: Opinion: Re-discovering the Pacific #IndiaNEWS #News By Patricia A O’Brien If you are trying to find traces of the United States’ long and layered ties with the Pacific Islands in Washington DC,

Opinion: Re-discovering the Pacific #IndiaNEWS #News
By Patricia A O’Brien
If you are trying to find traces of the United States’ long and layered ties with the Pacific Islands in Washington DC, you need to look hard. Apart from the names of iconic battles chiselled into the Washington Mall’s second world war memorial, evidence of America’s complex Pacific history stretching back to the beginning of the Republic is not there.
Until very recently, this absence was replicated throughout Washington’s institutions, where the Pacific Islands have been at the back of mind since those epic battles were fought 80 years ago.
But over the past few months, things have changed.
Dramatic Shift
The reason for this dramatic shift is plain for all to see: China. Washington is now undergoing a Pacific re-discovery that goes all the way to the top.
At the end of September, US President Joe Biden will host Pacific leaders at the White House for the first US-Pacific Island Country Summit (Sept 28-29). This will be in the style of the ASEAN meeting held in May.
After the second world war, the US was largely absent in the Pacific. There were notable exceptions, not least the shameful Marshall Islands atomic testing programme that continues to deeply affect the present. Now the US is striving to be seen and viewed as a force for good in a part of the world where China has been making deep, transformative and worrying inroads for over 15 years.
This isn’t the first time US postwar hegemony has been challenged in the Pacific. In the 1980s, the Soviet union was disrupting the Pacific Islands power balance and the US responded with a series of treaties and agreements. One was the 1987 South Pacific Tuna Treaty, signed with 16 Pacific Islands. The treaty’s ongoing importance was underscored in recent weeks as part of the renewed US diplomatic drive.
The US also brokered three Compacts of Free Association (COFA) with its former United Nations Trust Territories that became the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of Palau in the mid-1980s. (Rather than becoming independent at this time, the Northern Marianas Islands opted to join American Samoa and Guam as US territories).
When the Soviet union collapsed in 1989, so too did US interest in the Pacific. But the compacts spurred the formation of numerous Micronesian diaspora communities across the US. Meanwhile, in exchange for certain rights, the COFA states gave the US exclusive control over their oceanic territories and a vital military base on Kwajalein Atoll.
Current Context
In the current geopolitical context, these 20-year agreements were expiring and languishing, much to the frustration of several congressional representatives from both political sides.

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