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On April 6, the leaders of Australia, New Zealand and 14 Pacific island states such as Fiji and Kiribati meet in Auckland for a summit of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF). At the top of the agenda is a proposal that would bind the PIF's member states into a security grouping. The members are Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, the Cook Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, the Marshall Islands, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.
For several years after the end of the Cold War, New Zealand was the only power in the South Pacific actively working with the region's small island states. At first this interest irritated the United States. In 1986, Wellington pulled out of the Australia-New Zealand-United States military alliance in a dispute over nuclear weapons. In the post-Cold War era Washington wanted to see Wellington bring its efforts to bear in areas of -- to put it bluntly -- more geopolitical relevance that Vanuatu or Micronesia.
This changed somewhat when East Timor broke away from Indonesia in 1999. Australian defense planners warned at that point that small states could become allied with potentially hostile powers such as China. To counter that possibility, Canberra began to slowly increase its involvement in the South Pacific alongside its New Zealand partners.
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