New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters’ row with the Cook Islands government in February was every bit as odd as his January quarrel with the President of Kiribati. It arose after the Cook Islands Prime Minister, Mark Brown, announced that he was travelling to Beijing to sign an ‘action plan’ for a ‘Comprehensive Strategic Partnership’ (CSP) with China.
The mercurial Peters interpreted this as a breach of the Cook Islands’ free association agreement with New Zealand, which requires ‘consultation’ over issues of foreign policy. Days later, the opposition in Rarotonga lodged a no-confidence motion alleging that Brown’s government intended to break the 1965 agreement with New Zealand under which Cook Islanders automatically obtain New Zealand citizenship.
The Beijing-aligned Prime Minister denied the charge. He survived the parliamentary challenge by 13 votes to 9. “This is not about consultation, this is about control,” he angrily told his country’s parliament.
The row over the Cooks’ China deal needs to be considered in the broader context of New Zealand’s reappraisal of its regional relationships. The Cook Islands previously signed a so called ‘strategic partnership’ agreement with China in 2014, one that was already upgraded to ‘comprehensive’ in 2018, without provoking much fuss in Wellington. New Zealand itself signed such an agreement with China in 2014, as did Australia.
When the latest MOUs signed by PM Brown in February 2025 were publicly released, they were typical Chinese government aspirational statements promising to ‘promote’, ‘uphold’ and ‘enhance’ this or that but were light on detail.
Although there was no policing or security element, analysts seized on a reference to potential assistance for ‘port wharves, shipbuilding and ship repair’ as evidence of strategic duplicity. Yet the sole concrete public commitment arising from the February Beijing summit was US$2.3 million, or even less, to replace a rusty old vessel that plies from the north to the south of the island group.
Since—according to the Lowy Institute data—the annual average aid flow from China to the Cook Islands since 2008 has been US$8 million per annum, it remains to be seen whether the latest commitments offer any net addition.
The various agreements reached between the Cook Islands and New Zealand down the years are not clear on what is and is not allowed. The 1964 Constitution leaves New Zealand responsible for the ‘external affairs and defence of the Cook Islands’, but a 1970s exchange of letters between then New
Zealand Prime Minister Norman Kirk and his Cook Islands counterpart, Albert Henry, talked vaguely of a ‘voluntary arrangement which depends on shared interests and shared sympathies’.
A 2001 Joint Centenary Declaration outlined a ‘relationship of partnership’ which ‘requires that all issues affecting the two countries should be resolved on a cooperative and consultative basis’. Yet it also gave the Cook Islands government ‘the capacity to enter treaties and other international obligations in its own right, with governments and regional or international organisations’.
In 2001, Helen Clark insisted that the Cook Islands could not join the United Nations (UN) unless it surrendered its people’s right to New Zealand citizenship. Likewise, it was a December 2024 row over whether the Cook Islands could issue its own passports that provoked the latest spat with Wellington.
Without that December flare up, the February agreements with China would have attracted far less attention, as with those in 2014 and 2018. The 1970s and 2000s statements about what free association entails occurred in a much more benign strategic era. More recently, Australia has been reconfiguring its
bilateral relationships with the Pacific Island states to deny access to any third state (read: China).
The Falepili Union Agreement, which came into force in August 2024, provides that ‘Tuvalu will mutually agree with Australia any partnership, arrangement or engagement with any other State or entity on security and defence-related matters in Tuvalu’.
Four months later, Canberra secured another such accord which provided that ‘Nauru shall mutually agree with Australia any partnership, arrangement or engagement with any other State or entity on matters relating to Nauru’s security, including maritime security, defence, policing, border protection, and cyber security sectors, and Nauru’s critical infrastructure concerning banking and telecommunications.
Easily the most coveted country in commercial competition for Melanesia’s natural resources is Papua New Guinea. In February, Canberra and Port Moresby jointly announced negotiations towards a defence treaty, with the deal sweetened by an earlier A$600 million arrangement to establish a PNG team in the Australian national rugby league.
These modern Pacific strategic denial agreements resemble those forged by the United States in Micronesia in the aftermath of the Pacific War. Then, the US was able to obtain UN Security Council agreement that post-war trusteeship included a legitimate right to exclude potential future enemies.
Those arrangements survived the transition to self-government in the ‘compacts of free association’ signed with the Marshall Islands (1982), Federated States of Micronesia (1982/1983) and Palau (1994), which were recently renewed for a third time under the Biden administration.
Elsewhere too, the United States has sought to preclude other Pacific Rim powers from accessing American-built Pacific infrastructure. In a treaty signed with Kiribati in 1979, for example, the US surrendered its territorial claims to 14 islands in the Phoenix and Line Islands groups, including
Kanton (or Canton) and Kiritimati (Christmas Island) but made this conditional upon prohibition of use by ‘third parties for military purposes except with the agreement of the Government of the United States’.
The New Zealand free association pacts with the Cook Islands (1965) and Niue (1974) were reached through the very different route of accommodating UN General Assembly pressures for decolonisation. They had no similar strategic denial components. Canberra security boffins therefore chide New Zealand for giving away its passports too cheaply. Peters is listening. He says he wants to ‘formally re-state the mutual responsibilities and obligations’ and to ‘reset’ the ‘constraints of the free association model’ with the Cook Islands.
That may not prove easy, unless accompanied by a convincing threat of termination which is unlikely to be forthcoming, not least because it would kick the door wide open for China.
The Cook Islands is even more constrained from issuing an ultimatum to New Zealand to allow it greater foreign policy freedoms, such as issuing passports or joining the UN. Its constitution requires a two-thirds majority in a referendum for any change in sovereign status. So, the best bet is that little will change, at least until either the Cook Islands loses its appetite for Chinese aid or Beijing tires of dishing out funds to attract Pacific client states. The presently recession-afflicted and cash-strapped New Zealand government is unlikely to be able to replicate Canberra’s costly Pacific deals.
Jon Fraenkel is a Professor of Comparative Politics at Victoria University of Wellington.
