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March 21, 2025
Senate Foreign Relations Committee: Shared Threats – Indo-Pacific Alliances and Burden Sharing in Today’s Geopolitical Environment
March 26, 2025
On February 19, the Project 2049 Institute hosted an event to roll out its most recent publication, Evolving Partnerships: U.S. Alliances and the Pacific Islands. This timely discussion focused on cooperation in development and security aid between the United States, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand in the Pacific Islands region.
During this event, Project 2049 Institute Director of Programs Grace Price outlined how coordination between these four partner countries can serve their interests and the interests of the Pacific Island countries, while preventing China from gaining a foothold in this strategically vital region. A round-table discussion followed, in which Aizawa Riho, a research fellow at the National Institute for Defense Studies (NIDS), and Nerida King, resident senior fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, engaged with the paper’s conclusions and recommendations.
Speaker Highlights:
Grace Price: The PICs are thinking strategically about how they are receiving aid and want to diversify the aid pool. China has shifted from bigger, flashier infrastructure projects to more targeted and tangible projects, and while Chinese aid comes faster and with less strings attached, it can breed problems of corruption and transparency issues about how the money is being used.
Aizawa Riho: China poses risks to the Pacific Islands region by having larger influence over PIC policy and decision-making, countering Japanese influence. China is better at building people-to-people interactions than the Americans and the Japanese, both in Southeast Asian countries and the PICs. China is trying to leapfrog its presence by embedding itself in the PICs beyond the first and second island chains by establishing a third island chain.
Nerida King: Due to Australia’s position as a Pacific nation and strategic interests, Canberra is especially attuned to growing Chinese influence in the PICs. Australia is currently working on a number of projects that meet PICs’ development needs in line with the Sustainable Development Goals and promote closer strategic alignment, with a particular focus on high quality, sustainably financed infrastructure investment.
Read the full report here.
