US Opens Door For China Advances In The Pacific

After winning control of the Solomon Islands and other island nations, US forces hopscotched west across the Pacific under intense hostile fire and helped defeat Japan.

Today, many of the Solomon Islands' 720,000 citizens say they favor Manele not for his international stance, but in hopes his Ownership, Unity and Responsibility (OUR) Party will upgrade the islands' poor health care, transportation infrastructure, electricity supply, schools, employment opportunities, housing and other daily needs.

The Solomon Islands is one of the world's poorest nations. China granted the Solomon Islands a $66 million loan so the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei could construct mobile telecommunications towers on its islands.

Huawei also won a 2018 contract for underwater telecommunication cables to and from the islands, financed by the Solomon Islands and Australia.

In 2023, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Kiribati, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, and the Cook Islands sent delegates to hear China's plan to strengthen law enforcement and security cooperation during a meeting billed as a“Ministerial Dialogue on Police Capacity Building and Cooperation Between China and Pacific Island Countries in Beijing.”

In a joint 2023 statement, the Solomon Islands reportedly agreed to Beijing's positions on Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet.

“China has been on the front foot across the Pacific for many years, doing trade and security deals with island countries, while the US is only now stepping up with new embassies opening in Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Kiribati and Tonga,” said Ben Bohane, a Vanuatu-based Pacific political analyst and photojournalist.

“From an island point of view, the competition has given them leverage for the first time as various powers come to court them – not just China and the US but Arab countries, Israel, Japan and even India,” Bohane said in an interview.

Meanwhile, on the island nation of Kiribati, a“Chinese police delegation team works with the Kiribati Police Service to assist a community policing program, and martial arts kung fu, and an IT (information technology) department, assisting our crime database,” Kiribati's acting Police Commissioner Eeri Aritiera told Reuters in February.

About a dozen Chinese cops in uniform landed for a six-month rotation in 2023 and have since been refreshed.

“We do not believe importing security forces from [China] will help any country,” the US State Department told government-run Voice of America (VOA) in February when asked about Kiribati and China. Kiribati is situated 2,100 kilometers south of Hawaii and established relations with China in 2019 after cutting out Taiwan.

China is planning how to finance the revamping of a two-kilometer runway on Kiribati's Kanton Island, a coral atoll that had been a major stopover for military and commercial aircraft during World War II.

China and Kiribati agreed to upgrade Kanton into an imagined tourism destination attracting Chinese tourists who would also visit the country's other islands. If financed and built by China, the airstrip on Kanton would be for passenger flights, including within Kiribati's chain of islands, but not for military use, Kiribati said.

Kiribati also receives financial assistance from the US, Canada, Japan, the European Union and others.

“Australia is supporting the Kiribati Police Service with major upgrades to its policing infrastructure, including a new barracks and headquarters and radio network,” Australia's Foreign Affairs Department told Reuters in February.

Kiribati's islands are splattered in four sectors across the map, where the International Dateline intersects the Equator.

Some islands are east of the Dateline while other islands are on the west side, and some islands are north of the Equator while some are below it.

Kiribati claims more than 3.5 million square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean's territorial rights – one of the planet's biggest exclusive economic zones.

“Pacific nations have long felt their infrastructure needs have not been met, so if traditional partners like Australia, New Zealand, and the US don't provide the wharves and roads and airports, then it is hard for them to tell island countries not to accept assistance from China,” Bohane said.

Washington influences some control over three island nations – Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau – under The Compacts of Free Association (COFA).

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Under the agreement, signed in 2023, the Pentagon can land troops and weapons on COFA's territories and block other countries from doing so. The US military is popular among many COFA citizens who joined the US armed forces as a fast track to become American citizens after serving in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

COFA's tiny Palau invited the Pentagon to build ports, bases and airfields on its islands, after feeling economically exploited and destabilized by China's overwhelming wealth, according to Palau President Surangel Whipps.

Under COFA, the US agreed to pay $7 billion over the next 20 years in assistance to Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau. In February however,“the funding was dropped from the security supplemental in the US Senate, under pressure from conservatives who wanted to lower costs,” VOA reported.

“With no amendment process permitted, the funds could not be added back in.”

A mangled COFA could wreck the islands' confidence in US backing, critics said. It“opens the door for China to make similar overtures to the COFA nations,” Hawaii's Senator Mazie Hirono warned.

America depends on a Three Island Chain to buffer the US west coast from China's eastern shores, a concept rooted in 1951 during the US-Korea War to guard against the Soviet Union and China.

The First Island Chain includes Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Borneo and other islands closest to China in the increasingly weaponized and contested South China and East China seas.

The Second Island Chain is further from China and links Guam and the Mariana Islands, Palau, Yap and islands further south.

The Third Island Chain runs south from the Aleutian Islands, through the center of the Pacific and the Hawaiian Islands, to American Samoa, Fiji and New Zealand.

Richard S. Ehrlich is a Bangkok-based American foreign correspondent reporting from Asia since 1978, and winner of Columbia University's Foreign Correspondents' Award. Excerpts from his two new nonfiction books,“Rituals. Killers. Wars. & Sex. - Tibet, India, Nepal, Laos, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka & New York” and“Apocalyptic Tribes, Smugglers & Freaks” are available here .