The Pacific needs its own Five Eyes-inspired intelligence alliance

Australia should lead the creation of a formal intelligence-sharing framework involving Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and Fiji, to build resilience against transnational and geopolitical threats in the Pacific, writes Mihai Sora in a new Lowy Institute Policy Brief.

The “Pacific Eyes” agreement — styled on the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States — would create a structured intelligence-sharing collaboration between the most closely aligned countries in the region.

Mihai Sora, the Lowy Institute’s Pacific Islands Program Director, says Pacific Island countries currently rely on a patchwork of bilateral and multilateral arrangements that are failing to address transnational crime, illegal fishing, disaster response, climate-related security, and cybersecurity issues in the region.

“These vulnerabilities create space for external actors — above all China — to gain leverage in the Pacific Islands,” writes Sora.

“A Pacific intelligence-sharing arrangement involving Australia, New Zealand, PNG, Fiji, and other willing Pacific Island countries would help to close those gaps and provide regional partners with the shared awareness needed to anticipate and blunt geopolitical coercion,” writes Sora.

“Over time, the ‘Pacific Eyes’ would create a more resilient, capable, and strategically aligned Pacific security community — one better equipped to manage geopolitical competition and transnational threats alike.”

Sora proposes an incremental approach where partners would work together to tackle less politically sensitive shared issues — maritime surveillance, transnational crime, cybersecurity, disaster and climate security, and regional threat assessments — to build trust and cooperative habits, before expanding into more sensitive areas.

“A ‘Pacific Eyes’ partnership would not emerge overnight,” writes Sora. “But success would mark a transformative step in regional security cooperation: a home-grown capability empowering Pacific Island states to anticipate and counter threats together, with eyes wide open.”

KEY FINDINGS

• The Pacific Islands face converging transnational and geopolitical threats that exceed the capacity of any single country to address. Organised crime, illegal fishing, cyberattacks, political instability, and climate shocks are compounding and being increasingly exploited by external powers, creating systemic vulnerabilities across the region.
  
• Existing intelligence exchanges are fragmented and inadequate to meet the scale of these challenges. Current bilateral channels and ad hoc networks leave critical blind spots in regional awareness, undermining the ability of Pacific Island governments, and Australia and New Zealand as principal partners, to anticipate and respond to “strategic surprises”.
  
• A dedicated intelligence-sharing framework — a “Pacific Eyes” agreement — would transform regional cooperation. By embedding structured, continuous intelligence collaboration between Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and Fiji, the initiative would build capacity, deepen trust, and lay the foundations for a resilient Pacific Islands security community.

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