Advertising
Supported by
WASHINGTON – No country is too small or too small in Washington, apparently to be excluded from the Trump administration’s crusade to counter China’s efforts to supplant the United States as the dominant power in the Pacific.
Proof of this is Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s resolve to fly almost halfway to the world so he can spend several hours in Palau, a Pacific archipelago of just 20,000 more people in the southeastern Philippines.
There is no indication of a direct military risk from China opposite Palau. Instead, the island country is an example of the hard-to-understand battlefield on which the United States and China are holding a festival of “great force” for global influence in the era of a more introspective Washington and an increasingly assertive and ambitious China. The struggle for force is intensifying on multiple fronts and is perceived through some as an emerging “cold war” similar to the most common clash that took place between the United States and the Soviet Union until the collapse of Soviet communism in 1991.
Defying Beijing, the small pro-American Palau is one of 15 states that have official diplomatic relations with Taiwan, the autonomous island that China claims as its own territory.
“We are involved in China continuing to try to return to countries that recognize Taiwan today to identify diplomatic relations with China,” said Heino Klinck, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for East Asia. “We put it destabilizing, frankly.”
The United States made this replacement when it identified Beijing as China’s only legal government in 1979, Washington maintains unofficial relations with Taiwan, and sells arms to Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act.
More broadly, Klinck said in an interview, Esper needs America’s commitment to having a long-term appointment with Palau.
“A small country, perhaps, outweighs their weight in terms of U.S. military registration rates,” Klinck said, adding that six Palauians had died in U.S. uniforms in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to a 1994 Free Association Pact, Palauians are eligible to serve in the U.S. Army.
The Trump administration’s list of court cases about China is long and extends beyond Palau. Washington mocks China’s militarization of the South China Sea, suspects its expanding nuclear arsenal, and has retaliated this year for its alleged use of diplomatic services in the United States to coordinate the theft of economic and clinical secrets. The pandemic and the coronavirus industry are also hotspots.
For its part, China considers U.S. policy designed to constrain its expansion as an economic and military power.
U.S. and Chinese warships occasionally compete for their position in the South China Sea. In July, Trump’s leadership took the diplomatic fight to a new point by pointing out that almost all of China’s maritime claims in the South China Sea were illegitimate, a broad that favors the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Brunei.
On Thursday, shortly before Esper left Hawaii for Palau, the Pentagon issued a public complaint about Chinese army exercises, adding a ballistic missile test this week around the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea. He described the measures as destabilizing and an attempt to “enforce illegal maritime claims” and put China’s neighbors at a disadvantage.
In addition, a U.S. Navy destroyer, the USS Mustin, patrbled foreign waters near the Paracels on Thursday in a move to challenge China’s invasion of the disputed waters there.
China’s Defense Ministry said Friday that it had organized its naval and air forces to monitor and verify the U.S. warship and had “warned” it after the Mustin “entered Chinese territorial waters.”
Chinese troops “will remain on high alert at all times and resolutely ensure China’s sovereignty and security and maintain peace and stability in the South China Sea,” he said, citing Colonel Li Huamin, spokesman for the Chinese army’s southern command.
Esper is making its first stopover in the Asia-Pacific region since the coronavirus pandemic forced it to restrict abroad in March. The Scale of Esper illustrates a vital explanation of the Pentagon’s interest in strengthening ties: Palau is in a North Pacific direction that connects U.S. forces based in Hawaii and Guam with possible hot spots on the Asian continent. I’m waiting for Guam, too.
No U.S. Secretary of Defense has visited Palau, to the Pentagon historian’s office.
Over the past year, THE RAND Corp. said that freely related states, adding Palau with Micronesia and the Marshall Islands, are “essential to promoting” the Asia-Pacific administration’s strategy. He said his position in the Pacific amounted to “a power-projected road that crosses the center of the North Pacific into Asia.”
The United States Army has a legacy, but not troops, in Palau. The Marines suffered heavy losses when attacking Japanese positions on the island of Peleliu, south of Palau, in September 1944. The United States administered Palau under the auspices of the United Nations after World War II and is guilty of his defense until 2044 of the Free Association Pact.
Palau is no stranger to tensions between the United States and China. In 2009, several Uighur men of Chinese origin who had been abducted in Afghanistan as suspected terrorists and imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay were released and sent to Palau. His resettlement reportedly provoked the wrath of Beijing, which requested repatriation.
Esper planned to place a floral offering on the coast of Palau, where an Avenger torpedo bomber from the United States Navy crashed on July 27, 1944. The 3 Americans on board perished; belonged to the same Navy torpedo squadron, the VT-51, as George H.W. Mr. Bush, the long-term president.
Randall Schriver, who until 8 months ago was the Pentagon’s leading Asian policy official, believes Palau is a logical obstacle for Esper, given that China is the administration’s main foreign policy and defense concern.
“This reflects the expansion of competition” and Beijing’s efforts to exert more influence on the North Pacific islands, Schriver said, as the tug-of-war of history that unites the United States with its war partners.
While Palau is off the beaten track of a Pentagon chief’s overall itinerary, the Scale of Esper is a gesture that a small country feels the tension of what Washington calls Beijing’s “predatory economy.”
In 2018, Beijing banned teams of Chinese tourists from visiting Palau, which depended on China for much of its tourism. The move was noted through Palau as a measure to pressure its leaders to move diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing.
In a Speech in February in which he described China’s US approach, Esper expressed his fear for small countries.
“Communist China is exerting monetary and political pressure, publicly and privately, on many Indo-Pacific countries and Europeans, large and small, as it pursues new strategies around the world,” he said. “In fact, the smaller the country, the heavier the hand of Beijing.”
In the Pacific, says Esper, China aims until 2049, the anniversary of its communist revolution, being the dominant military force in Asia.
Advertising