The vast Pasifika, once a realm of distant empires, is now a central theater for 21st-century geopolitical competition. As great powers vie for strategic dominance, the small island states of the Pasifika are navigating increasingly complex waters through sophisticated multi-alignment strategies.
By engaging with multiple competing partners without exclusive alignment, Pasifika nations, preserve sovereignty while addressing existential threats like climate change.
Pasifika states must leverage both collective action through the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) and individual strategies, to maintain agency in the evolving regional order.
The collective force: Pacific Islands Forum as amplifier
The PIF serves as the primary vehicle for collective action, transforming individual voices into powerful regional consensus.
The Forum’s endorsement of the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pasifika Continent, established a comprehensive framework that emphasises Pasifika priorities rather than external agendas.
This collective approach was further demonstrated through the “Ocean of Peace” initiative, which seeks to establish the Pasifika as a zone guided by principles including peaceful dispute resolution and freedom from coercion.
By establishing these regional norms, Pasifika states, create frameworks that external powers must respect, making it more difficult for great powers to impose their will on individual states. However, the PIF faces challenges maintaining unity amid diversenational interests and external pressures.
The recent decision by Solomon Islands to bar all dialogue partners from the current 2025 Forum meeting, reflects ongoing tensions between collective solidarity and individual national preferences. Similarly, disagreements over
Taiwan’s status have periodically threatened Forum unity, illustrating the difficulties of maintaining coherence amid intense great power competition.
Individual navigation: Sovereign balancing acts
Solomon Islands exemplifies both opportunities and risks in multialignment. The 2022 security pact with China triggered significant regional backlash, demonstrating the dangers of perceived alignment with a single power. However, under Prime Minister Jeremiah Manele, the country has recalibrated its approach, strengthening relations with Australia while maintaining Chinese partnerships.
This careful balancing act aims to preserve regional relationships while resisting external pressure.
Fiji has positioned itself as a norm entrepreneur through initiatives like the “Ocean of Peace” concept. Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka has articulated a vision of Pasifika security that emphasises regional cooperation and the “Pacific Way” of consensus-building.
Fiji’s 2024 Foreign Policy White Paper, identified regional division as the most significant security threat, leading to advocacy for frameworks that manage rather than eliminate great power competition.
Vanuatu illustrates how domestic politics shape multi-alignment strategies. The country’s proposed security agreement with Australia, contributed to political instability, leading to snap elections in 2025.
This demonstrates how security partnerships have become contentious domestic political issues rather than merely technical foreign policy matters.
Challenges and Adaptive Strategies
Pasifika states face significant constraints in implementing multialignment strategies.
Structural power asymmetries create inherent limitations on agency, while political instability can disrupt consistent foreign policy implementation.
Limited institutional capacity makes it difficult to manage complex webs of international relationships simultaneously.
Despite these challenges, Pasifika nations have developed adaptive strategies;
- Diplomatic leverage: Using strategic geography and international forums to place climate change — their most pressing existential threat — at the center of regional discussions;
- Economic diversification: Soliciting competing infrastructure proposals from multiple partners to secure favorable terms and avoid over reliance; and
- Security pluralism: Developing diversified partnerships that provide capabilities without creating dependency, preferring “issue-based alignments” for different security challenges.
The Pasifika Way Forward
The multi-alignment strategies employed by Pasifika states represent a sophisticated response to complex geopolitical realities.
Rather than passive victims of great power competition, Pasifika nations have demonstrated remarkable agency in navigating between competing partners while advancing their own interests.
The “Pasifika Way” of consensus-building provides both model and foundation for these strategies, asserting the right to shape regional architecture rather than accepting frameworks imposed from outside.
The ultimate test for multi-alignment will be whether it can deliver tangible improvements in human security while preserving Pasifika sovereignty.
As Prime Minister Rabuka emphasised, peace requires not just security forces but “societies and nations built on foundations of harmony, stability, and freedom from want and fear.”
This comprehensive understanding underscores that multi-alignment is not merely geopolitical gamesmanship, but a necessary strategy for addressing existential threats while navigating great power competition.
The Pasifika experience offers lessons beyond the region about maintaining agency in an increasingly polarised world.
While challenges remain, Pasifika states continue refining approaches that turn geopolitical competition into opportunity rather than threat, demonstrating that even the smallest nations, can exercise meaningful sovereignty through strategic ingenuity and collective solidarity.
- RO NAULU MATAITINI is a member of the Great Council of Chiefs. He is a chief of Rewa Province whose paramount chief is the Marama Bale Na Roko Tui Dreketi, Ro Teimumu Kepa. The views expressed herein are his and not of this newspaper.
