From Islands Business Rowan Callick writie's:

  Two forces are driving the perception that is being increasingly grasped by Pacific islands elites—that the international community is back, taking a big new interest in the region as 2012 dawns.

The first is being driven by anxiety about the impact of climate change.
It has been reinforced especially by the attendance of global movers and shakers at meetings in the region, enabling them to visit en route, islands nations that would otherwise never have attracted so much attention.
The Pacific Islands Forum attracted a grander lineup of global talent than ever this year, including leaders from Europe, the US and Asia. 
Its meetings now handily kick off the increasingly onerous annual end-of-the-year summit season that consumes hosts of initials and acronyms  including ASEAN’s East Asia Summit, APEC, CHOGM, G20 and the UN General Assembly annual sessions
The United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, for instance, visited Kiribati en route to the Forum summit in Auckland in September.
He said after his trip to Tarawa: “Climate change is not about tomorrow. It is lapping at our feet—quite literally in Kiribati and elsewhere. I have watched the high tide impacting those villages. The high tide shows it is high time to act.”
The first UN head to attend a Forum summit, he said: “The countries of the Pacific are at the front of the frontline on climate change” and that he will “sound a global alarm” about the threat to the region.
When the Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma attended the Commonwealth Law Ministers’ conference in Sydney in July, he spent time in Samoa and Tonga en route.
Golden opportunity
Like Ki-Moon, he attended the Forum summit in Auckland, which includes 11 Commonwealth members. 
He said there: “It’s a golden opportunity for me to meet all these leaders and get a view of what’s on their minds”—and a considerably more convenient opportunity than travelling between the far-flung islands states.
“We at the Commonwealth were part of their nation building. Most of them are evolving democracies, with clusters of governance issues. “We always discuss the role of women. And climate change is one of their most important issues.”
This discussion continued through the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth in October, when Pacific countries gained a further opportunity to raise concerns with leaders from a broader global community.
But success in attempting to reap rewards in global assistance for climate mitigation or adaptation have been limited, despite top-level support of heads of leading international organisations.
The Durban climate change conference at the end of the year ultimately proved disappointing to Pacific islands representatives.
And a push by Pacific countries to have the UN adopt climate change as a global security issue in July failed, despite dire warnings of rising sea levels from Australia’s parliamentary secretary for the Pacific, Richard Marles and Nauru’s then President, Marcus Stephen, in New York.
Russia and developing nations blocked a tough statement on the issue by the 15 countries of the Security Council. 
China’s deputy ambassador to the UN, Wang Min, said that climate change “is fundamentally a sustainable development issue” rather than a security issue, and that the industrialised world should spend more to mitigate any effects on developing countries.
Stephen said: “Let history report that again we have sounded the alarm and the world chose not to act.”
The second force driving the perception of a renewed international focus on the Pacific is a more hotly disputed one—it is the thrust by the Bainimarama Government in Fiji to gain the legitimacy that comes from foreign recognition and support.
Canberra’s leading security think-tank for instance, commissioned a recent report jointly written by Richard Herr, deputy director at the centre for international and regional affairs at the newly established University of Fiji. 
This stresses that Australia’s “privileged position in the Pacific islands regional structure needs to adjust to recent changes”—including the fast growing influence of China and the durability of the military regime in Fiji.
The report, whose other author is ASPI director of research programmes Anthony Bergin, says “attempting to use Pacific regional agencies to curtail our (Australia’s) neighbours’ emerging Asian ties would damage both our national interests and those of Western allies grappling with related developments, especially in the Western Pacific”.
They urge Canberra to engage more closely with sub-regional groupings, especially the Melanesian Spearhead Group, currently chaired by Fiji, and to repair the relationship with Fiji “at the highest level,” through talks between Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Commodore Frank Bainimarama. 
