point on security

Conferences

Washington

Driving home the point on security

By Chris Ashton

THE notion that the South Pacific is a tranquil backwater to global con flict dies hard. In terms of United States security it was long seen as an

American lake, meaning overwhelming

US naval superiority underpinned by the ANZUS Pact, with Australia and New Zealand ensuring the security of the Pacific Islands. Not any more. And to drive the point home to the Bush Admi nistration this was signalled through a two-day conference in Washington in May.

Called Strategic Co-operation and Competition in the Pacific Islands, it

brought together diplomats, politicians,

defence force personnel, academics and civil servants from Australia, New Zea land, the Pacific Islands, France and Japan for the presentation of papers and round-table discussions with their Amer ican counterparts for policy in the Paci fic, including Micronesia. Dr Fedor Mediansky, Associate Professor of Poli tical Science at the University of NSW, Sydney, and Conference co-ordinator, told Pacific Islands Monthly that the US interest in the South Pacific was militari ly driven, meaning that it was perceived for its bearing on US security interests.

Unless US policy managers for the Paci

fie could understand it and adapt its policies accordingly in terms of Pacific island interests, its own security interests would ultimately be imperilled, he said.

The conference was meant quite ex pressly to correct US misconceptions ab out the Pacific.

Such conferences, often with the same figures giving the key papers, have been presented elsewhere, notably in Hawaii and Canberra. And what they had to say this time was familiar with a specialist interest in Pacific affairs. The difference was that for the first time the vanue was Washington. The South Pacific ranks low in America’s list of global priorities.

Many of the speakers accepted this, and added that it should remain so. Their plea was rather for greater sensitivity and willingness to listen to Pacific Island states, and the urgent need to develop a core of career specialists in Pacific policy management in the Defence and State Departments, in place of generalists whose limited expertise was lost when they were posted elsewhere.

Will the Washington Conference make any difference? Don’t look for a blinding revelation comparable with Saul on the road to Damascus. To the extent that it changes anything, those changes will be piecemeal, incremental, slow and largely invisible.

But nor should it be discounted as merely another academic talkfest. A six page summary of the main points emerging from the Conference was dis tributed the following week to the under secretary for policy in the Office of De

fence; to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and to desk officers in the East Asia Pacific division in Defence.

One of the highlights of the confer ence was the bafflement of the eminent Japanese professor advising his Govern ment on its Pacific aid programme, Dr Akio Watanabe, as to the attitude of its Western partners in the Pacific to Japan playing a more active role in its security.

Another was the universal derision with which American, but also Australian

participants greeted the claims by New

Zealand’s spokesman, American-born Dr Stephen Hoadley, of Auckland Universi ty, that despite the rupture to the ANZUS Pact, New Zealand’s capacity to safeguard Western security interests in the Pacific was not impaired.

A third, oft-repeated point was that the Pacific Islands were becoming in creasingly open to so-called new “play ers” from outside the region. They varied from Libya with a special interest in New Caledonia, and India with a spe cial interest in Fiji, to the growing intelli gence gathering activities of the USSR

through its fishing fleets.

The feeling of most participants was that the dangers posed by some of the newcomers was at least equal to the be nefits others would confer. Drug run ning, terrorism, arms smuggling, orga nised crime and scope for exploiting ethnic and racial tensions were cited. For the Western nations already involved the moral of this was that its security in terests would need more careful man agement than in the past. □