China is expanding security partnerships with island states across the Pacific, according to American lawmakers and officials wary of the communist regime moving to curtail U.S. influence in a critical region.
“Through foreign assistance, elite capture, and robust public messaging campaigns, the PRC has moved aggressively to assert itself in the Pacific Islands,” Assistant Secretary Daniel Kritenbrink, the lead State Department official for East Asia and the Pacific, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday.
Those efforts are paying off, most recently in the form of an agreement to open a Chinese police outpost in Kiribati, an island nation whose strategic location made it the scene of an intense battle between U.S. and imperial Japanese forces during World War II. U.S. officials have been working to halt the slide, but even recent American diplomatic successes could be undermined by Beijing’s initiatives.
“Papua New Guinea, which just signed a new security pact with us last year, has been approached by China about a new security and policing arrangement,” Sen. James Risch (R-ID), the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said during the hearing. “Chinese police are present in Kiribati, and we know China has set its sights on other nations.”
Such countries might appear small on a map of the globe, but they loom large for strategists in capitals around the world, from Washington to Beijing, because the island states have sovereignty and economic rights over vast waterways that link U.S. forces in Hawaii to the broader Pacific Rim.
“Our whole approach to the Pacific Islands is to listen to the Pacific Island leaders, what their top needs are … and then to make sure that we meet the needs that are outlined in [their] strategy,” Kritenbrink said.
Yet U.S. policymakers sometimes have struggled to follow through on that rhetoric even in relatively simple cases, such as the renewal of the agreements that organize U.S. ties to the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau. Known as Compacts of Free Association, these deals “ensure that the United States – and only the United States – can maintain a military presence” in those countries, as a senior Pentagon official who testified alongside Kritenbrink put it, but Congress only authorized funding for the agreements last week, following a lengthy delay.
“Our defense posture in the Pacific Islands countries, ranging in levels of presence from a permanent footprint to rotational forces, is critical for U.S. military logistics, sustainment, and power projection,” said Assistant Secretary Ely Ratner, the top Pentagon official for the Indo-Pacific, during the hearing. “Failure to extend the economic assistance related to the Compacts would have had serious consequences for the economies of our FAS partners, our strategy in the broader Pacific Islands region, and, ultimately, our national security.”
China has proven effective at using tactics that U.S. officials regard as buying influence in the region to persuade countries such as the Solomon Islands to cut ties with Taiwan and establish a strategic relationship with Beijing. U.S. officials have struggled to counter those initiatives in part because of a hesitance in the United States to enter into major trade agreements.
“We have to be realistic, that if we do not have a robust trade agenda in the Pacific Island countries, that they will — not by desire, maybe, but by default — ultimately deal with the Chinese,” Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) said Thursday.
U.S. officials have warned in the meantime that China’s influence, including the policing partnerships, comes with painful downsides for the countries it targets.
“Certainly, when you think about some areas where countries ought to be cautious about their engagement with China, part of it is the leverage and the coercive avenues that are opened up for the government,” Kritenbrink said. “Part of it is really the organized crime, as well.”
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Risch, the Idaho Republican, suggested that the administration develop a plan to assist governments with internal security as an alternative to Chinese arrangements.
“I would strongly suggest that you guys revisit your efforts in that regard and see how you might be able to make them more attractive, so when they do bite on the hook, that it’s our hook and not the Chinese,” he said.
