« The Pacific will probably become, for a long time to come, the essential theater of our destiny as men. » On September 6, 1966, these words were pronounced by then-French President Charles de Gaulle on a visit to the Franco-British New Hebrides, which became independent Vanuatu in 1980.
Nearly 60 years later, Emmanuel Macron is sticking to the same rhetoric. On Friday, July 28, the French president completed a visit to the Western Pacific in New Caledonia, Vanuatu, and Papua New Guinea. On his way back to Paris, he added a stopover in Sri Lanka, where he met with President Ranil Wickremesinghe. On Tuesday, French foreign minister Catherine Colonna spent a few hours in Fiji, home of the Pacific Islands Forum. In Samoa, Paris announced the opening of a new embassy.
After drawing up the promised assessment of a « hundred days » period of appeasement in France following the death of Nahel M., a 17-year-old shot by the police, a tragedy which triggered massive riots nationwide, and calling for « order, order, order » on Monday, the president’s diplomatic sequence in Oceania enabled him to assert « independence » and « sovereignty » everywhere, whether it be that of France or its partners.
On Thursday, he was the star of the show in Port-Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, speaking in Bislama on stage at the Melanesian Arts Festival, a giant cultural event bringing together artists from the « Pacific family » every four years. On Friday, he walked two kilometers through the magnificent Varirata forest in Papua New Guinea, along with Prime Minister James Marape, who had the entire capital Port Moresby decked out in flags. In the background, Colonna was focusing on the ongoing crisis in Niger.
‘New imperialisms’
« In the Indo-Pacific, and especially in Oceania, new imperialisms are emerging and a logic of power is threatening the sovereignty of many of the smallest and often most fragile states, » Macron said in Port Vila. The imperialism of China and Russia, which he never mentioned by name, was, in his view, « the basis of a new kind of colonization. »
On the military level, additional resources – 200 personnel and a €150 million investment in a naval base – were announced for New Caledonia. The intention is to come to the aid of neighboring Vanuatu, regularly hit by climatic disasters, not to compete with America’s Pacific policeman. On Thursday, in Port Moresby, United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin signed an agreement to provide « not a permanent military base, » as he put it, but significant security facilities.
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