The Biden administration’s push to counter China will reach new heights over the coming days as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken visit island nations in the South Pacific to pursue new military and diplomatic outposts in the hotly contested region.
Simultaneous trips highlighting Washington’s fierce strategic rivalry with Beijing include Mr. Austin’s stop in Papua New Guinea, the first ever by a U.S. defense secretary. The tiny nation has opened the way for American forces to access its territory in the face of China’s growing security footprint in the nearby Solomon Islands.
A significant diplomatic component is also at play. Mr. Blinken visits Tonga on Wednesday to dedicate a U.S. Embassy there as the State Department beefs up personnel and spending at new facilities in island nations across the region.
Since the beginning of the year, the Biden administration has signed a defense agreement with Papua New Guinea, opened embassies in the Solomon Islands and Tonga, renewed free trade pacts with Micronesia and Palau and stepped up senior-level visits at a pace not seen in years.
Mr. Blinken will head to New Zealand before joining Mr. Austin in Australia on Friday and Saturday for the annual Australia-U.S. Ministerial Consultations, which officials say are aimed at advancing “unprecedented cooperation” in the Indo-Pacific.
The Biden administration is facing congressional criticism that it has not met the regional strategic challenge posed by China. Still, analysts say, the visits highlight the president’s buy-in to a broader, bipartisan campaign to ramp up U.S. presence in a corner of the world long seen as an afterthought to strategic policy.
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“China has reminded us that this part of the world is important,” said Brian Harding, the senior expert on the region at the U.S. Institute of Peace. “Just look back at World War II to see why the geography of the Pacific islands might be relevant to a broader conflict in the region.
“It’s important because there are a lot of countries there, and it matters whether these countries are going to be democracies that are transparent and whether they are going to vote with us at the United Nations or side with us in other international forums,” he said.
The U.S. recognizes 12 independent Pacific island nations. Several of them are now caught in a tug of war between Washington and Beijing over influence and access.
“In years past, these nations were literally flyover countries when U.S. Cabinet secretaries were going to Australia, New Zealand or Indonesia,” Mr. Harding said. “Now the secretary of state is literally stopping in Tonga and the secretary of defense is literally stopping in Papua New Guinea. That says a lot about the rising importance of the region.”
Mr. Blinken, who also plans to take in a U.S. match at the Women’s World Cup in New Zealand, is making his third visit to Asia in two months.
The secretary had a tense visit to China last month and was in Indonesia this month for an annual U.S. meeting with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Washington and Beijing are jockeying for influence over the regional diplomatic forum.
China has said the tandem Blinken-Austin visits smack of desperation in an area that the U.S. has long dismissed as insignificant.
Chen Hong, president of the Chinese Association of Australian Studies and director of the Australian Studies Center at East China Normal University, told the state-controlled Global Times this week that Washington “has neglected this region for years. Now it is striving to court regional countries only after seeing their growing cooperation with China. Just like a Band-Aid, plastered on where it hurts.”
The Biden administration’s eagerness to “send so many olive branches to the region,” the analyst told the news website, “just proves how successful China’s cooperation with those countries is.”
Diplomacy and leverage
U.S. officials say Beijing has established permanent diplomatic facilities in eight of the 12 Pacific island nations recognized by Washington and gains leverage through the power of China’s massive domestic economy and import markets.
China’s assertive maritime moves are raising regional concerns. Palauan President Surangel Whipps Jr. told Reuters last month that his government had asked the United States to step up patrols of the island’s waters after Chinese vessels made several incursions into the country’s exclusive economic zone.
Unease about China’s effort to establish a strategic military access point in the Solomon Islands spiked last year when the tiny nation signed a secretive security agreement with Beijing.
Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare has rejected suggestions that his government might give China a military foothold, but his country has already aligned with Beijing over the status of Taiwan. The Solomon Islands moved in 2019 to abandon recognition of the U.S.-backed island democracy, which China claims as part of its territory.
The Sogavare government more recently signed an agreement to boost cooperation with China on “law enforcement and security matters,” raising the prospect that Beijing will exert influence over the internal affairs of Pacific island nations.
Two days after news of the agreement broke last month, State Department documents outlined U.S. plans for a massive increase in diplomatic personnel and spending in the region.
In a notice sent to Congress and obtained by The Associated Press, the department said it envisions hiring up to 40 staffers over the next five years for each of four recently opened or soon-to-be-opened U.S. embassies in the region.
Those include an embassy in the Solomon Islands that opened in January, the embassy in Tonga that Mr. Blinken will dedicate on Wednesday, and planned embassies in Port Vila, Vanuatu, and Tarawa, Kiribati. Embassies in Honiara and Nuku’alofa have only two temporary American staffers.
Mr. Harding noted in an interview that “before all this movement, there were only two U.S. embassies in the South Pacific that were accredited to eight countries.”
“If you’re going to take a region seriously, that doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “The challenge is how do we work with these countries on issues they care about and harness the energy that is coming because of the strategic competition with China.
“Countries in the region have concerns about China, but they also see China as an economic partner,” Mr. Harding said. “The main concerns of these countries are issues of climate change and economic development.”
More parts to the puzzle
The Biden administration has said new embassies are only part of the puzzle.
A White House statement last year said unity within the Pacific Islands Forum, another multinational organization, should be at the center of efforts to promote regional unity. The statement said the administration is committed to tripling its congressional funding requests for economic development and ocean resilience in the region and doing more to help individual island nations contend with climate change. The White House also has promised to reestablish a presence for the Peace Corps in the region.
A diplomatic centerpiece of the push was supposed to be a visit by Mr. Biden to Papua New Guinea in May for what would have been the first-ever visit by a sitting U.S. president. The trip was canceled at the last minute as Mr. Biden rushed back to Washington to deal with debt limit talks with congressional Republicans.
Mr. Austin is visiting U.S.-Papua New Guinea after the May signing of a bilateral security agreement. It comes with speculation about the scope and nature of growing defense ties. The Pentagon has not divulged specifics, but Agence France-Presse has reported that the deal opens the way for Washington to station troops and vessels at six Papua New Guinean ports and airports.
The nation of roughly 10 million people is situated across a group of islands east of Indonesia and is home to precious metals and other resources.
Mr. Harding said Exxon Mobil, which has a vast natural gas operation in Papua New Guinea, is the country’s top foreign investor.
“It is not a coincidence that Secretary Austin’s visit comes on the heels of the signing of a defense cooperation agreement that holds out the potential for U.S. military access in Papua New Guinea,” he said.
“Beijing is absolutely watching,” he said.
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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