Opinion | The Solomon Islands are not treated as an equal
By Tom Fowdy
Yesterday China's foreign ministry confirmed the signing of a bilateral security deal with the Pacific Archipelago nation of the Solomon Islands. The deal has been extremely controversial to Australia and the United States, who see it as China gaining a foothold on the country towards a potential military or naval base. This provoked an outrage in the Australian media, including producing several articles geared towards calling for open regime change, or even war. One of them penned by the founder of "The Diplomat" magazine, David Llewellyn-Smith, in an outlet called "MacroBusiness" is simply titled "Bomb Honiara" and calls for the immediate removal of the islands' government and "political destabilization".
As media opposition has been vocal, the US and Canberra alike have sent scores of officials to the country in the bid to try and pressure them into changing course, including yesterday Biden's "Asia Czar" Kurt Campbell, a well-known advocate of anti-stratagem in the "Indo-Pacific". However, and very much predictably, none of these "diplomatic" overtures have succeeded in getting the island nation to change its course and abandon the deal, and neither of course has its critics stopped to reason why, opting instead for the typical promulgation of paranoia, hysteria and yellow peril vitriol which has dominated Australia in recent years.
If it wasn't clear already: Australia (and by extension the US) doesn't treat the Solomon Islands as an equal partner, and believes it holds a permanent belonging in their own sphere of influence. As a former British colony which still bares the Crown, the Solomon Islands is treated as akin to being "the property" of Australia, who portrays itself as a sincere guardian of its "true interests" so to speak, of which the influence of China is deemed to be a "threat" to. It's very much an "Anglosphere" mode of thinking. The UK itself espoused a similar attitude towards countries in the Caribbean who have also fostered closer ties with China in recent years, with the country's right-wing press widely blaming Beijing for Barbados' decision to scrap the monarchy.
Perceiving the world through such exceptionalist tinted glasses, it becomes untenable for these countries to recognize or understand why their influence might in some cases be "rejected" and why they do not consent to hegemony over them. With all Anglosphere countries having been derived from British Imperialism, of which was through its military triumphs always on the "right side of history" there is a widespread denial in such countries that the legacy of colonialism was in fact a bad thing, which has been superseded by a broader narrative and set of assumptions that it was a "force for good". Therefore, what is understood as "hegemony" by the countries who have been subjected to it, is otherwise misleadingly construed as "acting in their best interests" against whatever challenger state they anoint as the villain, in this case, China.
In reality, the Solomon Islands has a great deal to gain in strengthening its relationship with Beijing, and the hysterical reaction from Washington and Canberra only serves to demonstrate why. The islands is not becoming an "ally" of China in the military sense as falsely depicted, but rather the current government of the islands recognizes that in the midst of such conflicting geopolitical pressures, China becomes a guarantor and "bargaining chip" which allows it to better assert its own national sovereignty and hand, as a series of tiny islands, against these hegemonic Anglophone states who have traditionally dominated it. In other words, if the US and Australia want to preserve "their influence" in the islands, they better pay up. It allows them to extract aid, investments and other concessions, whilst guess what? Getting of course the same from China too. "Win-Win" as Beijing calls it.
Given this, one cannot truly blame the Solomon Islands for the path it has taken. It faced the options of either staying under Australian hegemony forever and being taken for granted, treated as an inferior child, or to place itself at the forefront of a geopolitical contest for the allegiance of the pacific and maximize its options on all sides. Yet otherwise, such a saga demonstrates the inherent cultural and political elitism saturated the heart of Australian politicians, topped off by the rampant paranoia and unhinged depiction of China. This itself ironically, is a precursor to precisely why events have taken this course.
The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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