The Pitfalls of Australia’s New Defense Pact with Papua New Guinea

Once Upon a Time in Oceania

As for Australia, its authorities claim they haven’t signed a treaty of this level and substantive depth in 70 years, not since the well-known ANZUS pact. While Australia is in a military alliance not only with the US and New Zealand but also with the UK, the AUKUS agreements are not as detailed. The document with PNG is also remarkable because it demonstrates Canberra reaching a new level of interference in the internal affairs of neighboring countries. It elevates the status of interaction between the parties to an allied level and stipulates a series of corresponding measures. The main one is mutual assistance in the event of an external threat. Furthermore, it outlines the inadmissibility of actions that could hinder the fulfillment of allied agreements—a clause that sounds extremely broad and allows for any interpretation. The parties commit to developing a full spectrum of military-technical cooperation: personnel exchanges, military education and personnel training, “synchronization of military doctrines,” bilateral and multilateral exercises, “actions to support security interests at sea, on land, in the air, in space, and in cyberspace,” the sharing of intelligence and other “sensitive information” through secure channels, “logistics integration,” and “mutual access to defense infrastructure.” The treaty even approves the possibility of recruiting each other’s citizens into their armed forces on a mutual basis.

In plain English, all this means the following: Papua New Guinea is, in effect, losing the remnants of its even somewhat formal sovereignty (part of it, one could say, was left with the British Commonwealth; another part was taken by the US, which signed a less obligatory but almost identical military-technical cooperation agreement with........

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