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Following Australia's push, leaders of the Pacific island countries agreed to back the Pacific Policing Initiative (PPI) at the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) on Wednesday. Under the plan, four regional police training centers and multinational crisis reaction forces – with Canberra providing around $400 million funding over five years – will be established in response to disasters or other security challenges in the region.

Despite Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's endorsement that the agreement "demonstrates how Pacific leaders are working together to shape the future," the PPI is widely seen as a contentious move under U.S. strategic pressure to limit China's role in the Pacific.

A candid chat between Albanese and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell caught on camera at the summit shows that the PPI is more an outcome of Canberra-Washington calculations than a joint will by the Pacific family.

In the video released by Radio New Zealand journalist Lydia Lewis, Campbell suggested the U.S. had been contemplating the initiative until "Kevin" – most likely a reference to the Australian ambassador to the U.S. Kevin Rudd – turned it down. "I talked with Kevin about it (the initiative) and so you know, we were going to do something and he asked us not to, so we did not," Campbell said.

"We've given you the land, so take the lane!" Campbell told Albanese. The Australian PM then joked that the U.S. could go "halfsies" on the cost of the initiative.

When reporters continued to press Albanese on the conversation, he became visibly irritated. "It was a private conversation. It was a jovial conversation, and a friendly one … People try and read something into it," Albanese said, brushing off questions about Campbell's potential connections with the PPI.

Although the U.S. so far has no plan to cover the initiative's $400 million price tag, the Albanese-Campbell private conversation clearly indicates that Washington, to some extent, has played a role in the Canberra-led PPI. In other words, Australia, by pushing to get the initiative through at the PIF, is dancing to the U.S. tune for their shared strategic calculations.

Vanuatu and Solomon Islands also voiced concerns that the initiative represented a "geostrategic denial security doctrine" designed to box out certain countries that the West deems as strategic opponents. The group needs to "make sure that this PPI is framed to fit our purposes and not developed to suit the geostrategic interests and geostrategic denial security postures of our big partners," Vanuatu Prime Minister Charlot Salwai said in a statement.

Solomon Islands believed that the PPI should not preclude countries from working with new-found partners. "The only thing that we do not agree to, is that it (the PPI) imposes conditions on our domestic security," Solomon Islands Foreign Minister Peter Agovaka said, adding that "I don't think another sovereign state should put conditions on another sovereign state."

Australian officials are more straightforward – not even to hide their anti-Beijing bias that the PPI will make it harder for China to embed itself deeply in Pacific police forces.

"The initiative attempts to place Pacific policing entirely under Western control, excluding China's presence," Chen Hong, director of the Australian Studies Center of East China Normal University, was quoted by the Global Times as saying.

True, China maintains a small police presence in Solomon Islands, but their security cooperation is open and aboveboard designed to enhance local policing capacity and protect the safety of Chinese nationals and institutions there. Beijing has no intention of establishing a military base in the region. As China has reiterated, forcing deals, interfering in the internal affairs of other countries or harming the interests of other countries is never part of China's diplomatic policy.

This is in sharp contrast to West-dominated cooperation where regional security is just an excuse for Western players to intervene in, or even control, security decisions of regional countries. If Canberra is sincere in enhancing regional stability and security, it should at least abandon its Cold War mentality and its anti-Beijing strategic calculations.

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