The document at the center of Solomon Islands' foreign policy has never been read by the people it governs. When the government signed a security agreement with China in 2022 — a deal allowing Beijing to send police and, potentially, military personnel to the islands — the full text was never released. Four years and three prime ministers later, it still has not been.
Matthew Wale was one of the loudest critics of that secrecy. In opposition, he called the pact "counterproductive to the security interests of the Solomon Islands and the region." In May 2026 he became prime minister, winning 26 of 50 votes in parliament to defeat Peter Shanel Agovaka, after Jeremiah Manele was removed in a no-confidence motion. Within weeks Wale pledged to review the agreement. Then he said something that complicated the pledge: the deal cannot be made public, because it contains a legally binding secrecy clause.
So the review will examine a document the reviewer says he cannot show the public. That tension is the real story, and it is more revealing than the binary — pro-China or pro-West — that outside coverage keeps trying to impose on Honiara.
What "review" is doing
A review can mean four very different things, and Wale has not said which he intends. It could be a prelude to cancellation. It could be an attempt to renegotiate and narrow the pact's scope. It could be a push for transparency — publishing at last what previous governments concealed. Or it could be political theatre: a gesture that distances the new government from its predecessor's most controversial act while changing nothing on the ground.
The early signals point away from rupture. Wale has traveled to Australia and New Zealand, and his government has moved to warm relations with Canberra that had cooled under the previous administration's tilt toward Beijing. But warming to the West is not the same as breaking with China, and Wale has been careful not to promise cancellation, nor to reopen the question of diplomatic recognition, which Solomon Islands switched from Taipei to Beijing in 2019.
Pacific governments are not passive pieces on a strategic board. They are trying to set limits on the behavior of every major power — and to be paid, in aid and investment, by more than one.
The secrecy clause is the knot. If the agreement genuinely binds Honiara to confidentiality, then Wale's transparency instincts collide with a commitment his own state has already made. If the clause is being cited as cover — a reason not to publish a document that would embarrass the government or Beijing — that is a different problem, and a domestic one. Either way, a review conducted behind the same wall of secrecy that made the pact controversial in the first place will struggle to satisfy the public that demanded it.
Why the government keeps changing
The deeper instability sits underneath the treaty. Manele fell because ministers defected and a confidence vote followed; Wale rose because he assembled the numbers in a chamber where party discipline is weak and independents, constituency funds and shifting loyalties decide who governs. Solomon Islands has cycled through leaders and coalitions at a pace that makes any long-term foreign commitment fragile, because the government that signs it may not survive to defend it.
That churn is the context foreign powers underrate. Australia and China both negotiate as though Honiara speaks with one durable voice; in practice it speaks with whichever coalition holds together this month. A security pact signed by one prime minister, questioned by the next, and reviewed-but-not-released by the third is not an anomaly. It is how Solomon Islands politics processes an agreement its own public was never allowed to see.
Wale has set himself a task with a built-in contradiction: to reassure his citizens by scrutinizing a document he insists they cannot read. How he resolves it — whether the review ends in disclosure, revision, or a quiet reaffirmation dressed as change — will say more about who actually governs the security relationship than any clause hidden in the text.