Beijing is pressing Pacific Islands Forum hosts to keep Taipei’s envoys out of the annual summit in Palau, while leaders of some of the world’s least populous states gather under the shadow of outside powers trying to steer the room.
The meeting opened Monday in Koror, where the host country’s population was due to rise from 18,000 people to 20,000 as delegates from dozens of countries arrived. That’s the scale of the spectacle: a tiny island state absorbing a diplomatic pile-on from powers far larger than the people who actually live there.
Who Gets to Set the Terms
Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. said Sunday it would be "unfortunate" if Pacific countries fail to reach consensus on opposing China’s recent missile test launch during the annual regional leaders' meeting hosted in his country this week. He told reporters, "The Pacific is our home, not a theater for geopolitical competition," and added, "Let’s not use this as a place that we should be threatening or making people feel uncomfortable."
Those words land in a summit already shaped by pressure from Beijing, Washington, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand, all racing in recent years to shore up alliances among Pacific leaders. The Pacific Islands Forum has 18 member countries and territories, and some have populations in the low thousands or tens of thousands. Their geography has made them strategically important as global tensions rise, which is another way of saying the powerful keep treating the region like a board game.
The forum’s foreign ministers failed to reach consensus on a statement criticizing Beijing’s launch of a ballistic missile into the South Pacific Ocean in July. Most member states strongly opposed China’s actions, but the refusal of two to endorse a statement saying so meant none was issued. Oliver Nobetau, Pacific Islands program director at the Lowy Institute, said, "We see examples of this where that consensus-based model, which is referred to as the Pacific Way, can sometimes lead to a bit of paralysis in taking action." He also said, "At this point in time when Pacific Islands are facing a lot of acute security issues, decision-making is paramount for this one," and, "We’ll be looking to see if President Whipps can sort of steer the forum to take tangible action."
Who Pays for the Power Games
The costs of this rivalry don’t stay in the conference room. Among the issues vexing Pacific island nations are the effects of the latest El Nino weather chaos, which has brought droughts and floods across the region. The volatile weather threatens food security and access to clean water, already vulnerable in island nations dependent on imported goods and funded largely by foreign aid.
Fuel volatility from the Iran war has also prompted some Pacific countries experiencing severe economic shocks to declare national emergencies in a region overwhelmingly reliant on imported diesel and gasoline, arriving via a fragile supply chain. When the supply chain snaps, ordinary people eat the damage. When the weather turns, ordinary people drink the damage. The people making the decisions are nowhere near the droughts, floods, or emergency declarations.
Whipps suggested that wealthy countries seeking involvement in the region could open their wallets to finance the widespread establishment of solar power capabilities across the region. He asked, "What are they doing together with us to partner to get a 100% renewable Pacific?"
That’s the closest thing in the article to a practical alternative: not another summit script, but money for solar power capabilities across the region. Whether the rich will actually fund it is another matter entirely.
The Summit’s Other Bosses
Palau is one of just 12 countries worldwide to recognize Taiwan, incurring the ire of Beijing, which sees Taiwan as part of its territory. It also sits at the nexus of other great power struggles. Located in the western Pacific Ocean, next to the Philippines, Palau draws from the Asian tourism market and has closer ties to the United States than much of the forum’s members.
A Compact of Free Association allows defense and security access for the U.S. in Palau’s territory in exchange for tens of millions of dollars in U.S. funding each year. That arrangement puts a price tag on access and a flag on dependence. The summit’s leaders are now trying once more to draw up a structure governing how other countries are permitted involvement in its meetings.
Countries approved to engage in the Pacific Islands Forum, including the United States and China, are known as dialogue partners, while Taiwan holds separate status as a development partner. Beijing has ramped up pressure on forum hosts to exclude Taipei’s envoys from the annual summit, a dispute that grew so fractious ahead of the 2025 event in Solomon Islands that all countries except member nations were entirely barred from attending.
Palau’s warm diplomatic relations with Taipei have this year drawn the attendance of Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung and provoked a warning from Beijing that China would oppose Taiwanese officials’ participation. The whole setup reads like managed rivalry, with the region forced to absorb the fallout.
That pressure has already produced absences and disruption. Early arrivals over the weekend were roiled by the news that one leader, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale — a newly elected leader more friendly to Australia than the more Beijing-aligned leader before him — had returned home just hours after arriving because an opponent had mounted a leadership challenge. It wasn’t immediately clear how much his forced departure, and the absence of others such as Kiribati’s President Taneti Maamau, whose country’s China ties have warmed during his tenure, could be attributed to unease about the summit’s geopolitics.
New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters said, "You’d be defying gravity and logic if you said it wasn’t a big problem," referring to bids for foreign interference in the event. He added that the leaders’ non-attendances were "seriously disappointing" and did not help, but said, "But in the main the delegations are of the highest standard. So let’s see how we go."
The delegations may be polished. The pressure isn’t. The Pacific keeps getting treated as territory to be managed, courted, funded, and contested by powers with far more reach than the island states they’re crowding into the same room.