Fiji’s Foreign Minister Ratu Inoke Kubuabola declared in 2011, angered by trenchant Australian criticism of the lack of progress towards elections in Fiji, that there is “little hope for real re-engagement between the governments of Australia and Fiji while Mr Rudd remains in office”—which means at least until mid-2013.
Rise of China and other Asian powers
But the rise of China and other Asian powers, Herr and Bergin say, offer the islands “new models for development as well as outlets for their national economies. The islands are displaying an increasingly independent fascination with Asia.” 
Many islands countries, they say, now have a “Look North” foreign policy focus.
The most palpable way in which this can be observed, is the push by the Fiji regime for allies beyond the Forum and CHOGM, from which it is suspended—and for ways to split those organisations so that it can win the backing of some of its members.
This also helps explain Fiji President Ratu Epeli Nailatikau’s otherwise rather puzzling remark within his Christmas message, that “we continue to reinforce the health of our nation—socially, economically and within an expanding global framework.”
The election of Fiji’s representative to the UN, Peter Thomson as one of 21 vice-presidents of the general assembly meeting in 2011, was part of that thrust towards “an expanding global framework”—one which could give Fiji further platforms to lobby against Australia’s candidature to the UN Security Council in 2013.
President Barack Obama made it clear during the latter months of 2011 that he will pursue through the election campaign this year and then beyond into the second term he is being backed to win, a Pacific-first foreign policy.
During the APEC forum he hosted in Hawai’i, his major new initiative was to breathe fresh life into the Trans Pacific Partnership of like-minded countries that would seek to build an open-door trade community—though for now, this only includes Australia and New Zealand of the Forum states.
Then in his speech to the Australian parliament, he said: “The United States is a Pacific power and we are here to stay.” 
Up to 2,500 US marines and US military aircraft will start to use northern Australia as a training and resourcing hub.
US a Pacific power
Obama said: “Let there be no doubt: in the Asia-Pacific in the 21st century, the United States of America is all in.” 
This was a message primarily intended for audiences in Asia, where growing concern about China’s ambitions especially in the disputed South China Sea, led in 2011 to a renewal of old alliances with the US and a strengthening of new ones, for instance— and however unlikely—with Vietnam.
The other big international factor affecting the Pacific countries has been the truce between China and Taiwan that has ended their former bitter battle for diplomatic recognition with eight islands nations backing China and six supporting Taiwan. 
It is an open and declared truce in Taiwan, an undeclared one in China, which does not of course recognise Taiwan as a nation anyway. But it has held solid for almost four years now.
During 2012, there will be a transition of leaders in China at the communist party’s five-yearly congress in October, and there may be a change too in Taiwan, which holds both its presidential and parliamentary elections on January 14.
It is possible that the outcomes of these transitions will launch the China-Taiwan conflict back into the Pacific, like a nuclear test that ripples ever further outwards—with politicians being coaxed—and worse—to back this side or the other. More likely, the truce will hold. It is strongly perceived in Beijing to be in its interest. It will also hold in Taiwan if Ma Ying-jeou is re-elected, as is marginally more likely.
But if the Democratic Progressive Party candidate Tsai Ing-wen comes to power, she—despite being a centrist—may find it hard to resist pressures from her own pro-independence party to push to win more international supporters, including in the Pacific.
This, far more than the current marginally increased Chinese role in Fiji—since the Bainimarama Government there started to become internationally isolated—would spur a big new Chinese thrust into the region to cement its existing alliances and attract more.
What do Pacific islanders think? A phone survey conducted in 2011 in Melanesian countries by the Port Vila-based Pacific Institute of Public Policy, asked which country beyond the Pacific islands, was their best partner.
It found that 40.5 percent of those in PNG and 40.4 percent in the Solomons named Australia. In PNG, China came next with 13.1 percent; in the Solomons, New Zealand came second with 20.2 percent.
In Vanuatu, China was perceived as their best partner with 32.9 percent, the US came next with 15.3 percent, followed by Australia with 14.1 percent.