Western powers have never treated the island countries seriously – but now they want a foothold against Beijing By Timur Fomenko, a political analyst US Senator Kamala Harris. © Getty Images / Ethan Miller
Last week, US Vice President Kamala Harris gave a video address to the Pacific Islands Forum – a multilateral meeting consisting of the archipelago nations of the South Pacific, commonly grouped as ‘Polynesia’ and ‘Melanesia’. In the exchange, Harris vowed to increase US cooperation with the island nations, warned of ‘bad actors’, and pledged to re-open US embassies in Tonga and Samoa, an illustrative example of how the US previously failed to take the region seriously – until Washington figured out it needed a foothold against Beijing, of course. Notably, the island nation of Kiribati did not attend the meeting, a move which was later blamed on Beijing. Later, China itself held their own meeting with the members of the forum.
If it wasn’t apparent already, a serious battle for influence and political dominance has opened up between major powers across the South Pacific. Although depicting China as the aggressor or expansionist, the US and Australia nominally see this region as a strategic ‘backyard’. Having won military dominance over the Pacific in the Second World War, Washington, and by extension, Canberra, understand unbridled dominance over these island nations as a prerequisite to their own global hegemony. It is a publicly stated ambition of US foreign policy to prevent China, now seen as its largest geopolitical opponent, from attaining military parity over the ‘first’ and ‘second’ island chains of the Pacific – if America lost primacy over them, it would lose its ability to project power into Asia at large.
Earlier this year, China stunned the US and Australia with a diplomatic blitz through the Pacific that saw it sign a landmark security pact with the Solomon Islands, as well as wrapping up a number of agreements with other nations. Washington and Canberra have since responded by whipping up alarm through the establishment media, claiming that China was aiming to build a military or naval base on the islands. This soon led to threatening rhetoric being publicly vented towards the Solomon Islands. Since then though, the US and Australia have pushed their own diplomatic offensive towards the island countries, as well as the conspicuous launch of yet another anti-China focused multilateral grouping, titled the ‘Establishment of the Partners in the Blue Pacific’, also joined by the UK and Japan. (RT)
