Cover Story
Watery Continent or Invisible Lake?
U.S. Pays Little Attention To Asia—But Less To The Pacific
Pacific academics have tried to make the point that our region should be considered a “watery continent,” a phrase that emphasizes our vast areas of sovereignty and attendant resources. They see this as preferable to what might be called the “tiny island” view, which emphasizes the smallness and remoteness of many Pacific Islands. As we take a broad look in this issue at the American interests in the Pacific Islands, we can only come to the conclusion that the “tiny island” paradigm has won the day in American strategic and foreign policy thinking.
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On a recent trip to Washington, D.C. to talk to some of the Pacific hands there, we found the symptoms of the usual out-of-sight, out-of-mind awareness of Pacific issues. James Kelly, the State Department’s Assistant Secretary for East Asia and the Pacific admitted that he had been unable to attend any recent high-level regional meetings. (Click here to see our interview with Kelly.) A few weeks after our visit, Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the East-West Center’s new D.C.-based U.S. Asia-Pacific Council. In a long speech called “Changing Dynamics in the Asia-Pacific Region,” Powell did not mention a single Pacific Island. The closest he got were references to the Philippines, Indonesia and Japan.
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A week later, in a 200-page State Department report called Patterns of Global Terrorism, not a single Pacific Island was mentioned. Again, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand got attention, but not Melanesia, not Polynesia, not Micronesia.
The North Pacific has always been the U.S. stomping ground, but even here the diminishing strategic value of Micronesia and the end of Cold War preoccupations have resulted in a lessening of the amount of Compact II aid and an increased demand for accountability in its use. The Compact II negotiations with the RMI and FSM, headed by State Department special envoy Al Short and Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior David Cohen, have resulted in agreements totaling about $3 billion over the next 20 years for the Marshalls, plus $2.3 billion to the Kwajalein landowners through 2066. FSM will get approximately $1.2 billion over the same time period, which is $25 million below the previous Compact agreement. Palau’s Compact is on a different schedule. Their Compact began in 1994 and ends in 2009. It brings in about $447 per year, in addition to special funding like the $150 million “Compact Road” on Babeldaob.
Except for the strong behind-the-scenes diplomatic pressure on Nauru to get out of the money laundering business, and for conclusion of a generous 10-year, $210 million agreement with the Forum Fisheries Agency, there have been few U.S. foreign policy or aid initiatives in the region. USAID, the lead foreign aid agency for the U.S. government, pulled out of the Pacific during the Clinton Administration, when increasing amounts of aid money was targeted for the former Soviet Union and Central Europe. Although there used to be a USAID presence in Fiji, the closest office is now in the Philippines.
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In terms of foreign policy then, it seems hard for the U.S. government to pay attention to anything outside of Europe and the Middle East—although North Korea bloomed as an Administration worry as the Iraq war began to wind down. Indeed, Assistant Secretary Kelly was the Administration’s point man on North Korea. (He is the American official who got told in a whispered hallway conversation that North Korea had the bomb.)
As always, when you see the hyphenated term Asia-Pacific, you can bet it really means Asia. The Pacific Islands are what diplomats and generals fly over as they’re on their way to Asia—to them it seems to be just an overly-large, mostly-invisible lake.
The strategic and foreign policy decision to bomb Iraq into freedom and democracy will probably mark a key historic change in U.S. foreign policy and military thinking. The consequences of the Iraq war are fundamental and will dominate U.S. relations, even in the marginalized Pacific. Australia and New Zealand went their separate ways in response to the war and this fundamental split between two long-term, Anglophone allies is symptomatic of the acrimonious divisions created by the war.
Europe is now deeply divided on this issue. And the Bush Administration seems to be pursuing a course of public vindictiveness toward any country that did not sign up for the Coalition of the Willing. Canada did not support the war and has gotten the cold shoulder by way of a cancelled presidential visit to Ottawa. (It probably did not help that one of the Canadian Prime Minister’s staff publicly called Bush a moron.) Nor did the other U.S. neighbor, Mexico, fare any better for their opposition or, at least, non-support for the war. There was no Cinco de Mayo celebration at the White House this year, unlike the first two years of the Bush Administration. Yet Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard was hosted at Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch, an honor reserved for the likes of Tony Blair or Mexico’s President Vicente Fox, before the latter fell from grace.
In reference to this seeming vindictiveness, it was Howard who put foot to mouth as he joked that the U.S. would probably not bomb New Zealand in retaliation for its opposition to action in Iraq. Meanwhile, New Zealand’s Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark got her own high heels dangerously close to mouth when she said publicly that the Iraq war would not have happened had Al Gore been president.
In the Asia part of the Asia-Pacific hyphen, China was opposed to the U.S. Iraq adventure; Japan was reluctantly supportive; the Philippines lined up with Bush, while Indonesia, with the largest Muslim population in the world, was opposed. In the Islands, Fiji and Samoa were opposed, Tonga waffled, as did the Solomons. The French territories, of course, share a common foreign policy with their colonial benefactor.
In the North Pacific, the three “Freely Associated States”— the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of Palau—were all on the COW list. All three had sons and daughters in the U.S. armed forces. Guam, the CNMI and Kwajalein atoll in the Marshalls are all likely to benefit from increased U.S. military spending as a result of post-9/11 trends, which include a possible redeployment of forces from South Korea into Guam and CNMI and increasing joint operations with the Philippines army.
