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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to