Mike Pompeo yesterday became the first US secretary of state to visit Micronesia, as Washington has signaled a renewed interest in its Pacific allies, no matter how small, in the face of regional competition with China.
In the meantime, China has launched a regional charm offensive that has alarmed US President Donald Trump’s administration, offering infrastructure loans and seemingly trying to have the Marshall Islands and Palau break off diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
Pompeo touched down on the island of Pohnpei, where he was to spend a few hours meeting leaders from the Federated States of Micronesia, as well as neighboring nations such as Palau and the Marshall Islands.
Photo: AFP
The diplomatic courtship followed a visit by Pacific island leaders to the White House earlier this year, part of a US drive for a “free and open” Indo-Pacific region to counter China’s increasingly muscular and expansionist policies.
“It’s still a major strategic area, and this isn’t new,” a senior State Department official said, citing past ties. “Now, the level of interaction is clearly elevated.”
Over the past year, the US has “worked aggressively” to shore up its position in the Pacific region, considering it “of significant strategic interest,” Elizabeth Economy of the Council on Foreign Relations said.
Hugging the equator, the Federated States of Micronesia are scattered along nearly 3,000km of the Pacific, a significant area given Sino-American disputes over freedom of navigation in ocean waterways.
Washington is no stranger to Micronesia — which brings together four island states and more than 600 islands and atolls — thanks to a compact that guarantees US development aid and military protection.
Formerly part of the Caroline Islands, which were US trust territories, the federation signed a Compact of Free Association with the US after gaining independence more than three decades ago.
Those agreements are set to be renewed in the coming years.
“The US can no longer afford to take the Pacific islands for granted,” Economy said.
The nations’ major point of difference with the US remains climate change — an existential challenge for low-lying nations, but a trend that the Trump administration has variously dismissed as a hoax or unimportant.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS