Spooked by China’s influence in the Pacific Islands, U.S. President Joe Biden hosted an unprecedented summit at the White House for leaders from the Pacific Islands Forum on 28-29 September. It was the culmination of a series of initiatives over recent months, as the U.S. government plays catch up in a complex and crowded geopolitical arena.
Overall, Pacific leaders left Washington well pleased, with an 11-point declaration of U.S.-Pacific partnership, a strong focus on climate action, a grab bag of funding pledges and significant diplomatic commitments for Forum members not represented at the United Nations. Island leaders welcomed the Biden administration’s recognition of “the climate crisis as the highest priority of our partnership, for it remains the single greatest existential threat to the livelihoods, security, traditional and customary practices, and wellbeing of people in the Pacific region.”
Despite these successes, the summit highlighted the fundamental contradictions of U.S. policies in the islands region. It took extensive lobbying for the Biden administration to invite all Forum island members to the summit, raising concern about the sincerity of U.S. support for the key regional organisation. Accompanying the summit declaration, a new ‘Pacific Partnerships Strategy of the United States’ highlights China as the key regional security driver, despite the declaration’s focus on the climate emergency. State Department factsheets detailing new initiatives are a jumbled list of commitments from diverse U.S. agencies, without much strategic coherence.
Beyond this, Forum leaders are well aware of the long process from political pledge to policy formulation, legislation, funding and then action on the ground. For example, Vice President Mike Pence announced a U.S.-led PNG Electrification Partnership (PEP) at the 2018 APEC summit in Port Moresby – little has been achieved to meet this pledge of electricity across 70% of Papua New Guinea by 2030. Now, a new plan to expand PEP across the islands region gained a meagre US$18 million pledge “subject to Congressional notification and domestic procedures.” This money won’t go far, beyond enriching some US consultants.
While there is bipartisan US support for greater engagement in the Pacific, some Pacific leaders fear the US Democratic Party may lose its majority in the House or Senate in November’s mid-term elections. After that, contested Presidential elections loom large in 2024 and a Republican victory will gut climate policy (Obama-era pledges were quickly abandoned by incoming President Donald Trump, who withdrew from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and refused to pay the remaining US$2 billion in climate finance pledged by the Obama administration to the Green Climate Fund).
Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown serves as the region’s champion on climate finance at global climate talks. While welcoming new US commitments, Brown wants results at COP27 in Egypt in November: “The US and developed nations have to step up and deliver now on their climate finance commitments,” he said. “We need increased grant and concessional lending and support to reform debt financing modalities.”
Policy changes
In Washington, the two-day event was crowded with side meetings, including a working lunch on people-centred development chaired by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken; talks with Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo on economic and trade opportunities; a climate roundtable with US Special Envoy John Kerry; meetings with business executives and discussions on challenges in the maritime domain.
As he welcomed island leaders to the White House, President Joe Biden re-announced a number of recent commitments, including plans for US embassies in Solomon Islands, Tonga and Kiribati and the opening of a US Agency for International Development (USAID) regional mission in Fiji by September 2023. Peace Corps volunteers will return to Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and Vanuatu (and possibly the Solomon Islands). Biden also announced the appointment of former US ambassador to Fiji, Frankie Reed, as the first ever US Envoy to the Pacific Islands Forum.
The 11-point ‘Declaration on US-Pacific Partnership’ includes headline commitments that are central to the Forum’s Blue Pacific agenda: bolstering Pacific regionalism and “the important role played by the Pacific Islands Forum”; “strengthening our partnership” and tackling the climate crisis together as a priority; economic growth and sustainable development; preparing and responding to natural disasters; cooperation on maritime security “to protect the Blue Pacific and enhance the laws that govern it”; maintaining peace and security; addressing COVID; and the promotion of nuclear non-proliferation.
When you dig into each part of the declaration, however, some of the commitments ring hollow. For all the US rhetoric on the “rules based order”, successive administrations have refused to ratify key instruments of international law that are crucial for Blue Pacific agendas, such as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
And how seriously can anyone take Biden’s pledge of support for the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, when the United States is the only major nuclear weapons state that has refused to ratify the SPNFZ protocols? Pledges of US support for nuclear non-proliferation are risible (except in the case of official enemies like Iran and North Korea) – the US is modernising its nuclear arsenal and hoping to sell nuclear submarines to Australia, angering some ASEAN and island nations.
