My Take | Bribery is at least more civilised than bombs
- The new Australian government’s offer to fund the next Solomon Islands election was dismissed as ‘inappropriate’. But it was a more rational response to the Solomon’s growing ties with China than the military intervention advocated by influential Western pundits
The Anglo-American hysteria over the growing ties between the Solomon Islands and China has continued unabated. However, it must be taken as progress of sorts that Australia’s new Labor government led by Anthony Albanese has resorted to a much more civilised method of foreign policy – bribery.
Previously, his predecessor Scott Morrison had issued threats about crossing “the red line”, which Solomon’s Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare not unreasonably took to mean military actions.
After all, influential pundits in Canada, Australia and the United States have been advocating an outright invasion and regime change on the island, and bombing it into submission as a response to China’s “aggression”.
Now, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong has publicly revealed an official offer to fund the next election on the South Pacific island state. Imagine if Beijing had made such an offer; Western capitals and news media would go berserk. Again, not unreasonably, Sogavare has dismissed the offer as “inappropriate”.
Still, comparatively, Wong’s is a measured, non-violent response.
In April, David Llewellyn-Smith, the Australian founding publisher and former global economy editor of The Diplomat, one of Asia’s most influential publications, wrote the following: “Either we undertake to destabilise the islands politically using whatever means necessary or we openly bomb Honiara into submission.