“Ocean of Peace”—an expression being bandied about by a handful of Pacific Island leaders — brings to mind the title of an early 1960s musical, “Stop the World, I Want to Get Off.”
The main idea behind “Ocean of Peace” is that the Pacific region can opt out of so-called “great power rivalry” and avoid much of the unpleasantness that afflicts the rest of the globe. Some commentators call for a regional security agreement to keep order.
Good luck with that. Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka apparently coined “Ocean of Peace” in 2023, and Pacific Island leaders then adopted it at their annual Pacific Island Forum (PIF) meeting in 2025 in the Solomon Islands.
However, the phrase is more something you’d see on a car bumper sticker. How it translates into a widely accepted security framework either locally or globally is unclear.
The Pacific Ocean is a big place with very different peoples and nations, each with sovereign interests. The region has never been exceptionally peaceful—including among Pacific islanders. Just ask the Fijians about the Tongans.
More recently, there was an inability to reach even diplomatic agreement on a Pacific Island Forum (PIF) statement condemning a Chinese missile test in the region.
Surely at a minimum an “Ocean of Peace” could agree this is bad? The most Pacific leaders (six of whom did not, or could not, show up at the PIF in Palau in late August) could manage was an expression of “concern” with no mention of China. Nauru opposed the entire statement and Kiribati avoided the meeting where the matter was discussed.
Both are under Beijing’s thumb.
Great power rivalry?
Being under pressure from Beijing is different from the usual “great power rivalry” framing in which China and the United States use the Pacific to carry out their rivalry — via military deployments, infrastructure, policing arrangements and access agreements.
In this framing, the rivalry spills over into coercion or instability among otherwise uninvolved Pacific Island states. However, this gives the impression that China and US are the only two major actors and that there is some equivalency.
One is hard-pressed to name a recent example of American coercion of anybody in the region or of US-caused instability.
Rather, China’s attempts to do in the Pacific region what the Japanese did in the 1920s and 1930s (but without any of the positive aspects) and create vassal states, are the major sources of coercion and instability in the Pacific today.
Just one example, recall China’s repeated use of “tourism” as a weapon to collapse the Palau economy and coerce the government of Palau.
Additionally, its efforts to interfere with the recent PIF meeting in Palau extended to personally threatening Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr. and close family if they did not follow Beijing’s dictates regarding Taiwan’s participation in the PIF.
Another huge source of instability and societal destruction throughout the region is Chinese organized crime and corruption (including flooding the region with drugs) that is part and parcel of the Chinese Communist Party’s modus operandi for gaining influence. As is the “elite capture” Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale spoke about recently.
For more, read then-FSM President David Panuelo’s public letters detailing Chinese coercion and subversion in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) and you’ll have a point-by-point indictment of the PRC and its efforts to dominate, disintegrate and destroy a nation’s consensual government and sovereignty.
The 2025 Annual Report of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s section on the Pacific Islands gives myriad more examples of unilateral unrestricted warfare attacks by the PRC.
The attacks are pervasive and evident across society, economics and politics in the Pacific. As another example, Chinese attempts to subvert Pacific media are well documented in a 2026 Center for Naval Analysis (CNA) report.
This is not “rivalry.” This is an attack by one nation against the democratic, economic and social institutions of many others across the region.
Retaining agency
One also hears complaints that Pacific Island nations are losing “agency” and unable to set limits on foreign military activity — that, it is argued — makes them pawns in the putative great power rivalry.
Besides the fact expanding Chinese military activities in the region are seldom mentioned, this is an implicit charge that the United States and “the West” are dominating national sovereignty and causing trouble. And if the Americans in particular would just pare down their activities, or even better leave, and stop threatening everyone by their very presence we’d have “peace.”
Central American Marxists and European Leftists in the 1980s used a variation of this argument too. However, the Pacific Island countries need some military capability — even if all other militaries magically disappeared. That’s the reality.
Otherwise, for example, their fish stocks will be plundered and transnational organized crime will set up drug transshipment points on their islands. Do you want the Chinese Coast Guard protecting your fish stocks from illegal Chinese fishing fleets?
Pacific Islands citizens and leaders are already quite capable of choosing who they want to deal with to provide defense and military support if they don’t want to create their own capabilities.
They have plenty of agency, and if you read the Compact of Free Association (COFA) agreements between Republic of Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Palau and the United States, they also have the right to shape (and deny) local activities of the US military.
The same goes with nations where the Australians operate — even if there’s no formal agreement.
It’s essential to distinguish between the US (and Australia and New Zealand) and China. The former are consensual democracies with a general respect for law, human rights and individual liberty.
China? It’s a totalitarian, expansionist, atheist regime. Pacific Islanders can tell the difference — even if certain corrupt leaders cannot.
Ultimately “Ocean of Peace” sounds like a nice idea and allows moral preening — sort of how Japanese used to declare themselves “pacifists” while expecting the Americans to exterminate anyone threatening Japan.
And it also improves prospects for squeezing money out of foreign donors for any number of think-tank studies and seminars, while those closer to China stall actions that might defend against Beijing’s aggression.
Meanwhile, it’s not going to protect anyone in the Pacific from the immediate problems of drugs, organized crime and illegal fishing. Nor will it protect from what’s coming — as demonstrated by the recent Chinese missile test into the heart of the “Ocean of Peace” and the PLA Navy flotilla flexing its muscles around Australia and New Zealand last year.
Pacific nations will need to defend themselves, either alone or with their friends. And they can decide who their friends are.
Grant Newsham is a retired US Marine officer and former US diplomat. He was the first Marine liaison officer to the Japan Self-Defense Force and is a fellow at the Center for Security Policy and the Yorktown Institute. He is the author of the book, “When China Attacks: A Warning To America.”
This article first appeared in The Sunday Guardian and is republished with the author’s permission. Read the original here.
