Pacific Turns Into a Strategic Frontline as Australia and US Step Up Maritime Security Spending
NADI, Fiji, September 28 — The Pacific Islands, long discussed mainly through the lens of climate vulnerability, are rapidly becoming a contested space for maritime security and great-power competition, as Australia and the United States commit fresh funding to help island nations police their vast exclusive economic zones.
At the Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting in Palau earlier this month, Australia pledged AUD$312 million (US$218 million) over ten years to Waqa Moana, a Pacific-designed initiative to combat transnational organized crime and strengthen maritime security through air mobility, aerial surveillance and regional interdiction. The funding builds on Canberra’s existing multi-billion-dollar Pacific Maritime Security Programme, which has delivered 23 Guardian-class patrol boats and three landing craft to a dozen partners.
Washington, meanwhile, is putting US$50 million into an upgrade of the wharf at Penrhyn (Tongareva) in the Cook Islands, with New Zealand contributing NZ$17.5 million. The US ambassador to the Cook Islands, Jared Novelly, pushed back this week against reporting that the project is a covert military base, saying discussions with Prime Minister Mark Brown centered on “illegal fisheries and narco-terrorism” — though the site now moves into feasibility and planning.
The spending reflects a broader recalibration. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese used a major Atlantic Council speech in New York to argue that the post-1945 world order is “not fit for purpose,” even as Pacific leaders challenged Canberra’s climate credibility at home — pointing to continued fossil-fuel approvals against UN warnings of a 1.5°C overshoot. Pre-COP talks in Fiji and Tuvalu in early October will test whether Australia can square its Pacific “family” rhetoric with its energy policy.
For the islands, the calculus is pragmatic: leverage competition among larger powers to secure financing, surveillance and sovereignty — while resisting being reduced to a chessboard. The result is a Pacific that is simultaneously more secured, more surveilled and more strategically consequential than at any point in recent memory.