US adviser warns of ‘strategic surprise’ in region

Events in maritime zone risk catching Washington off guard, official fears

The Pacific may well be the part of the world most likely to see “strategic surprise”, the United States Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt Campbell has said, in comments apparently referring to possible Chinese ambitions to establish Pacific-island bases.

Campbell told Washington’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies that the US had “enormous moral, strategic, historical interests” in the Pacific, but not done enough to assist the region, unlike countries such as Australia and New Zealand.

“If you look and if you ask me, where are the places where we are most likely to see certain kinds of strategic surprise – basing or certain kinds of agreements or arrangements, it may well be in the Pacific,” he told an Australiafocused panel.

Campbell called it the issue he was “most concerned about over the next year or two”, adding: “And we have a very short amount of time, working with partners like Australia, like New Zealand, like Japan, like France, who have an interest in the Pacific, to step up our game across the board.”

He did not elaborate on what he had based his reference, but lawmakers from the Pacific island nation of Kiribati said last year that Beijing had drawn up plans to upgrade an airstrip and bridge on one of its remote islands about 3,000km southwest of the US state of Hawaii. Construction on the tiny island of Kanton would offer China a foothold deep in a territory that had been firmly aligned to the US and its allies since the second world war.

Kiribati said in May last year the Beijing-backed plans were a non-military project designed to improve transport links and bolster tourism.

Campbell said ways the US and its allies needed to do more in the Pacific included in countering Covid-19, on the issue of fishing, and in investment in clean energy.

He followed up on remarks he made last week that Washington needed to “step up its game” on economic engagement in Asia.

He said Australia had privately urged the US to understand that as part of its strategic approach, it needed to take “a comprehensive, engaged, optimistic, commercial and trade role”.

Campbell touted the so-called Aukus pact, under which the US and Britain have agreed to help Australia acquire nuclear submarines – as well as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue summits between the US, Australia, India and Japan – as evidence that American partnerships were causing China “heartburn”. But some Indo-Pacific countries, many of which count China as their largest trading partner, have lamented what they consider insufficient US economic engagement after former president Donald Trump quit a trade deal now called the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.

US President Joe Biden told Asian leaders in October that Washington would launch talks on creating an Indo-Pacific economic framework, but few details have emerged. Australia’s envoy to Washington, Arthur Sinodinos, said Canberra continued to raise the issue with the US Congress and “we haven’t given up hope” of a US trade policy.