By Alex Bristow*
Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong will represent Australia at the 10th Pacific Island Leaders Meeting (PALM10) in Tokyo this week. Wong should use the opportunity to publicly affirm the importance of Japan’s contribution to peace and stability in the Pacific. She should also use private meetings with the assembled Pacific leaders to gauge the region’s appetite for a clearer division of labour between Australia, Japan and other partners in providing defence and security assistance to the region. (The Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The Strategist.)
This year, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will co-host PALM10 alongside Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown, the current chair of the PIF.
The PALM10 agenda is anchored on the PIF’s 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent, spanning issues from climate resilience to economic development. But the organising thread across PALM10’s seven thematic areas is rules-based order, reflecting the free and open Indo-Pacific concept that Japan’s former prime minister Shinzo Abe pioneered. Compared with 1997, recent PALM meetings have a clearer focus on harder-edged security concerns, including China’s coercive conduct.
The evolution of the PALM format tallies with Tokyo’s growing confidence about working with the Pacific on defence and security matters, working around the constraints of Japan’s postwar pacifist norms, and capitalising on the fact that regional concerns about Japan’s historic militarism have abated.
For decades, Tokyo relied on philanthropic organisations, such as the Nippon Foundation and Sasakawa Peace Foundation (SPF), to handle maritime security initiatives, including giving patrol boats to the Pacific Island countries closest to Japan—Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands—and sustaining the vessels. Those organisations remain important, and I represented ASPI at a 1.5-track dialogue hosted by SPF last week that fed into PALM10.
But the Japanese government is also expanding direct security assistance to a broader range of countries through new mechanisms, such as Official Security Assistance (OSA), which was introduced in Japan’s 2022 national security strategy. Despite being administered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, OSA allows for the transfer of military materiel, and staff from Japan’s Ministry of Defence are closely involved in its implementation. OSA is already being used for providing patrol boats for Fiji, and Papua New Guinea is also tipped as an OSA beneficiary. Pacific countries that don’t have militaries, which are the majority, could also gain from OSA in the longer term.
Alongside direct security assistance, the Japanese Self-Defence Forces are becoming more conspicuous in the Pacific, conducting more port calls and supporting delivery of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. The Japan Coast Guard is also playing a larger role across the region. It’s possible that Japan may follow Australia’s lead by appointing defence attaches or maritime security advisers in the Pacific; it may even share maritime surveillance data across the region.
Japan’s technical and industrial expertise could also be invaluable for infrastructure suited to military or law enforcement use, such as wharves. And in civilian sectors with facilities that can be used militarily—such as telecommunications and its subsea cables—Japan is already working with Australia and the United States to keep Chinese providers out.
Japan’s security step-up in the Pacific is welcome, but it also raises familiar questions in Canberra about deconfliction, the absorption capacity of recipient countries, and wider inclusion. The most suitable forum for coordination seems to be Partners in the Blue Pacific, an informal mechanism launched in 2022, especially as formats like the Japan-Pacific Islands Defence Dialogue meet infrequently and do not presently include such emerging Pacific partners as South Korea.
At a more practical level, Canberra and Tokyo need to discuss whether it makes sense for both countries to continue providing complex equipment like patrol boats to the same countries, imposing burdens for crewing and sustainment, or whether a division of labour is more appropriate. That discussion must involve the Pacific Island countries and other key partners. In some Pacific island countries, such as Palau, Taiwan is one of those partners. The region’s geography and history suggest that Japan’s greatest strategic interests is in the Micronesian region north of the equator, while Australia’s is in the Melanesian countries closest to it.
Improving the efficiency of comprehensive security assistance in peacetime could lay the foundations for the military division of labour that would become necessary in the event of a regional war. In dividing responsibilities between Japan and Australia, the United States must be involved, but there are good reasons not to include it in nascent and furtive conversations with Pacific Island countries about implications for them of a conflict that China might impose on the region. Wong should use PALM10 to gently nudge forward such difficult conversations.
Beijing’s propagandists are already targeting Japan’s growing role in the Pacific, including spreading disinformation about the release of radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, which will be a hot topic at PALM10. It’s essential that Australia and Japan work together to help the Pacific Island countries appreciate that the real threat to regional peace and stability is Beijing’s rapid and non-transparent military build-up, revisionist agenda and coercive conduct. Now is the time to develop the bonds, or kizuna, needed to reinforce collective deterrence and keep the region pacific.
