US Vies for More Influence
The Solomon Islands signed a security pact with China last April sparking a series of geopolitical responses. A regionwide security deal met with some resistance and was shelved, but China’s diplomacy has re-enforced and strengthened its place in the Pacific prompting Australia to step up its engagement with Pacific islands. Now we’re beginning to see the US response.
President Biden hosted the first US-Pacific Island Country Summit in Washington in September 2022. Outcomes included a statement of principles to guide increased US engagement and a headline grabbing US$800 million (about FJ1.83 billion) assistance package.
This comes on the back of earlier
announcements to open embassies in the Solomon Islands, Tonga and Kiribati; and a joint move by Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the UK and US to expand cooperation in the region.
US presence in the Pacific
The US has been in the Pacific Island nation for more than 100 years, since it annexed Hawaii, Guam and American Samoa between 18981900.
These islands, along with the Northern Marianas, remain part of its territory; with Palau, Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) and Marshall Islands – all formerly UN Trust Territories – becoming independent states in ‘free association’ with the US from 1986.
Historically, the US presence has been concentrated on its military bases in the North Pacific, with leadership and development assistance in the South Pacific delegated to Australia and New Zealand. But this division appears to be breaking down.
What the money will be spent on?
The US is pledging more than US$800 million of assistance to Pacific Islands over the next decade. But it is unclear how much of this is new money or whether this represents much of an increase compared to what was spent over the past decade.
The principles outlined in the US-Pacific Partnership are more revealing. Climate change adaptation, oceans and regionalism are prominent themes, reflecting the collective ‘Blue Pacific’ identity and agenda of Pacific Small Island Developing States (SIDS) articulated in the 2050 Strategy on the Blue
Continent.
Some critical issues were not addressed by the Summit, including China’s domination of fishing in the region and overexploitation of fish populations, and high levels of debt to China held by some Pacific SIDS.
What does this mean for Pacific Small Island Developing States?
Geopolitical competition in the region presents Pacific SIDS with a dilemma. On the one hand, more attention from larger States could be beneficial. As long as peace prevails, increased great power attention enables SIDS to leverage their geographic location. Competition between the US and China today – and which draws in Australia, Japan, India and New Zealand – provides a platform for small States to articulate their vision and design systems that fit them, as occurred with the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Continent. It also ensures larger States to outbid each other for influence.
But the risk is that these territories could one day become embroiled in an armed conflict not of their own making – as happened during the Second World War.
What the US should be mindful of
The US Government will be aware of the complexities of delivering aid to Pacific Islands, including the way archipelagic geographies substantially increase costs. They will also know, based on their experience in Micronesia, that this will likely be a long game.
US presence in the region hasn’t always been benign. Guam and American Samoa remain on the UN decolonisation list. The legacy
of colonialism, militarisation and nuclear testing in the North Pacific is profound, and the search for compensation by victims ongoing.
The US has a history of providing assistance to the region via ‘Compacts’, which are longer-term programmes of assistance.
These have some advantages over project aid provided by Australia and New Zealand and China’s infrastructure investments – all of which have left or ignored Pacific perspectives.
There is absolutely no suggestion that the US will extend these to South Pacific states, but this experience of longer-term commitments and engagement could shift the way assistance is delivered in the region.
However, substantial US assistance has a mixed record of facilitating economic development. Palau has the highest GDP per capita in the region, but FSM and Marshall Islands fare no better than islands to the South that are not covered by the US Compact.
Time will tell how the geopolitics plays out, but clearly the status quo of the past three decades in the Pacific is shifting. SIDS decisions increasingly matter, and they repeatedly show they can adapt geopolitical shifts to their benefit.
The strategic division established in the 1970s has run its course. Both Canberra and Washington agree: the US has to get back in the game in the South Pacific, because China has changed the game. What holds for the broader IndoPacific is now true for the South Pacific. Australia expends much money and might to prevent a Chinese ‘strategic surprise’ in the islands. That’s the phrase used by the US Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt Campbell, speaking in January at the launch of an Australia chair at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
What the US expects of Australia in the South Pacific
Since the modern South Pacific arrived in the 1960s and 1970s, the United States has handed significant regional responsibility to Australia and New Zealand.
America would do the duties of the big external power in Micronesia. Australia and New Zealand would ‘shoulder the main burden’ in Melanesia and Polynesia.
A buffed, burly ex–US Navy officer wily in the ways of Washington expressed the US stance with typical clipped directness: ‘Don’t understand the South Pacific. Happy to leave it to you. Always willing to help.’
The Washington insider was Richard Armitage, who served as an assistant secretary of defence (1981– 1989) and deputy secretary of State (2001–2005). My memory of Armitage’s description of the division of responsibilities is anecdotage from the late 1990s. For the formal expression of that division as it was being created, turn to Australian cabinet documents.
