A month after China launched a nuclear-capable ballistic missile into the self-declared nuclear-free Pacific, the region's foreign ministers gathered in Fiji and found themselves unable to agree on how — or whether — to speak together about it. New Zealand's Winston Peters, who had pressed for a joint condemnation, encountered what he described as predetermined positions that no amount of logic could move. The episode reveals something older and more enduring than any single weapons test: the difficulty small nations face in asserting collective sovereignty when powerful forces have already sh