Geopolitical complications
Last June, the US initiated the ‘Partners in the Blue Pacific’ (PBP) initiative with Australia, New Zealand, Japan and the United Kingdom, “for more effective and efficient cooperation in support of Pacific Island priorities.”
At the time, regional scholars like Tarcisius Kabutaulaka, Greg Fry and Terence Wesley-Smith argued this White House initiative “effectively forms a special group of five ‘like-minded’ partners with a shared interest in displacing or competing with China. This then becomes a new grouping in the regional architecture – an inner circle – which complicates and ignores existing structures.”
Germany and Canada have now announced plans to join PBP, but French President Macron has been wary of being fully integrated into US containment policy against China. While they have attended PBP meetings as observers, France and the EU are not founding partners, reflecting post-AUKUS tensions as well as ongoing competition for regional arms sales between US corporations like Lockheed and Europe’s EADS.
Analysing the summit, former Forum Secretary General Dame Meg Taylor and Soli Middleby stressed: “Recent Western-led initiatives such as AUKUS, the Indo-Pacific Strategy and the Partners in the Blue Pacific … all deliver a fait accompli to the Pacific without consultation. They disregard the Pacific’s own regional processes and perspectives while claiming to be working in the Pacific ‘family’s’ interests.”
Financial pledges
The White House summit saw bold US commitments to finance its new agenda, announcing more than US$810 million in additional expanded programs, on top of “over $1.5 billion to support the Pacific Islands over the past decade.” However, the summit communiqué features spin as well as substance.
The US$810 million commitment includes $600 million in fisheries funding already announced by Vice President Kamala Harris in her virtual speech to last July’s Forum leaders meeting in Suva – money that is yet to be approved by the US Congress.
Most of the past decade’s US$1.5 billion in regional funds has gone to the three Freely Associating States in the northern Pacific (the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau and Republic of the Marshall Islands). The Compact of Free Association (COFA) agreements with these three Micronesian states are due to expire soon (September 2023 for RMI and FSM and a year later for Palau). Despite their centrality to US strategic planning against China, there are still roadblocks in the US bureaucracy which are delaying COFA renewal.
Last year, US Congresswoman Katie Porter told Congressional hearings on the 67 US nuclear tests at Bikini and Enewetak atolls: “The United States is not willing to discuss the nuclear legacy with the Marshallese …The resistance is on the side of the United States government, and I think it’s going to be very difficult for us to start the negotiations to extend COFA unless we act on the moral and national security imperative that we have to address that nuclear legacy.”
Just before the summit, the RMI government used heightened attention on the Pacific to announce it would not join the latest round of COFA talks, given the failure of the US Congress to guarantee full nuclear compensation (after rulings from the RMI Nuclear Claims Tribunal, more than US$2.4 billion is still owed to Marshallese landowners for damage to property and health).
At the summit, the Biden administration’s pledge of an extra US$130 million in climate finance was warmly welcomed by island leaders. To avoid Congressional roadblocks for these funds, the White House did some fancy footwork to reallocate unspent funding pledged to Egypt (ironically, the host of November’s COP27 climate negotiations!).
According to Associated Press, “the Biden administration will pay for $130 million in new climate initiatives for Pacific Island nations by reallocating money that had originally been earmarked for military assistance for Egypt, but withheld because of concerns over human rights abuses…the money reprogrammed was a portion of $1.3 billion in foreign military financing allotted for Egypt in the 2020 budget. The administration froze $130 million in funding over Egypt’s failure to improve human rights conditions.”
Engaging with the territories
Before the summit, US statements on the centrality of the Pacific Islands Forum rang hollow, given the initial invitation was only extended to island states with UN representation, not the full Forum membership. In the weeks leading up to the meeting, Forum Secretariat officials and government leaders lobbied hard to ensure that all Forum island governments were invited, along with Forum Secretary General Henry Puna.
After the recent Pacific Islands Conference of Leaders (PICL) conference on September 12-14, FSM President David Panuelo confirmed to Islands Business that Samoa and Niue raised this rebuff with US officials: “Samoa did flag that with the United States and Niue did directly flag those concerns.
