New Caledonia is rife with internal conflict, and foreign powers are looking to exploit it. Violent riots began in New Caledonia last month after France introduced voting-reform legislation that would have given French citizens who recently moved to the island full voting rights, essentially diluting New Caledonia’s indigenous vote and making it more difficult for the island to achieve independence from France. Riots killed at least eight people, with arson and looting rampant. French president Emmanuel Macron suspended the reforms this week to quell unrest and encourage “dialogue on the ground and the return to order,” he said on Wednesday.

Frederic Grare has an interesting piece explaining the event’s consequences: “What’s more politically saleable than a good old colonial conflict?” he asks:

Azerbaijan and Russia have instrumentalised the situation to settle scores with France, as they have in other parts of the world. China could turn out to be the main winner in the end, though, so far, it’s keeping quiet. . . .

The most radical attack on the French response to the unrest came from outside the region. Azerbaijan has little or no interests in the South Pacific, but its president, Ilham Aliyev, is determined to make France pay for its support to Armenia. In July 2023, he instigated the creation of the Baku Initiative Group with the sole purpose of supporting liberation movements against ‘French colonialism’, calling New Caledonia a nasty remainder of the French colonial empire. Azerbaijani flags started appearing at pro-independence rallies in New Caledonia long before the unrest. A controversial memorandum of understanding was also signed with the Congress of New Caledonia. The Baku Initiative Group has since condemned repression by French forces conducting similar operations in French Polynesia.

Unsurprisingly, Russia has joined the choir. On 18 May, Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, expressed the view that the unrest in New Caledonia was ‘stemming from the lack of finality in the process of its decolonisation and [was] yet another confirmation that the French policy towards its former colonies, renamed “overseas territories,” [was] reaching an impasse’. Moscow is also considered by the French authorities to be behind the massive cyberattack launched against New Caledonia on the eve of Emmanuel Macron’s visit.

France’s recent conflict, and the foreign influence that encouraged it, prompts a look into America’s Pacific Island commitments. Russia and China are expanding their Pacific presences (China specifically hopes to turn the region against Taiwan). And the U.S. delayed the renewal of its compact with the Freely Associated States (the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of Palau) for six months this year, during which Palau president Surangel Whipps Jr. warned of China’s increasing foothold in the Pacific: “The PRC has already offered to ‘fill every hotel room’ in our tourism-based private sector — ‘and more if more are built’ — and $20 million a year for two acres for a call center,” he said.