Features | Diplomacy | Oceania

How Great Power Rivalry Is Fracturing the Pacific Islands Forum

Absences from this year’s Leaders’ Meeting are raising questions about the group’s solidarity amid growing China-U.S. competition.

The Smaller Island States (SIS) Leaders Meeting kicks off the 55th Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting week in Palau, Aug. 31, 2026.

The 55th Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) Leaders’ Meeting opened on August 31 under a banner of unity, but it can’t escape the reality that outside powers are competing for influence in the Pacific. The question now facing the PIF is whether the forum’s consensus model, once a safeguard for small-state sovereignty, has become the very mechanism through which that influence reshapes regional outcomes.

The official theme of this year’s PIF Leaders’ Meeting, held in Palau, is B.E.L.A.U., or Building Economies, Life, Action, Unity, an acronym that doubles as a tribute to the host nation’s indigenous name. It was meant to signal collective resolve. Instead, the gathering has been defined by conspicuous absences and blocked consensus. Given the return of Taiwan as a development partner after last year’s exclusion, some see this year’s PIF as proof of Beijing’s growing capacity to paralyze the region’s most important multilateral institution from within.

At least five Pacific leaders chose not to attend. The leaders of Kiribati, Samoa, and Vanuatu dispatched deputies, while Fiji’s Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka stayed home to manage domestic affairs. The most dramatic absence was that of Solomon Islands’ Prime Minister Matthew Wale, who landed in Palau only to leave hours later after a no-confidence motion was filed against him back in Honiara. Wale had served as prime minister for barely three months and as outgoing PIF chair, was meant to hand the gavel to Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr. Instead, he left Foreign Minister Rick Hou to represent his country at the summit.

Kiribati’s case is particularly revealing. President Taneti Maamau dispatched not a cabinet minister but David Teaabo, his director of foreign service and a former ambassador to China. In an organization where decisions require consensus at the level of heads of state, sending a lower-ranking delegate who cannot commit to communique language with full authority is itself a political statement.

Kiribati’s posture becomes clearer against the backdrop of the missile crisis that preceded the summit. On July 6, China conducted a submarine-launched ballistic missile test in the Pacific, firing what Taiwan identified as a JL-2 from the South China Sea. The missile, carrying a dummy warhead, transited the exclusive economic zones of the Federated States of Micronesia, Naoero (formerly Nauru), and Kiribati before landing near Tuvalu’s maritime boundary. Beijing provided only a few hours’ notice to the affected Pacific Island nations.

The reaction was swift – at least from those countries that did respond. Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister James Marape invoked the region’s traumatic history of nuclear testing, insisting that Pacific nations “do not want history repeated.” Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the test “provocative” and “destabilizing.” Yet when Pacific foreign ministers gathered in Fiji in early August, Kiribati and Naoero blocked the consensus needed to issue a joint condemnation.

The PIF has historically operated on the principle of unanimity, a practice rooted in what Pacific leaders call the “Pacific Way,” designed to ensure that no island nation, however small, could be overruled by its larger neighbors. But the model assumed that external pressures would remain at the margins of PIF deliberations. When a member state with deep ties to the power responsible for a security event deploys its consensus rights to shield that power from collective criticism, the model risks becoming a means of undermining collective action.

New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Winston Peters made the frustration explicit, noting that two countries “were seeking to use the need for consensus as a veto provision.” Peters said that he had “made it very clear that we didn’t think outsiders should be telling insiders” what positions to take.

Kiribati’s alignment with Beijing extends beyond the blocking of a PIF statement. In late August, its parliament passed the first reading of a constitutional amendment that would restrict diplomatic recognition to states holding U.N. membership or permanent observer status, effectively........

© The Diplomat