Held from September 8 to 12 in the capital of the Solomon Islands, Honiara, the 54th Summit of the member states of the Pacific Islands Forum became a landmark event in the ongoing process of transformation in the Indo-Pacific region.

Meanwhile, the latest Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) received serious attention from the world’s leading players for an entirely understandable reason: the growing importance for each of them of exerting influence on developments in the Pacific Ocean basin, which makes up half the territory of the Indo-Pacific. It is precisely this region as a whole that is becoming the focal point of global political and economic processes. Let us also recall that this factor is by no means significant for the first time. Such was the case, for example, on the eve of and during the Second World War.

This time the PIF Forum was held without the participation of “partners”

This subtitle, in fact, designates one of the main distinguishing features of the latest PIF Forum. Let us indicate some “reference points” of the history of the PIF over the past several decades.

Created in 1971, that is, at the height of the Cold War, the Forum acquired its current form in 2000, today including 18 island states of the Pacific basin. Its present status and the character of its functioning could not but be influenced by the radical changes on the global playing table that took place ten years earlier with the end of the global conflict. In particular, already at that time a contender emerged to occupy at the playing table the place previously held by the USSR.

That contender was China, which, together with occupying the mentioned place, brought into the scenario of the new global game its own key problem, conditioned by the “specific” status of Taiwan on the international stage. And alongside the gradual transformation of the PRC into the second global power, the Taiwan issue inevitably shifted into the focus of its competitive struggle with the United States. For several years now, this has been a source of considerable turbulence also within the PIF, since the member states of this Forum are........

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