Biden launches $810M Pacific Island diplomatic initiative

The Biden administration has launched a diplomatic initiative — the Pacific Partnership Strategy — to reinforce its intent to counter China’s growing influence in the region. The initiative is timed to be the centerpiece of the two-day first-everU.S.-Pacific Island Country Summit, which concludes Thursday.

The Strategy —a 16-page document bolstered by two separate fact sheets — outlines objectives hinged to deepening U.S. engagement with Pacific Island countries backed by generous funding commitments and benchmarks to track the Strategy’s rollout.

The initiative’s substance and timing reflect the administration’s recognition of the geostrategic perils of a region where China is filling the void created by decades of U.S. disengagement. But the administration’s biggest challenge will be to convince skeptical Pacific Island countries that the Strategy reflects a long-term U.S. commitment to the region, rather than temporary panic about Beijing’s intentions.

“Pressure and economic coercion by the People’s Republic of China … risks undermining the peace, prosperity, and security of the region, and by extension, of the United States,” the Pacific Partnership Strategy introduction said. “These challenges demand renewed U.S. engagement across the full Pacific Islands region. To that end, President Biden is elevating broader and deeper engagement with the Pacific Islands as a priority of U.S. foreign policy.”

The Strategy identifies key Pacific Island concerns as top priorities for U.S. engagement with the region, including the risks wrought by the climate crisis, damage done by illegal factory fishing fleets and the economic displacement inflicted by the pandemic. But Pacific Island leaders convening in Washington on Thursday will want to see the U.S. back that rhetoric with action.

“The Pacific has heard it all before and they're going to want to see real commitments,” said John T. Hennessey-Niland, recently the U.S. ambassador to Palau and now professor of practice at the Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University. “The risk would be to over-promise and under-deliver … we need to find the resources to do what is required in this increasingly strategic part of the world.”

The Biden administration is committing $810 million to the Strategy to counter such skepticism. That figure — which includes a “10-year $600 million Economic Assistance Agreement request to Congress” — suggests the administration is seeking to avoid the ridicule it endured for the relatively paltry $150 million Biden doled out among ASEAN’s 10 member states in May.

The spending spree doesn’t stop there. The administration will also seek $5 million from Congress “to establish a fellowship program in partnership with the University of the South Pacific and premier universities in the United States.” The Strategy also budgets a $22 million for climate change resilience and ocean and weather data collection. That largesse follows Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s announcement Wednesday of $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.”

But Biden isn’t just throwing money at the Pacific Island countries. The strategy outlines specific benchmarks of U.S. engagement. They include bolstering U.S. diplomatic presence in the region from six embassies to nine through a planned new embassy in Solomon Islands and possible diplomatic outposts in Tonga and Kiribati.

But the administration lacks either the will or resources to ensure that every Pacific Island country will get a permanent U.S. diplomatic presence. “Where gaps in permanent presence remain, we will pursue additional facilities and creative solutions to provide the Pacific Islands with the diplomatic attention they deserve,” the document said.

Those “creative solutions'' may fall short in satisfying either Pacific Islanders or the under-resourced U.S. diplomats tasked to serve them. “The motor pools in many of our larger embassies have more personnel than our small Pacific [diplomatic] Pacific posts like Palau,” Hennessey-Niland said. “That has to change if we're serious about our renewed interest in this strategically important region.”

The Strategy’s other benchmarks include support for “good governance capacity,” including anti-corruption, media development and human rights programs. And the U.S. is adopting an explicitly multilateral approach to improving Pacific Island countries’ climate resiliency and employment and educational opportunities by promising the assistance of allies including France, the European Union and South Korea.

Helping Pacific Island countries develop “climate-resilient and adaptive infrastructure” will be costly. So the administration has committed to leveraging the financing capacity of the U.S. Trade & Development Agency and the Export-Import Bank to assist in funding such initiatives.

The Strategy also commits to renewing the strategic partnership agreements, or Compacts of Free Association, with Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands. The COFAs for Micronesia and Marshall Islands expire in 2023, while Palau’s expires in 2024. Special Presidential Envoy Ambassador Joseph Yuntold POLITICO last week that the State Department was on track to renew those COFAs 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 and have a positive demonstrative effect for neighboring countries.

“If we can conclude those [COFAs] promptly and fund them that would probably be the best possible way to demonstrate U.S. resolve,” Hennessey-Niland said. “I know it covers three countries only, but the rest of the region would hear that loud and clear that the U.S. is willing to do its part and step up in a major way to renew those agreements.”

Sealing those COFA deals likely won’t come cheap. The Washington, D.C.-based ambassadors to Palau, Micronesia and Marshall Islands sent a letter to Kurt Campbell, the U.S. National Security Council’s Indo-Pacific coordinator, on Monday cautioning that “U.S. proposed economic assistance is insufficient.” The ambassadors warned that unless the Biden administration improves the COFAs' financial incentives “the governments we represent cannot rely on a successful [COFA negotiation] outcome.”

But the Strategy — backed even by deep-pocketed best intentions — won’t render a quick fix to waning U.S. influence in the region.

“The United States government has been somewhat apathetic toward the Pacific Islands region [and] this has resulted in reputational harm across the region,” said Michael Walsh, chair of the Asia-Pacific Security Affairs Subcommittee on the Biden Defense Working Group during the 2020 presidential campaign.

“The United States government not only needs to make concrete commitments on issues that matter to the Pacific Island countries, it also needs to follow through on those commitments. That will take time — there is no other remedy.”