Pacific Island leaders are pushing back against the rising geopolitical jousting between big powers in their region by barring international development partners, including the U.S. and China, from their annual summit this week.

Beginning Monday, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Jeremiah Manele will host this year’s five-day meeting of leaders from the 18 Pacific Island Forum member countries, including Australia and New Zealand, in his country’s capital, Honiara. On the agenda will be topics of regional concern, from development and security to climate change and governance.

Twenty-one global partners, including the U.S., United Kingdom, European Union, Canada, China and Japan, will be absent, although the World Bank and United Nations agencies will attend as observers. The move is designed to prevent interference by external players intent on bolstering their broader geopolitical ambitions.

"It is necessary to ensure engagement is conducted through a robust, transparent and strategic mechanism that reflects our priorities, protects our sovereignty and strengthens our collective voice globally,” Manele explained in a recent press briefing.

There has been a lot of media speculation about what exactly triggered the sudden announcement, given that international partners have attended leaders’ summits since the 1990s, with attention focused on the diplomatic tussle between China and Taiwan for standing in the region. Last month media reports alleged that Chinese officials had pushed for the Solomon Islands government to exclude Taiwan, which is diplomatically aligned with Tuvalu, Palau and Marshall Islands, from the Forum summit.

At last year’s leaders’ meeting in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, Chinese diplomats pressed for removing all references to Taiwan in the summit’s final communique. And, while denying their intent to interfere in this year’s summit, Chinese embassy officials declared that Taiwan is not a country and has “no qualification or right to participate in Forum activities whatsoever.”

Yet, while Manele’s announcement last month was made with a united Forum front, public statements subsequently suggested that not everyone necessarily agreed. The partner ban was supported by Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Junior and Samoa’s leader, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa. In concurring, Crown Prince Tupouto’a ‘Ulukalala’ claimed the outcome followed “a rich and robust discussion and was reflective of our collective maturity and solidarity as a region.”

Yet Papua New Guinea and New Zealand expressed misgivings, while the United States and Australia voiced support for the participation of all global partners. Hilda Heine, president of the Marshall Islands, wrote to Manele encouraging him to rethink the move to “avoid the unintended consequence of distancing partners at a pivotal time” of development needs.

Yet the Pacific leaders’ concerns are not unfounded. The intensifying war of one-upmanship between the U.S. and its allies on the one hand and China on the other for strategic control in the Pacific is growing. It was accelerated by the extensive China-Solomon Islands security pact announced in 2022, which includes a provision for the Pacific nation to call on Chinese police and military forces to maintain social order.

It was a development that provoked the U.S., Australia and New Zealand to launch myriad aid and security countermoves. The Biden administration invited Pacific leaders to Washington summits in 2022 and 2023, where promises were made to strengthen economic and climate change assistance and provide more than $1 billion in additional aid funding. Some U.S. embassies were reopened in Pacific Island countries, augmented last month by the opening of a new FBI office in Wellington, New Zealand.

But the rash of executive orders issued by Trump this year dealt a blow to U.S. soft-power relations to the Pacific Islands. His hefty new trade tariffs on developing Pacific Island countries — 32% imposed on Fiji, 22% on Vanuatu and 10% on Papua New Guinea — generated less than favorable reactions.

“If the U.S. market becomes more difficult due to this tariff, we will simply redirect our goods to markets where there is mutual respect and no artificial barriers,” PNG’s Prime Minister James Marape warned in April.

Moreover, Washington’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and multilateral institutions, including the World Health Organization, and its freezing of international aid have undermined some of the region’s most important priorities and needs.

“The U.S.’ seeming erosion of the international rules-based order and the multilateral system will be of concern to Pacific Island leaders who rely on and invest heavily in the multilateral system to advance their key interests,” Joel Nilon, Senior Pacific Fellow at the Pacific Security College at the Australian National University, told RS. Leaders of Tonga, Solomon Islands, Cook Islands and Palau wrote a letter to Trump expressing their concerns about his policy turns in April.

Before USAID was drastically downsized in January, Washington spent $3.4 billion on aid assistance to the region annually. Even then, it has trailed behind Australia, New Zealand and Japan in the magnitude of development assistance it provided to the region.

At the same time, however, the U.S. has retained the Biden administration’s rhetoric about the region’s geopolitical importance. “America, as the leader of the free world defending American interests, is going to need to make sure we’re focused properly on the Communist Chinese and their ambitions in the Indo-Pacific and around the world,” U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared in February, as Admiral Samuel Paparo of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command visited Australia to strengthen defense ties.

In the same month, Chinese naval vessels conducted unprecedented maneuvers in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand.

The decline of U.S. assistance and its relative disinterest in Pacific perspectives, particularly regarding climate change, could have long-term implications for its assumptions about the region’s support for its plans to counter China’s own ambitions. Its diminished status as a development partner is already giving China plenty of gaps to fill. In May, China hosted its annual China-Pacific Islands Foreign Ministers Meeting for the first time in China, where it showcased a swathe of climate-related projects for Pacific countries.

A preoccupation with beefing up U.S. military and intelligence presence in the region will not by itself build strong, trust-based bilateral relationships with the region’s key players. This obsession has minimal currency with Pacific Islanders and “is very much perceived by leaders as a major distraction from their real security concerns,” Nilon emphasised, notably climate change, the risks of natural disasters, and development challenges, as well as transnational crime, border and cybersecurity.

Over the next year, the Pacific Islands Forum will review and redraft its future engagement strategy with donor countries. And before the 2026 leaders’ summit takes place in Palau, when partner dialogue meetings are expected to resume, there is an opportunity for the U.S. administration to also rethink its strategic approach. Ultimately Pacific Islanders desire a new script with America listening and consulting in a genuine, reciprocal and consistent long-term partnership.