The Australia-Fiji treaty signed in Suva on July 6 is no ordinary defense pact.
The Pacific Ocean Alliance, also known as the Veitacini Treaty, is clear: An armed attack on either side in the Pacific is treated as a threat to common security, and both governments have pledged to act against it through their own internal processes. Fiji now becomes an official ally of Australia, joining the US, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.
What stands out is that the treaty is designed to be open-ended: Other Pacific nations can join, provided every existing member agrees. This opening is the core of the entire document, asserting that regional security must be led by the Pacific itself, not externally directed.
Alongside the security treaty, Australia and Fiji also signed the Vuvale Union, a package said to be worth about US$1 billion ($690 million) over 10 years covering climate and economic cooperation.
A similar pattern emerged earlier with the Nakamal Agreement with Vanuatu, said to be valued at around A$500 million, and the PukPuk Treaty with Papua New Guinea last October.
The timing coincided with a Chinese ballistic missile test in the Pacific. Australia’s foreign minister confirmed Beijing had given advance notice of the blast, although Canberra still called the move a threat to regional stability.
It’s hard to read this overlap as pure coincidence—it seems more like a signal, a reminder that Beijing’s fleet can move whenever regional pressure demands a response. Of course, none of these geopolitical changes happened in a vacuum. It taps into the broader rivalry between the US and an increasingly assertive China.
Chinese firms have already built a large footprint across eastern Indonesia, controlling much of the nickel processing in Halmahera, North Maluku, a key link in the global electric vehicle battery supply chain.
This presence comes with ports and logistics infrastructure sitting right on the front door of the Pacific, which is a way of saying that the fight for critical minerals and the fight for maritime security are really the same race.
From a Western perspective, the Fiji-Australia alliance is easy to label as a diplomatic victory for the US and its partners, as a way to defeat China.
Each additional Pacific nation included in the Australia-led pacts reinforces the impression that the region is being pulled back into the fold of Western security, especially after the alarm caused by China’s 2022 pact with the Solomon Islands.
But this reading greatly simplifies the current position of the Pacific nations. For Fiji, rapprochement with Australia is not a matter of bowing to Washington’s agenda. It reads more like an attempt to protect its autonomy by managing two pressures at once: the withdrawal of Chinese capital that comes with strings attached, and pressure from the US and its allies to fall exclusively in line.
There is another way to see this whole picture: as a survival strategy for small islands. To the people who live there, a threat to the ocean that sustains them, such as deep-sea mining for polymetallic nodules, can feel as serious as a military threat.
Seen this way, a pact like this becomes a means of maintaining control over one’s destiny, not simply a matter of choosing between two giants. Pacific nations like Fiji face a tangled vulnerability, caught between two rival giants and further squeezed by a deteriorating climate, so their efforts amount to a struggle for survival.
So the real story coming out of all this is not about who is winning the US-China contest. It is about how small Pacific states are trying to build collective leverage between two opposing pressures.
This treatise is an attempt at that. Whether it will resist the pull of the two great powers in the long run is still an open question – one that depends on how the treaty is implemented and how the broader dynamics across the Pacific unfold in the years ahead.
M. Guntur Cobobi is a member of the Central Board of the Youth Association of Indonesian Muslim Intellectuals (PEMUDA-ICMI) and a researcher at the Center for Global and Melanesian Studies, Universitas Khairun.