In the U.S. capital there is a small cadre of Pacific hands in the private and academic sectors. In government, aside from State Department experts, the Department of the Interior’s Insular Affairs Office has the most expertise and is the most active presence in the region. Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior David Cohen is the Administration’s principal non-State Department point man on the Pacific. He appears in this issue authoring a defense of “accountability” provisions in the newly-negotiated Compact II agreements with the Marshall Islands and the FSM (Click here to see the story.). Cohen is sometimes described as the DOI’s “enforcer” in demanding U.S. oversight of Compact II finances and in insisting that the American Samoa government hire an independent auditor to oversee its sometimes-puzzling territorial finances. “People are sometimes painting this [emphasis on accountability] as some kind of reimposition of colonialism,” Cohen told Pacific Magazine, “but after 17 years of Compact assistance, it’s natural that both sides would find ways to improve financial procedures. We’re talking here about collective accountability. Neither side can do it alone.”
Another D.C. pool of expertise on the Pacific resides in the Pacific delegation to the Congress. Hawaii has two senators, Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka and two representatives, Neil Abercrombie and Ed Case. Guam has a delegate in Congress, Madeline Bordallo.
But the dean of Pacific expertise in Congress is American Samoa’s representative Eni F.H. Faleomavaega. He is particularly troubled about what the Bush Administration’s Iraq war was doing to American foreign relations, not only in the Pacific, but worldwide.
“I have to give credit to Secretary Powell,” Faleomavaega says, “for convincing the President to work through diplomatic channels. But the way I see it, Secretary Powell didn’t even have a chance. Dick Cheney was out there deriding diplomacy. I don’t think Powell was treated in good faith. The President has basically said to other countries, ‘It’s either our way or the highway.’ This is arrogance in its highest form.”
Faleomavaega says American foreign policy has always had a certain disdain for Asia, “which is based on our long history of failures there.” The Congressman, who is a Vietnam war veteran, and now ranking member of the Asia-Pacific Subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee, sees a chain of historical U.S. misadventures in the region—the Philippines, Korea and Vietnam, for instance—as tempering U.S. caution about the region. “When I first came to Congress 15 years ago, no one wanted to be on the Asia-Pacific Subcommittee. Now it’s the largest subcommittee.” The Congressman sees this as at least a small sign of the increasing awareness of the region. “Our trade with the Asia-Pacific region is now twice what we do with Europe and four times that of any other region in the world,” he adds.
Faleomavaega worries, though, that if the U.S. abdicates responsibility in the region there will be stark consequences. “If Japan sees threats coming from China or North Korea, they can become a nuclear power overnight. If that happens, there will be a reaction from China.” Faleomavaega wants the U.S. to comes to grips with the North Korea problem. “We’ve got 37,000 troops in the DMZ that will become sacrificial lambs should North Korea invade the South.”
The Bush Administration’s foreign policy regarding Iraq has caused deep divisions in the State Department, which can usually expect its Foreign Service officers to comply with whatever policies a sitting administration adopts. But three senior foreign service officers publicly resigned in protest at the Bush Administration’s unilateralist Iraq policy. This is unheard of. Ann Wright, who was deputy chief of mission in Mongolia, and who had previously served at the U.S. embassy in Pohnpei, FSM, resigned saying that, “this is the only time in my many years serving America that I have felt I cannot represent the policies of an administration of the United States.”
In recent U.S. diplomatic activity in the Pacific, career Foreign Service officer David Lyon took over in January as U.S. Ambassador to Fiji. Lyon has held posts in Africa, China, Brazil and the Philippines. The Fiji ambassador is also accredited to Nauru, Tonga and Tuvalu. The other news of note has been the nomination of Robert Fitts to be U.S. ambassador to PNG, New Caledonia and Vanuatu. Fitts once served in the State Departments East Asia - Pacific Bureau as director of the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore Office. He was also deputy chief of mission in Manila. Once confirmed by Congress, he will be based at the U.S. Embassy in Port Moresby, which is aided by a Consular Agent in Honiara, Solomon Islands.
Japan has been increasingly generous in its aid to Pacific Islands. It is funding major scholarship, infrastructure and alternative energy projects around the region. And not a month goes by without some announcement of aid to Pacific Island countries or regional organizations by the People’s Republic of China or Taiwan (Republic of China). Although increasingly criticized for its aid policies, Australia is considered generous in both its monetary aid and its advice on how to use that aid. France and the EU have both been dramatically increasing their aid profiles in the region.
Meanwhile, with the exception of the funding to its own territories and the three Freely Associated States, the U.S. has virtually abdicated a significant donor presence in the Pacific.
Over the next decade it is going to be very interesting to watch the consequences emerge as the U.S. continues its neglect of the region and powers like the EU, China and Japan increase their influence while the Bush Administration’s generals and diplomats cut their decks of cards, discarding the disloyal and bidding up the pot for the regional players who have their names on the COW list.
The U.S. certainly will not bomb New Zealand, but it may be doing something equally dangerous and foolish as it slowly alienates 120-something countries of the world while bragging that 40-something countries, like Palau and Tonga in the Pacific, are on board for the Bush-Cheney crusade.
