Dunderheaded Diplomacy: Australia’s funding offer to the Solomon Islands

Back in Australia, Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister, Simon Birmingham, did not disagree with the sentiment, but took issue with the execution. The Albanese government, he remarked on RN Breakfast, should have done things in confidence and on the sly. To have made it public was a "giant misstep".

Nor was the electoral gambit enough for those voices who wish to see the South Pacific turned into an Anglo-Australian garrison ready to repel the Yellow Horde. The apoplectic demagogues on Rupert Murdoch's Sky News network rage that more should be done. The blustery Andrew Bolt told his handful of viewers that the Albanese government had shown "weakness" in not trouncing the independent will of island savages and their drift towards the bosom of totalitarianism. "It still refuses to say a word of criticism as the Solomon Islands, this island nation right on our border, as its leader pushes from democracy towards something looking increasingly like the Cuba of the Pacific."

The only country risking the status of a "Cuba of the Pacific", in so far as political isolation is concerned, is Australia. "Australia's strategic dilemma in the twenty-first century," writes former Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani "is simple: it can choose to be a bridge between East and the West in the Asian Century – or the tip of the spear projecting Western power into Asia." In choosing to be a spear of Western interference, tipped by an ignorance of regional conditions and historical realities, Canberra's estrangement and exile is all but guaranteed.