“The Pacific Islands Forum is our premier regional organisation and it will remain that way,” Panuelo said. “When the US invites our region, we want to be inclusive of all the members of the Forum as a family.”
The absence of Kiribati President Taneti Maamau and leaders from Vanuatu and Nauru (both mid-election) reflected ongoing pressures for regional coordination. In recent years, the Forum Secretariat has expended extensive time and energy resolving diplomatic mini-dramas, such as China-Taiwan jousting or the United States demanding separate meetings apart from other Forum Dialogue Partners.
Now, in a positive sign, island leaders are pushing back, with Secretary General Puna noting: “The direction from our Forum Leaders is clear, as they themselves have been steadfast in their encouragement of all Forum Dialogue Partners to recognise and respect our regional mechanisms, including our Blue Pacific Principles for Dialogue and Engagement.”
The lobbying over attendance was worth the effort. In a major policy shift, the United States announced plans to upgrade diplomatic relations with Cook Islands and Niue, both self-governing states with ties to New Zealand that are not represented at the United Nations. President Biden said: “I’m proud to announce that, following appropriate consultations, we will recognise the Cook Islands and Niue as sovereign states.”
Cook Islands Secretary of Foreign Affairs Tepaeru Herrmann has been lobbying to open this door to greater US engagement. After the summit, she said: “Today’s announcement is not only welcomed, it heralds a new era in not just US-Cook Islands relations, but the platform from which the Cook Islands conducts its international engagements moving forward.”
The presence at the White House of Presidents Louis Mapou of New Caledonia and Edouard Fritch of French Polynesia was another unprecedented highlight, reflecting the increasing regional integration of the two French dependencies since they joined the Forum as full members in 2016. Even though the French government had authorised their participation, images of the flags of Kanaky and French Polynesia flying at the White House went viral on local social media.
Still smarting from the September 2021 AUKUS decision that undercut France’s Indo Pacific strategy, photos of President Biden hobnobbing with Mapou and Fritch angered pro-French loyalists at home and officials in Paris. Anti-independence politician Nicolas Metzdorf, who represents New Caledonia in the French National Assembly, sharply questioned French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, claiming that “leaving these two communities of the Republic alone with the USA is at best a diplomatic fault, at worst an abandonment of sovereignty.”
In contrast, President Mapou told the White House summit his country “is opening a new page in its history since we are engaged, with the French State, in a process which has been called, explicitly, a decolonisation process.” The first pro-independence President in New Caledonia in 40 years then travelled on to New York to address the United Nations 4th Special Political and Decolonisation Committee, reinforcing the central call for decolonisation as leaders begin talks in Paris on New Caledonia’s political status.
The C-word
Despite the summit’s success, US geopolitical agendas will continue to crowd out island priorities. While the official joint declaration on US-Pacific partnership doesn’t directly mention the People’s Republic of China, the accompanying ‘Pacific partnerships strategy of the United States’ is bluntly critical of Beijing, which “risks undermining the peace, prosperity, and security of the region, and by extension, of the United States.”
Speaking in Wellington after the summit, Solomon Islands Foreign Minister Jeremiah Manele said the initial draft of the declaration included “some references that we were not comfortable with…There was some references that put us in a position that we would have to choose sides, and we don’t want to be placed in a position that we have to choose sides.”
China’s recent diplomatic initiatives in the region have panicked defence and intelligence officials across the Anglosphere, with a US State Department memo noting: “As the recent signing of a new PRC-Solomon Islands security agreement demonstrates, we may be in the early stages of an historic shift in the Pacific that would usher in a new security paradigm — one that is unfavorable to US security interests, will frustrate our ability to effectively compete with the PRC, and will impede implementation of the Indo-Pacific Strategy.”
The summit and its shopping list of commitments reflect growing US panic over regional geopolitical trends. However, action speaks louder than words. A decade ago, then US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton came to the 2012 Forum leaders meeting in Rarotonga, pledging regional engagement – with few concrete results. Will leaders face the same disappointment as they return to Cook Islands for the next Forum leaders’ summit in 2023?
