Strategic Geography
🇸🇧Solomon Islands
Solomon Islands has a security agreement with China and chaired the Pacific Islands Forum in 2025–26, making it a telling case of how a small state preserves room for its own judgement between great powers. This section follows its diplomatic choices and their interaction with regional institutions.
2 analyses
The Statement That Never Came: A Chinese Missile Test Exposes the Deeper Contest in Pacific Diplomacy
After a Chinese submarine test-launched a strategic missile into the Pacific, the Forum's foreign ministers could not agree on a statement. A failure to agree on wording repays more study than a strongly worded communiqué: the same consensus rule that let small states constrain nuclear powers in 1985, and blocked Beijing's regional security package in 2022, has now blocked the Forum's own statement. The institution has not changed — the structure of interests has.
Missile Diplomacy in the South Pacific: Security and Economic Calculus Behind the Solomon Islands' Protest
Following China's submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) test in the South Pacific, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale issued a rare public protest. Coming from a government long seen as one of Beijing's closest Pacific partners, the criticism signals that island nations are increasingly putting regional security and sovereignty ahead of immediate economic incentives.