Gulf oil states are using their vast wealth to build influence across the far-flung South Pacific, experts have told reporters, tearing a page straight out of China’s Belt and Road playbook.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — two of the world’s biggest crude oil producers — have been ramping up efforts to shed their reputations as global climate laggards.
Both have been lavishing money and attention on small, isolated and often indebted Pacific nations, where rising sea levels are already creeping up on low-lying coastal communities.
Photo: AFP
Businessman Milroy Cainton, who was recently appointed as Vanuatu’s special envoy to the UAE, said it was clear the Gulf states wanted friends in the Pacific.
“There are some good things they see in the South Pacific,” he said. “We are getting big help from them, as well as from China.”
Since 2015, the UAE says it has spent at least US$50 million on infrastructure projects throughout the Pacific islands, typically focused on renewable energy. Emirati petrodollars have funded a wind farm in Samoa, water storage facilities in the Marshall Islands, and solar power projects in Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Solomon Islands.
One of the most conspicuous examples sits smack in the middle of Vanuatu’s leafy capital, Port Vila, where a UAE-funded solar farm keeps the lights on inside the country’s parliament.
“It’s one of the largest-scale renewable energy projects in Vanuatu,” Cainton said. “The relationship is progressing big time with clean energy.”
Saudi Arabia has sought to establish diplomatic relations with a clutch of its own Pacific partners, including Tuvalu and Fiji in 2015, Tonga in 2020, Vanuatu last year and the Cook Islands in April.
It has built a particularly warm relationship with the Solomon Islands — pledging US$8 million this month to help it prepare for the Pacific Games in the capital, Honiara.
A host of Pacific dignitaries traveled to the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh, earlier this year, where they discussed issues such as climate financing with counterparts from the Arab League.
Over the past decade, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have become increasingly prominent players on the international stage. They have snapped up high-profile sporting franchises, lured the biggest entertainers to perform in their cities and become more assertive in their foreign policy. Both have made headline-grabbing commitments to renewable energy, and the UAE pulled off a major coup when it secured the rights to host the COP28 climate conference in Dubai later this year.
“It reflects the new ambitions of these Gulf states, which were traditionally passive actors in international relations,” said Jean-Loup Samaan from the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore.
“In the last decade they have gradually moved into the Persian Gulf, into the Indian Ocean and the Indo-Pacific. They use what they have — financial assets,” he said.
“The UAE is more advanced than the Saudis. They tend to go into these countries, establish strong diplomatic relations and then come with investments in local infrastructure,” he added.
Samaan compared the strategy to a pared-back version of China’s Belt and Road Initiative — spending money in developing countries to grow their global reach.
“It’s like a smaller, Gulf version of the Belt and Road,” he said.
Samaan said profit was far from the most important consideration when dishing out these investments.
“They want to secure diplomatic partners that align with their interests later on,” he said.
Although they have a small collective population and limited economic clout, the Pacific islands can be immensely valuable diplomatic partners. The Pacific bloc represents 12 of 55 votes in the UN’s Asia-Pacific region, which also includes Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Pacific affairs expert Stewart Firth said “influence comes at a cheap price” in the small, developing economies that make up the Pacific.
“Small amounts of assistance have large effects,” said Firth, a fellow at Australian National University.
Author and Middle East analyst Matthew Hedges said such relationships also helped the Gulf states burnish their climate credentials, which have been historically weak because of their role as major fossil-fuel producers.
“It’s about emboldening their reputation and trying to align with what’s happening internationally,” said Hedges, who in 2018 was jailed in the UAE on spying charges before being pardoned and released.
“They are deliberate and smart about how they communicate what they do. It’s pragmatic, and it’s for the long term,” he said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
RSS