The Question from the Pacific Islands: Will the United States Be a Credible and Consistent Indo-Pacific Partner?

The Question from the Pacific Islands:Will the United States Be a Credible and Consistent Indo-Pacific Partner? Henryk Szadziewski (bio) and Anna Powles (bio) In March 2023, Dame Meg Taylor, lawyer, diplomat, and former secretary general of the Pacific Islands Forum, told Radio New Zealand that Pacific leaders "should have paid much more attention to the Indo-Pacific strategy as it emerged."1 Taylor's comment highlighted not only the abundance of external strategies and policy frameworks targeting the Pacific Islands but also the increasing alignment of economic cooperation with security partnerships. Taylor was particularly concerned that island leaders were being sidelined while major geopolitical decisions were being made that affected the Pacific. This tension was highlighted in the Pacific Islands Forum's latest security outlook report, which noted that "while geopolitical competition could draw much-needed attention and resources to the Pacific, it could also distract the region and its partners from efforts to address its existing security priorities—addressing climate security, supporting human security, and disrupting criminal activity."2 These priorities are most cogently laid out in the 2018 Boe Declaration on Regional Security, which identified five key challenges in the Pacific: climate change, human security, environmental and resource security, transnational crime, [End Page 56] and cybersecurity.3 The heightened geostrategic environment of the Indo-Pacific—and the plethora of foreign strategies and policies aimed at the Pacific Islands—has been prompted by the increased political, security, economic, diplomatic, and cultural profile of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Australia, Canada, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States are among those states and regional bodies that have outlined security and economic plans for the wider Indo-Pacific region. Similarly, inside this large, two-ocean region, some of these actors, notably the United States and China, have focused new attention on the Pacific Islands. Through the United States' Indo-Pacific Strategy and Pacific Partnership Strategy, both launched in 2022, Washington has clearly staked a claim in a competition for attaining—and retaining—influence in the Pacific Island countries and territories (PICTs).4 This essay examines the abovementioned U.S. strategies in the context of their implications for the PICTs. Before discussing the two strategies, however, the essay begins with a brief description of the United States' post–Cold War Indo-Pacific and Pacific policies, which is critical to understand the measured PICT responses toward Washington's recent "Pacific turn." The next two sections then analyze the security and economic pledges of these strategies, evaluating the challenges and opportunities that the United States faces in Oceania. We argue that, while the United States has committed to re-engaging with the Pacific Islands and reasserting the U.S. strategic geography as part of the broader Pacific region, Washington's persistent framing of the U.S. pivot to the Pacific in terms of strategic competition with China will undermine the United States' ability to develop the type of deep relationships that will strengthen its role as a credible partner in the Pacific. U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategies and Pacific Policies before 2022 The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in 1990 and 2003 diverted the United States from forming a comprehensive policy of strategic denial in the Pacific Ocean. Nevertheless, in the period between the end of the Cold War and 2022, the United States [End Page 57] developed policies of engagement with the PICTs. At a 1990 summit in Honolulu, for example, President George H.W. Bush announced a Joint Commercial Commission, which aimed to facilitate dialogue between Pacific Island governments and U.S. businesses exploring opportunities in the region.5 The commission later proved "to be a failure, with little new U.S. investment or trade in the islands."6 In the decade following the commission, "influences from the USA, and other English-speaking nations…decreas[ed] as a proportion of the total external impact."7 It then took another ten years, a period defined by the war on terrorism, for the United States to fully revert its gaze to the Pacific. Building on earlier outreach efforts in 2010, U.S. president Barack...