Michael Stoil's Blog

Oceania as Geostrategic Chessboard

September 11, 2013
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Watching another glorious sunrise emerge above the pandamus trees as I sip coffee on my balcony, it is difficult to accept that former colleagues in the national security field think of this island of Guam merely as “the tip of the spear” of U.S. military power targeting East Asia. In effect, the 175,000 inhabitants of the island, their 3,000 years of indigenous culture, and their political and economic future are of minor importance to its colonial policymakers in comparison to the island’s location as a staging ground for geopolitical adventures.

 

Unfortunately, this has been the recurring fate of almost all of the island-nations of the Pacific for the past five hundred years. Oceania occupies nearly 25% of the surface of the globe, but it is also the least populated region—with few than 45 million inhabitants—and one of the poorest in resources. As a result, for more than 400 years the Pacific Islands have been of interest to the rest of the world primarily because of geographic location. When the governments of Spain, Portugal, France, the UK, and Germany extended their influence over Pacific territory, their primary objective was to improve the positioning of forces on a vast maritime chessboard between East Asia and the Americas. This motivation was especially prominent during the transoceanic rivalry between the US and Japan that dominated the history of the region during the first half of the 20th century. The lure of location proved so important in that conflict that the US delayed liberating the people of its own Pacific colonies from wartime enemy occupation to more quickly secure the more strategically desirable island possessions of Japan.

 

A focus on Oceania as a location for strategic assets rather than an inhabited region of the world has been harmful to the peoples of the island states and territories. As colonies, they lacked even the dubious benefits of economic exploitation. Significant financial investment in the region by colonial powers was limited to some of the UK possessions, to the League of Nation mandate administered by Japan, and to the U.S.-acquired Hawaiian Islands; in each of these cases, the financial investment was accompanied by massive resettling of outsiders onto the islands. Elsewhere in the Pacific, economic and social development often was discouraged during the colonial era, in part to avoid the creation of local interests that might compete with military priorities.

 

The physical location of Pacific Islands rather than the needs or potential contributions of the peoples of the region reputedly remains an obsession for policymakers in the US and China, the two modern rivals for influence in Oceania. The US keeps several Pacific territories under limited sovereignty, ranging from the blatant colonial possessions of Guam and American Samoa to the “freely-associated” Republic of the Marshall Islands. The rationale given for continued US imperial policies in the Pacific is the forward positioning of military assets that could be used to counter “threats to US interests in East Asia.” Since 2005, the People’s Republic of China has expanded efforts to influence the island states of the western Pacific, providing leading island families with college scholarships, investment opportunities, and cash. According to analyses conducted by the Rand Corporation for US military, these efforts appear related to by long-term plans to deny the waters of the “first and second island chains”— defensive perimeters roughly 1200 and 3200 kilometers east of China’s coastline—to any potential antagonist.

 

People of Oceania increasingly express unhappiness at the perception of their region as a game board for a new competition between outside powers. In 2010, for example, US defense authorities were taken by surprise when the indigenous people of the self-governing colony of Guam organized to oppose an expansion of military facilities on the island that would have threatened the site of an ancestral coastal village. Popular opposition to heavy-handed Chinese efforts at acquiring political influence has evolved in the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, and the Federated States of Micronesia. Occasionally, these protests have taken the form of anti-Chinese riots.

 

Growing political consciousness among the Pacific Island populations, combined with the potential for 21st century technology to strengthen the self-reliance of island-states, gives rise to the possibility that Oceania may not always be viewed as a vast maritime chessboard. There may actually come a time when the national interests of the people of the Pacific Islands are taken as seriously by outsiders. 

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