In a March 1977 Cabinet submission on Australian diplomatic representation in the South Pacific, Foreign Minister Andrew Peacock stressed the ‘urgent need for Australia to extend its official presence in the South Pacific’, because of efforts by the Soviet Union and China to increase their roles in the islands.
Peacock wrote that Washington expected Canberra and Wellington to carry the South Pacific load.
In discussions on Soviet and Chinese motives in the region, the United States Government has made it clear that, while it stands ready to play a supporting role, it looks to Australia and New Zealand to shoulder the main burden of ensuring the stability of the region and of developing close relations with the Island countries.
The United States also looks to Australia and New Zealand to provide most of the basic reporting and intelligence on the countries of the region.
By 1977, the two decades of decolonisation in Melanesia and Polynesia was nearly complete. Here’s the independence timeline: Western Samoa, 1962; Tonga, 1970; Fiji, 1970; Papua New Guinea, 1975; Solomon Islands, 1978; Kiribati, 1979; and Vanuatu, 1980.
The new South Pacific was born
Gough Whitlam’s Labor government (1972–1975) and Malcolm Fraser’s Coalition government (1975–1983) responded in the ways that still drive much of what Australia does in the islands. Whitlam and Fraser worked to remake Australia’s role while holding to a fundamental tenet of the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia: we must be the chief power in the South Pacific, a foreign policy and strategic imperative specified by the constitution in 1901.
Earlier prime ministers—Alfred Deakin, Billy Hughes, John Curtin— talked of empire and later of trust territories. Whitlam and Fraser had to find ways for Australia to be the key partner for newly independent neighbours. In creating that role in the 1970s, Canberra was also rethinking the Australia–US alliance following Vietnam, in the ‘aftermath of America’s greatest defeat in war in 160 years’ (a line from another wily Washington player, Robert Gates). America expected allies to do more of the strategic and diplomatic lifting.
Peacock repeated the message of South Pacific responsibility—and the complications involved—in a cabinet submission on US relations in December 1978: The Americans have looked to Australia and New Zealand to take the lead in the South Pacific, but have accepted Australian encouragement to take a more active role in the region. In view of Island sensitivities, Australia will need to exercise care in interposing itself between South Pacific countries and the US.
Under Fraser, Australia doubled its aid to the South Pacific and set up new diplomatic missions. Leaving aside aid pledged to Papua New Guinea.
1978 was the year that Australia gave more aid to the islands than New Zealand did. And so it has continued. Australia wants to be the top aid giver in the islands.
As for Peacock’s line about encouraging the US ‘to take a more active role in the region’, that’s been an occasional effort that never really shifted the fundamental settings. Until now.
The effect of the division of responsibilities over the five decades was most evident in the diplomatic, political and intelligence realms. A negative read would be that Washington went absent in Melanesia and Polynesia. A kinder version is that Washington had more important tasks everywhere else in the world, and had confidence in Australia and New Zealand to serve their own interests and their own region. On defence and strategy, the South Pacific gets plenty of attention from Hawaii, from the US Pacific Command, which in 2018 was renamed Indo-Pacific Command.
The jest used to be that in the old title of the US Commander in Chief Pacific—CINCPAC—the first ‘C’ stood for Caesar. This Caesar was a military tribune with more power than many of the prime ministers and presidents he treated with. Thus, Washington was relying on its tribune as well as its allies.
Yet even the tribune in Hawaii shares some of the Washington problem when it comes to Polynesia and Melanesia. With responsibility for more than half of the earth’s surface, IndoPacific Command has a lot of forces in a lot of places, but not many in the South Pacific.
The strategic division established in the 1970s has run its course. Both Canberra
and Washington agree: the US has to get back in the game in the South Pacific, because China has changed the game. What holds for the broader Indo-Pacific is now true for the South Pacific. Australia expends much money and might to prevent a Chinese ‘strategic surprise’ in the islands. That’s the phrase used by the US Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt Campbell, speaking in January at the launch of an Australia chair at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. Campbell said the US had to lift its game in the South Pacific, to match what’s done by Australia and New Zealand:
‘But that’s an area that we need much stronger commitment. And I’m, frankly, looking to Australia as the lead here. And we, as the United States, have to be a better deputy sheriff to them in this overall effort.’
The US as Australia’s ‘deputy sheriff’ shows Campbell’s dry humour, his understanding of the way roles have long been allocated, and his memory of the trouble former prime minister John Howard had with the ‘deputy sheriff ’ badge.
The US understanding of what Australia can deliver in the South Pacific has changed and that means the US role must change.