification" describes with precision: their territories, their exclusive economic zones, and their diplomatic votes are valuable to external actors in ways that have nothing to do with Pacific peoples' own development priorities.

What the AUKUS Announcement Did Not Include

The AUKUS agreement, announced in September 2021, was a bilateral-plus-one arrangement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The fourteen members of the Pacific Islands Forum were not consulted before the announcement. The announcement was not preceded by a Pacific Islands Forum extraordinary summit, or even an informal leaders' dialogue. Pacific Island leaders — including those of Fiji, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Samoa, Tonga, Kiribati, and the Cook Islands — learned about the most significant restructuring of regional security architecture in three decades from the same press conferences that the rest of the world did.

The subsequent political consequences were predictable to anyone who had read Greg Fry's scholarship on Pacific regionalism carefully. Fry has argued consistently that durable Pacific security requires not just consultation but genuine co-design — that arrangements imposed from outside, even when technically in Pacific interests, corrode the legitimacy of the multilateral institutions through which Pacific peoples exercise collective influence. The AUKUS announcement accelerated a dynamic in which China could credibly present itself to Pacific Island governments as a bilateral partner that at least offered a negotiated agreement, in contrast to an Anglosphere that announced its strategic intentions and expected alignment as a matter of course.

The Solomon Islands security agreement with China, signed in April 2022, was the direct consequence. Sogavare's government had spent months signalling its frustration with Australian security policy — including the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, which many in Honiara experienced as a form of security paternalism. The China agreement offered something the AUKUS framework had not: the formal acknowledgement that Solomon Islands was a party to the arrangement, not a recipient of it. The substance of the Chinese offer was debatable; its form was not.

China's Pacific Expansion and the Limits of Alliance Thinking

The subsequent two years saw intensified Chinese diplomatic and development activity across the Pacific. Police cooperation agreements were sought with multiple Pacific Island states. Infrastructure financing was offered under Belt and Road Initiative frameworks. Fishing access agreements were expanded. The United States and Australia responded with a counter-mobilisation — the Partners in the Blue Pacific initiative, increased development financing through the Australian Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme, and accelerated infrastructure commitments.

Tarcisius Kabutaulaka, the Solomon Islands political scientist at the University of Hawaiʻi, has argued that framing this competition as a binary choice between alignment with the United States-Australia axis and alignment with China fundamentally misreads Pacific political culture. Pacific Island governments have historically practised what Kabutaulaka calls "multiple bilateralism" — maintaining relations with competing external powers as a means of extracting development resources without sacrificing sovereignty. The problem in the current period is that the intensity of the great-power competition has made multiple bilateralism harder to sustain: both sides are demanding clearer alignment as the price of their engagement.

This demand for alignment is, in Stiglitz's framework, a form of structural coercion that operates through economic conditionality rather than direct political pressure. Development financing, labour mobility schemes, security guarantees, and infrastructure investment are not politically neutral transfers. They come with the expectation — sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit — of diplomatic alignment, vote behaviour at the United Nations, and access permissions for military assets. Pacific Island states that accept this conditionality on either side sacrifice a portion of the sovereignty that the Boe Declaration was designed to protect.

The Sea of Islands in a World of Great-Power Competition

Epeli Hauʻofa's foundational essay "Our Sea of Islands," published in 1994, proposed a reframing of Oceania that has never been more urgently needed than in 2026. Hauʻofa argued against the colonial cartography that depicted Pacific Island states as "tiny islands in a far sea" — small, resource-poor, dependent, peripheral. In its place he proposed Oceania as a sea of islands: a vast, interconnected maritime world whose peoples had navigated, traded, and governed across enormous distances for millennia before European contact. The Pacific was not a peripheral space bounded by its islands; it was a central human world constituted by its ocean.

The great-power competition of the 2020s has re-imposed the colonial cartography. Pacific Island states appear in strategic documents primarily as geographic objects — forward basing locations, exclusive economic zone access points, diplomatic votes at multilateral bodies — rather than as sovereign actors with their own security priorities. The AUKUS submarine pathway traverses Pacific waters; no Pacific Island state was asked whether it consented to nuclear-powered vessels operating in its exclusive economic zone. China's security agreement with Solomon Islands was negotiated bilaterally; no Pacific Islands Forum process validated it.

The Boe Declaration's assertion of climate change as the primary security threat is not a naive claim about the relative importance of military competition. It is a sophisticated insistence that Pacific peoples have the right to define the terms of their own security analysis. That right is being eroded by an architecture that — across the spectrum from AUKUS to Chinese security agreements — is designed to serve the strategic interests of external powers and consults Pacific peoples only as an afterthought.

What a Pacific-Led Architecture Would Actually Require

A security architecture that takes Pacific sovereignty seriously would begin not with submarine pathways or bilateral police cooperation agreements, but with the institutional strengthening of the Pacific Islands Forum itself — including adequate, predictable financing for the secretariat, genuine decision-making power over regional security frameworks, and binding commitments from external partners to consult before announcing arrangements that affect Pacific waters, airspace, and exclusive economic zones.

It would treat climate displacement — the forced relocation of communities in Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, and low-lying coastal areas of Fiji and PNG — as the primary security threat that Pacific governments have consistently identified it as, rather than a development footnote appended to military strategy documents. It would fund adaptation at scales commensurate with the emissions that Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom have produced — a reparative commitment that Greg Fry's "Pacific way" framework identifies as the logical conclusion of the colonial responsibility analysis.

And it would recognise, in Hauʻofa's terms, that Oceania is not a strategic theatre. It is a home.

Monexus writes this as Pacific peoples' story, because the strategic-competition coverage never does.