IN September 2024, the US secretary of the air force, Frank Kendall told a meeting about China and the Indo-Pacific that ‘China is not a future threat. China is a threat today’. The evidence for this, Kendall said, is that China is building up its operational capacities to prevent the United States from projecting its power into the western Pacific Ocean region. The admission by Kendall is of interest.

The problem for Kendall was not that China was a threat to the other countries in the region of East Asia and the South Pacific, but that it was preventing the United States from playing a leading role in those waters. These waters include the region around China’s territorial limits, where the United States has helped engineer close calls with the Chinese navy as the United States and its allies have conducted ‘freedom of navigation’ exercises. ‘I am not saying war in the Pacific is imminent or inevitable’, Kendall said. ‘It is not. But I am saying that the likelihood is increasing and will continue to do so’.

ISLAND CHAIN STRATEGY

In 1951, senior US foreign policy advisor and later secretary of state, John Foster Dulles helped design an aggressive strategy for the United States in the Pacific region. Dulles was responding to the Chinese Revolution (1949) and the US war on Korea (1950-1953). He advised the United States during the formulation of several key treaties, such as ANZUS Treaty (1951), that brought Australia and New Zealand firmly out of British influence and into the US war plans, and the San Francisco Peace Treaty (1952) that ended the formal US occupation of Japan. These deals came alongside the US occupation of several island nations in the Pacific – of Hawaii (since 1898), of Guam (since 1898), and Samoa (since 1900) – where the US had already established military facilities, including ports and airfields. Out of this reality that swept from Japan to New Zealand, Dulles developed the idea of the ‘island chain strategy’ with three rings that went from close to China outward as an aggressive perimeter to prevent any power other than the United States to command the Pacific Ocean.

Over time, these three island chains became hardened bases for US power projection, with about four hundred bases in the region established to maintain US military assets from Alaska to southern Australia. Despite the signing of various treaties to demilitarise the region – such as the South Pacific Nuclear Free Treaty or the Treaty of Rarotonga (1986) – the US has moved lethal military assets, including nuclear weapons, through the region for threat projection against China, North Korea, Russia, and Vietnam (at different times and with different intensity). This ‘island chain strategy’ includes military installations at the French colonial outposts (such as Wallis and Fotuna, New Caledonia, and in French Polynesia). The United States also has military arrangements with the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau.

The entire US military architecture in the Pacific must include the large set of military installations in Japan and South Korea, which host nuclear weapons on a range of delivery systems. There is a policy of ‘neither confirm nor deny’ regarding nuclear weapons because of the controversy over their being permanently based in these countries. Camp Humphreys, outside Seoul (South Korea), is the largest US overseas military base with 40,000 US personnel on station. All attempts to denuclearise the Korean peninsula, even with US president George H W Bush’s pledge in 1991, such weapons of mass destruction remain secretly on US bases and in naval facilities.

EXPANSION

Over the past fifteen years, the United States has been increasing its military activity in the Pacific. This includes refusing to close bases despite local opposition, opening new bases, and expanding bases to increase their military capacity. In Australia, without any real public debate, the Australian government has used its own funds to expand the runway on Tindal Air Base in Darwin so that the United States can base B-52 bombers with nuclear capacity there. At the same time, the Australian government has allowed the expansion of the US submarine facility at Freemantle, where the US will base nuclear-armed submarines. These expansions came at the same time as the US signed a new agreement with Australia and United Kingdom called the AUKUS (2021) that sidelined the French submarine manufacturers and ensured Australia bought submarines from the UK and US. Eventually, Australia will provide its own submarines into the missions conducted by the US and the UK in the waters around China.

The AUKUS project is only part of the US ambitions in the region. The United States will now open new bases in the northern islands of the Philippines (Naval Base Camilo Osias in Santa Ana, Cagayan; Camp Melchor Dela Cruz in Gamu, Isabela; Balabac Island in Palawan; and Lal-lo Airport in Cagayan). The expansion in the Philippines, the first time since the early 1990s, comes at the same time as the United States has intensified its arming of Taiwan through the provision of a new generation of lethal military technology (including missile defence and tank systems intended to deter a Chinese military assault). Japan’s military has now extended its command-and-control coordination with the United States through new two-plus-two mechanisms which will allow the highest level of coordination possible. This will mean that the command structure for US troops in Japan and South Korea would not be reliant upon orders from Washington but would be autonomously controlled by the US command structure in these two Asian countries.

AUKUS allowed the US and the UK to fully coordinate their own strategies. It took some effort to bring France into the equation, particularly after its submarine sales to Australia had been undermined by the US-UK industries. Over the past few years, the US has engaged the Pacific states through the US Pacific Partnership Strategy for the Pacific Islands (2022) and through the Partnership for the Blue Pacific (2002), an ‘informal mechanism’ to draw Germany and Canada into the US Pacific project. In 2021, at France’s France-Oceania Summit, there was a commitment made to reengage with the Pacific, with France bringing in new military assets into New Caledonia and French Polynesia. The US and France have opened a dialogue about coordination of their military activities in these waters against China.

RUMBLES

Things are not going as smoothly as anticipated for the war project of the United States and its European allies. Protest movements in the Solomon Islands (2021) and in New Caledonia (2024) led by communities who are no longer willing to subdue themselves to neo-colonialism came as a shock. It was not enough to blame China for these protests, since these are manifestations of hundreds of years of anger at colonial conquest. It will not be easy for the western powers to build their island chain in the Pacific. They face challenges from Hawaii to New Caledonia to New Zealand.