1 October 2026
The 11th South Pacific Defence
Ministers’ Meeting (SPDMM) was held in Fiji from September
22 to 24. It included representatives of the regional
imperialist powers Australia, New Zealand and France,
alongside Chile, Fiji, Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Tonga.
They were joined by observers from Japan, the United Kingdom
and the United States. Desna Solofa, Acting Secretary
General of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) also
attended.
The SPDMM describes itself as “the premier
defence ministerial dialogue in the South Pacific, enhancing
cooperation and driving Pacific-led responses to shared
regional security challenges.” Behind token statements
about the need for “joint responses” to climate
disasters, humanitarian emergencies and transnational crime,
the organisation’s real agenda is strengthening the web of
imperialist alliances preparing for a US-led war against
China.
Last year’s SPDMM in Chile issued a
communiqué calling for greater “operational
collaboration” between the region’s militaries to face
“new trends in security challenges” and to promote “a
secure and resilient region”—that is, against
China.
The SPDMM 2026 communiqué expressed “grave
concern” over the July ballistic missile test conducted by
China in the Pacific, using stronger language than adopted
at the divided PIF leaders’ summit in Palau this month. It
noted that it was the second test in the region by China
within two years, while saying nothing about the many
intercontinental ballistic missile tests by the United
States around the Marshall Islands, most recently on May 20.
The ministers hypocritically said the Chinese test “risked
undermining” peace and “national sovereignty.”
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A
key decision at the 2025 SPDMM was to transform the Pacific
Response Group (PRG), a regional military disaster response
group formed in 2004 ostensibly to develop a more
coordinated response to natural crises, into a taskforce
that could conduct “stabilisation operations” for
Pacific nations to deal with civil unrest.
The
imperialist powers anticipate that soaring social inequality
and economic breakdown—intensified by the US-Israeli war
against Iran—will produce social explosions across the
Pacific. In 2024, riots erupted in PNG over poverty, and
France deployed troops to suppress an uprising by Kanak
youth in New Caledonia.
The aim is to create a mobile
military force, alongside the Australian-led Pacific
Policing Initiative, that can intervene rapidly anywhere in
the region. Expanding the remit of the PRG to deal with
civil unrest topped the agenda at this year’s
SPDMM.
In April, the Joint Heads of Pacific Security
(JHOPS)—including military leaders from Australia, NZ and
most Pacific island countries—endorsed a push for a
“Regional Operations Deployment Framework Treaty” to
provide a “flexible and responsive mechanism” for
military deployments.
The ministers’ group signalled
they will not rush to expand the remit of the PRG. The
caution was no doubt in response to the recent failure of
Canberra and Wellington to impose a unified statement by the
Pacific Foreign Ministers meeting, and then the PIF summit,
to condemn China’s missile test. A number of Pacific
leaders with close ties to China were absent from the
summit.
At the PIF summit in Palau, the leaders did
not agree to kickstart negotiations on the treaty called for
by the JHOPS group, signalling that they wanted to move more
slowly on the issue.
Many Pacific countries, including
Naoero (formally Nauru), the Solomon Islands and Kiribati,
do not want to alienate Beijing as it provides significant
development aid and loans. Increasingly, however, they face
demands from Washington, backed by Australia and New
Zealand, for complete and unwavering alignment with their
war plans.
The SPDMM ministers declared last week they
had decided on a “phased approach” to expanding the
PRG’s mandate, “recognising the importance of first
consolidating and enhancing the PRG’s humanitarian
assistance and disaster relief [HADR] capabilities” before
working to “include stabilisation operations.”
The
PRG could also be deployed in destabilisation and regime
change operations against governments that are perceived to
be too close to China.
Australian Defence Force chief,
Admiral Mark Hammond, who was at the meeting alongside
Assistant Defence Minister Peter Khalil, told the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that the group “must pay
due respect to sovereign constitutional processes” and
there had to be an “absolute consensus of an overlap with
respect to national interest.”
But Hammond
emphasised there was “rock-solid” support for the PRG at
a “macro level” because it embodied the idea of
“Pacific-led security.” The PRG, he declared, will
“help us cut through bureaucracy and to interpret their
national interest into individual language that enables us
to get on, deliver and support.”
“Pacific-led”
security is fraudulently deployed by Canberra and Wellington
to embed their own neo-colonial domination over the region,
which they regard as their own “backyard,” and counter
any Chinese influence. The 2000 Australian Defence White
Paper enunciated an explicit interventionist doctrine laying
the basis for military interventions to “foster the
stability, integrity and cohesion of our immediate
neighbourhood.”
One thorny issue concerns the legal
immunity necessary for military personnel deployed to other
countries in the region. According to JHOPS, Pacific
sovereignty would purportedly be safeguarded by the
principle that deployments “would only be triggered by a
formal request for assistance by a member.”
Such
“requests” are however easily manufactured in the heat
of a crisis, particularly given the level of political and
military interference across the Pacific from Washington,
Canberra and Wellington.
There is no shortage of
precedents for military interventions to enforce colonial
domination, including the French military-police crackdown
used to suppress the New Caledonia uprising. Australia and
New Zealand have repeatedly dispatched troops to Pacific
nations under the banners of “peacekeeping” and
“restoring order”—including deployments to East Timor,
Tonga and the Solomon Islands. The latter country was
effectively occupied by Australia and NZ from 2003 to
2017.
The fresh military preparations take place
against a backdrop of escalating social crises in every
Pacific nation, involving deepening poverty, inequality and
health disasters directly connected to the global capitalist
crisis. The US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran,
combined with the Trump administration’s shutdown of the
USAID program and withdrawal from the World Health
Organisation (WHO), have severely impacted dependent Pacific
nations.
According to the WHO, PNG now has the
fastest-growing HIV epidemic in the Asia-Pacific region,
followed by Fiji. The Fiji government this month formally
declared a national HIV emergency. Health Minister Dr.
Atonio Lalabalavu confirmed that estimates indicated that
one in every 60 adults in Fiji is living with HIV, connected
with an epidemic of widespread drug use. Transmission
between mothers and babies is on the rise, with 18 babies
dying in the past year.
Major struggles will
inevitably erupt as the imperialist powers and the local
ruling elites turn to increasingly authoritarian measures to
impose the full burden of the economic and social crisis.
Working people in Australia, New Zealand and the wider
Pacific must oppose the escalating neocolonial militarist
operations and fight for the international unity of the
working class across the
Asia-Pacific.
