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WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House on Thursday unveiled a Pacific strategy designed to bolster U.S. engagement with more than a dozen island nations on issues including climate change and maritime security while pledging to expand the U.S. diplomatic presence in the region.
The Biden administration released its new strategy, as well as plans for $810 million in new aid for Pacific Island nations, as President Joe Biden prepared to meet with leaders attending the U.S.-Pacific Island Country Summit. The Democratic president was set to address the summit on Thursday and then host the leaders for a dinner at the White House. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with leaders on Wednesday at the State Department.
The White House also announced plans to recognize the Cook Islands and Niue as sovereign states, after "appropriate consultations." The United Nations recognized the rights of the two self-governing islands in free association with New Zealand to establish diplomatic relations with other countries in the early 1990s, but the United States is not among countries to do so.
Biden is looking to turn up engagement with Pacific Island nations as part of his broader effort to shift U.S. foreign policy focus toward Asia and offer a counterweight to China's growing military and economic influence in the region.
The 16-page document notes “heightened geopolitical competition impacts” for the Pacific Island countries that also directly affect the United States.
“Increasingly those impacts include pressure and economic coercion by the People’s Republic of China, which risks undermining the peace, prosperity, and security of the region, and by extension, of the United States,” the strategy document says. "These challenges demand renewed U.S. engagement across the full Pacific Islands region."
Among the broad strategy aims laid out by the Biden administration in the document are expanding the number of U.S. diplomatic missions from six to nine across the Pacific and completing work to renew strategic partnership agreements with the Pacific Island nations of Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands that are set to soon expire. The strategy also calls for increasing the presence in the region of the U.S. Coast Guard, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Pentagon.
Leaders from Fiji, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, the Cook Islands, French Polynesia and New Caledonia are attending the two-day summit. Vanuatu and Nauru sent representatives, and Australia, New Zealand and the secretary-general of the Pacific Island Forum sent observers, according to the White House.
White House officials acknowledge that U.S. inattentiveness toward the region since the end of the Cold War has left an opening for Beijing to exert its influence.
Plans for the summit were announced earlier this month, just days after the Solomon Islands called on the U.S. and Britain not to send naval vessels to the South Pacific nation until approval processes are overhauled. The Solomons in April signed a new security pact with China.
And just last week, the Marshall Islands pulled out of a negotiating session with the U.S. over their Compact of Free Association, which expires next year. The Marshall Islands says the U.S. isn’t engaging on its claim for proper reparations from the legacy of U.S. nuclear testing in the islands.
The Marshall Islands says there was extensive environmental and health damage from the dozens of tests in the 1940s and 1950s, which a settlement in the 1980s fell well short of addressing.
Besides their meeting with Biden, island leaders are scheduled to meet on Thursday with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.