Biden administration smooths Pacific Island Summit frictions

The Biden administration on Wednesday indicated that Solomon Islands had reversed a decision to refuse to sign on to a partnership declaration between the U.S. and Pacific Island countries, an issue that had threatened to cloud the White House’s efforts to deepen U.S. influence in the region.

The Solomon Islands, which signed a controversial security pact with China this year, was refusing to sign an 11-point summit declaration “designed to provide a framework for intensified U.S. engagement in the Pacific,” the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported Tuesday.

Also late Wednesday, the administration said that another reported sticking point ahead of the first-ever U.S.-Pacific Island Country Summit in Washington, D.C., the Marshall Islands’ suspension of talks planned for last weekend on renewing its strategic partnership, or Compact of Free Association Agreement, was inaccurate.

Ahead of the summit, which began Wednesday and will continue into Thursday, that reported dissension threatened to impede administration efforts to leverage the meeting as a symbol of U.S.-Pacific Island country unity. By defusing that discord the administration can claim victory in reinforcing regional support for the U.S. to counter China’s growing influence in the South Pacific.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that the U.S. and Pacific Island leaders — apparently including those of Solomon Islands — had sealed "a declaration of partnership between the U.S." Blinken said the declaration demonstrated the two sides’ “shared vision of the future,” but didn’t provide details on specific signatories. But his announcement suggests the administration had wrangled last minute changes in the document’s wording that had prompted Solomon Islands’initial refusal to sign on.

The declaration "was not done yesterday,” a senior administration official told POLITICO. "Not only [with] Solomon Islands but several others … negotiations had not been completed.”

The official also disputed a report that the Marshall Islands hadsuspended talks with the U.S. on renewing its strategic partnership to protest the perceived U.S. failure to address the economic, environmental and health legacy of U.S. nuclear weapons testing around the atolls from 1946 to 1958.

“There never was an interruption in COFA talks with Marshall Islands — we met with their delegation earlier this week and agreed on the dates for next discussions,” said the official. “So it was never the case that because of the nuclear issue, or because of whatever issue that we or they refused to meet, that was never the case.” The official declined to comment on the report asserting the talks’ suspension.

POLITICO efforts to contact representatives of the Marshall Islands and Solomon Islands were unsuccessful.

But reports of their initial public pushback marked a humbling kick-off for the two-day summit and underscores the challenges that the Biden administration faces in redeeming U.S. credibility in a region where China is filling the void created by decades of U.S. disengagement. But the administration is adamant that the two-day summit will deliver tangible benefits for Pacific Island countries that will underscore U.S. resolve to be their superpower partner of choice.

“This summit is quite a while in the making and we believe it will be a substantial investment,” a different senior administration official said Tuesday. “We will talk specifically about programs and agencies and specific budget numbers.”

Blinken rolled out the first of those numbers Wednesday by announcing $4.8 million in U.S. funding for the new Resilient Blue Economies initiative aimed to “strengthen marine livelihoods by supporting sustainable fisheries, aquaculture, tourism.”

Detailed deliverables powered by generous U.S. funding is essential if the administration wants to counter China’s growing influence in the region. For many Pacific Islanders, the most visible symbols of U.S. engagement are the remains of former World War II battlefields such as Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. That influence vacuum has lubricated China’s diplomatic inroads over the past two decades in the absence of a competitive U.S. alternative.

The administration is coordinating its summit outreach with its Partners in the Blue Pacific initiative with allies Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom “to add more resources, more capacity, more diplomatic engagement as a whole,” said the official. The summit will also mark the launch of the U.S. government’s first-ever Pacific Strategy, a regional-specific compliment to the administration’s China-containing Indo-Pacific Strategy launched in September 2021.

“This [strategy] is specifically aimed at the concerns and the objectives in the Pacific as a whole … [and] about how to organize the disparate elements of the U.S. government toward tackling issues like climate change, training, issues associated with [over]fishing, investments in technology,” the official said Tuesday.

Initiatives to address the existential threat that the climate crisis poses to Pacific Island countries will get their leaders’ attention. China has helped power its diplomatic inroads with a bespoke climate diplomacy aimed to address concerns about rising sea levels. China’s special envoy on climate change, Xie Zhenhua, earlier this month convened a “climate change dialogue and exchange meeting” in Beijing with diplomatic representatives from Vanuatu, Samoa, Kiribati, Solomon Islands, Micronesia, Fiji and Tonga, the Chinese Foreign Ministry reported.

The administration deployed Blinken, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry on Wednesday to tout the administration’s determination to improve Pacific Island countries’ links to the U.S. “We’ll have the following day a major event at the Chamber of Commerce when the leaders will have an opportunity to engage with a broad array of business groups ranging from tourism [and] travel to energy to technology, to essentially talk about how U.S. business groups can be more actively engaged,” the official said Tuesday.

Special Presidential Envoy Ambassador Joseph Yun told POLITICO last week that the State Department was on track to renew COFAs with Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands by end-2022 after six months of intensive negotiations. Those agreements will effectively firewall those three countries from Beijing’s efforts to displace the U.S. as the region’s dominant superpower.

But the initial resistance of Solomon Islands to sign on to the summit declaration will heighten administration concerns about the influence of the country’s security pact with Beijing on its relations with the U.S. Solomon Islands denied port access to a U.S. Coast Guard cutter last month due to unspecified “bureaucratic reasons” and subsequently imposed a temporary moratorium on all foreign naval ships.