Clearly, America is determined to change the world’s perception that it is a marginal player in the resource-rich and geopolitically crucial region.

Dev Nadkarni
After the end of the Cold War and its more recent Middle East entanglements, the Pacific has receded into a mere blip on America’s geopolitical radar. Its involvement in the region except for the Northern Pacific—thanks to North Korea—has seemed desultory, even in its own tiny scattered territories off the Pacific Rim.

The superpower has acknowledged that it has been spending a lot less time, effort and resources in the region than it should be, attributing it to policy priorities and budgetary constraints.

The perception of its relative invisibility in the Pacific has been further accentuated by the high profile wrangling for one-upmanship in the islands between the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan over the last few years, not to speak of the ubiquitous influence of Australia and New Zealand across the entire Southern Ocean for decades.

Clearly, America is determined to change the world’s perception that it is a marginal player in the resource-rich and geopolitically crucial region.

Last month, it hosted the Pacific Islands Conference of Leaders (PICL)—a triennial meeting of heads of government and senior officials from the Pacific islands region.

Traditionally held in Hawaii, this is the first  time the meeting had a mainland venue—significantly, too, in the capital— Washington DC. The US has declared 2007 as the “Year of the Pacific”.

Weeks before the PICL conference, a senior US official said the country wanted to reverse any perception it had withdrawn from the Pacific.

With the “Year of the Pacific” theme, the US has sought to bring the importance it gives to the region into sharp focus within its own policymaking machinery as well as to get various government departments and agencies—including Defence, Coast Guard, Interior, the Peace Corps, among others—to work together in what it calls a “whole of government approach” to make the country’s presence felt in the region.

The region’s vastness, its resource richness, its proclivity for political instability, its perceived collective weakness that can potentially be exploited by transnational terrorist and crime organisations, compounded by America’s long neglect in the region, have all added to the acute sense of urgency in taking pro-active steps in the Pacific.

Last year, it sent Assistant Secretary of State, Christopher Hill, to attend the Pacific Islands Forum Meeting where he went on record saying his boss, Secretary of State Condolezza Rice, wanted to attend too but things being what they were with North Korea, she couldn’t.

Indeed, Hill has been hopping around the Pacific for a while, having visited Honiara, to consider opening an office there, and Wellington—where he asked for New Zealand’s “eyes” to view the Pacific and generally praising the country for its long and friendly relationships with the Pacific islands states. At last month’s Washington meeting he also announced scaling up his country’s diplomatic presence in the region with an extended facility in Suva.

But the United States must know that winning over the islands collectively will be no cakewalk, New Zealand’s “eyes” notwithstanding.

Despite their isolation and vulnerability, the islands have always demonstrated a fiercely individualistic streak. Whether it is in their support to China or Taiwan—an issue on which elections have been fought and governments toppled in the Solomon Islands, Kiribati and Vanuatu—or on issues like whaling, cooperation agreements (like air services), or even electing a Pacific islander as head of the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, the islands have always had difficulty seeing eye to eye. Given those precedents, the US cannot expect smooth sailing in Pacific waters.

In fact, it got a glimpse of the shape of things to come at last month’s PICL meeting in which America’s negative perceptions of the islands and its self-absorption in its own security concerns seemed to have dominated the agenda. Tongan Prime Minister Dr Feleti Sevele criticised the inclusion of country-specific issues on the conference agenda. 

Objecting to the fact that donor countries and agencies saw it fit to discuss political developments in Fiji, Tonga and the Solomons, the three countries supported by a few others, boycotted a briefing in which donors and donor organisations were to report back to the PICL on the outcome of their meeting.

Earlier, standing in for President George Bush, who was busy hosting Queen Elizabeth, Ms Rice came down heavily on Fiji, criticising its latest coup in her all-too-brief opening address saying the Pacific can not evolve into an area where strongmen unilaterally decide the fates of their countries and destabilise the democratic foundations of their neighbours.

Though the Fiji delegation expectedly objected to that comment, it received support from an unlikely quarter: US Congressman Eni Faleomavaega of American Samoa. He criticised America’s “double standards” in dealing with dictators saying if Pakistan coup leader and President Pervez Musharraf could visit the US 10 times, there was no reason why Fiji’s Interim Prime Minister should have been prevented from attending PICL.

Back from the Washington soiree, a growing number of islands leaders have been expressing their disenchantment with the proceedings. Cook Islands Prime Minister Jim Marurai has said he was disappointed with the meetings.

Perhaps the biggest challenge the US will face as it pursues its plans in the Pacific in the coming years is dealing with the islands’ loyalties to the long entrenched Asian powers that have been heaping their largesse on supporting nations—especially from the point of view of its own security concerns.

The episode of the Chinese satellite tracking station in Kiribati, that the US believed was keeping tabs on its Kwajalein Atoll base, being a case in point.

The entry of the US into the Pacific islands region especially with its thinly disguised, security-laden agenda is sure to add a new dimension to the prevailing geopolitical turbulence in the area, not to mention the contribution of smaller, more nimble players like the Philippines and Chile to the emerging Pacific Party as they make quiet but determined inroads into the region.