A backslapping moment between Australia’s prime minister Anthony Albanese and the US deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell, at the Pacific Islands Forum leaders meeting in Nuku’alofa this week. (Photo: RNZ Pacific/ Lydia Lewis)
A brief exchange between Australia’s PM Anthony Albanese and the US deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell — caught on video at this week’s Pacific Islands Forum summit in Tonga — offers a rare glimpse into how Australia sub-contracts the Pacific on behalf of US “interests”.
Van Jackson, a senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University and US foreign policy and security expert, explains.
Anthony Albanese: “We had a cracker today getting the Pacific Policing Initiative through. It’s so important . . .”
Kurt Campbell: “That’s fantastic . . . I talked with Kevin [Rudd, Australia’s ambassador to the US] about it, and we were going to do something and he asked us not to, so we did not. We’ve given you the lane, so take the lane.”
Albanese: “We can go halfsies on the cost if you like.”
This is the short video clip making the rounds on social media. In it, Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, is chopping it up with US deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell. The pair appear to not realise they were being filmed (one hopes).
Both were in attendance at the annual Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting — the premier regional institution in the Pacific — in Tonga this week. In the video, the two were celebrating what they saw as a big policy win. Going into this week’s summit, Australia had been working to get the buy-in from Pacific Island nations for a Pacific Policing Initiative (PPI) that would be funded and hosted by Australia, with a training facility also based in Australia.
Before the forum meeting, it wasn’t obvious Australia would get regional agreement for this PPI thing because a number of Pacific countries had voiced some form of reservation about it.
Leonard Louma, the director-general of the Melanesian Spearhead Group — which includes Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front of New Caledonia — said this of the initiative:
This PPI must be genuinely framed to fit our purposes and not conveniently developed as part of the geo-strategic denial security doctrine of our big partners.
The prime minister of Vanuatu, Charlot Salwai, similarly added:
[This PPI must be] framed to fit our purposes and not developed to suit the geo-strategic interests and geo-strategic denial security postures of our big partners.
“Geo-strategic denial” is how a lot of folks in this region understand the US strategy of primacy. It is focused on US domination as a means of denying Chinese domination. And they chafe at it because of what it assumes, as much as what it imposes and risks.
But it’s been an open secret in the Pacific for the past year that some countries were uncomfortable with Australia’s gambit because it appears imperious and is trying to create a police security architecture for the region that excludes and purposely squeezes out China.
Over the past year or two, several Australian officials have commented that they see China’s police presence in the Pacific as a threat and believe China should have no “security” role in the Pacific.
For Pacific Island nations, that’s not Australia’s call to make.
Cue this week’s video of Albanese and Campbell. The exchange shows us what Australia’s sub-imperial relationship to the US looks like from the inside. It’s backslapping blokes. Western powers hatching plans for what to do in the Pacific, rather than with the Pacific. The client driving things when it has the comparative advantage. And a presumption on the part of the US that Australia is a loyal proxy for Washington’s interest in what increasingly looks like a regime of exclusion. Campbell literally says:
We were going to do something and [the Australian ambassador] asked us not to, so we did not. We’ve given you the lane, so take the lane.
I have a sense that some people think it’s a cheap shot to describe Australia as a sub-imperial power or to make note of the fact that Australia’s entire foreign policy nests within US foreign policy. But it’s not a cheap shot; it’s what the relationship is. There’s an excellent book-length argument about why Australian policymakers think their security depends on American primacy. It doesn’t have to be a relationship where Washington gives the orders and Canberra obeys. Hegemony doesn’t work like that.
More importantly, exchanges like that between Albanese and Campbell would be inexplicable if Australia wasn’t “America’s man in the Pacific.”
From a Canberra perspective, where I’m writing this, Australia has been well-served by its sub-imperial arrangement with the US in the past. But the past is past.
The US no longer has primacy and exists in a world mismatched with such a strategy. Australian thinkers have not taken seriously how what they do serves the strategy of another power whose own strategy clashes with the world as it is.
To paraphrase Macklemore, the problem isn’t the police, it’s what they’re policing.
Police capacity is an issue in the Pacific and a regional approach could be useful. But that regional approach must be led by the Pacific, rather than a sub-imperial power that has openly declared its desire to displace China and stand in for a superpower that is the region’s leading source of militarisation.
I’d also like to point out that the significant level of outside police forces in the Pacific is a red flag for all of us. It only adds to the militarisation of the region, and the ongoing pressure and instability caused by outside players. Notably, China also has a police presence in the Pacific, but right now the scale of that presence pales in comparison to that of the US and Australia.
Policing is fundamentally a community function or an imperial function. And it can’t be a community function if it’s imported from the outside.
Van Jackson is a senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka. He has written four books, including Grand Strategies of the Left: The Foreign Policy of Progressive Worldmaking (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and Pacific Power Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the ‘Asian Peace’ (Yale University Press, 2023). Before entering academia, Van was a foreign policy practitioner, working as a strategist and policy adviser in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Obama administration, and serving in the US Air Force as a Korean linguist and intelligence analyst.
(First published on Van’s Substack and republished here with permission.)
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