The Peril of American Neglect in the Pacific

Under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, policymakers in Washington have in recent years reached a consensus about the need to compete with China. They have paid growing attention to the technological and military aspects of the competition, shoring up relationships with partners and allies, and trying to prevent China from gaining access to critical technologies. But they have neglected one key area: the United States’ diplomatic ground game. To compete effectively with China, Washington must better support the efforts of its often beleaguered and overstretched diplomats abroad. Nowhere is this deficit more evident than in the Pacific Islands region—an area that encompasses nearly a fifth of the world’s surface, through which the American military and a good deal of U.S. trade travel, and that is home to more than a dozen democratic states.

After years of neglect, and in response to increased Chinese activity in the region, Washington has stepped up its engagement in the Pacific. It has opened new embassies, signed new security agreements, hosted two summits at the White House with all the region’s leaders, released a Pacific-focused national strategy that responds to regional priorities, and worked with major allies and partners elsewhere to deliver needed infrastructure to Pacific Island countries. Those efforts are welcome—and overdue. But the United States’ influence in the region is still being undercut by the limitations of its diplomacy: insufficient reach, inadequate funding, and outdated reporting requirements. Together, these flaws make it harder for Washington to compete with Beijing in the Pacific. Without a shift in how Washington prioritizes and supports diplomacy in this area, the United States will continue to cede ground to China across a region that reaches from the Philippines to Hawaii.

PINSTRIPES ON THE BEACH

The political scientist Bernard Brodie wrote that strategy wears a dollar sign, suggesting that budgets reveal much about a country’s priorities. But strategy also sits on a map, and where a country places its resources also tells the story of what it values. According to the Lowy Institute’s 2024 Global Diplomacy Index, China now leads the world in diplomatic presence, notably with more diplomatic outposts than the United States in Africa, Central Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific Islands. The study looks purely at diplomatic installations—embassies and consulates—but the contrast is even starker when considering the number of diplomatic personnel who work at those installations. China has embassies in nine Pacific Island countries (the United States has them in eight), and Chinese diplomats vastly outnumber U.S. diplomats, sometimes by a factor of ten to one. In the archipelago country of Vanuatu, a Chinese official reported that the Chinese embassy had between 12 and 16 diplomats. The United States has just one temporary representative. In the Solomon Islands, China’s embassy can house up to 100 Chinese personnel but currently holds 30, a figure that does not include its 12-person police liaison team. The new U.S. embassy in the Solomon Islands, meanwhile, usually has only two to five U.S. personnel.

Worse, there are places in the region where the United States has no permanent presence at all and has completely ceded the field. Take, for instance, the island country of Nauru. Since 2005, Nauru had been one of a handful of countries to maintain formal ties with Taiwan rather than with China. But that changed in January of this year, when Nauru switched to recognizing the government in Beijing, a move precipitated by intense Chinese engagement. Washington, with no diplomatic presence on the ground, had no forewarning of the switch, much less any hope of convincing the Nauru government to change its mind. Intermittent diplomacy or depending on allies and partners, such as Australia and New Zealand, to advance and defend U.S. interests is insufficient. In the absence of a real diplomatic presence, the United States invariably struggles to influence decisions that may have significant strategic repercussions.

In other areas, the U.S. presence and diplomatic buildup is no longer commensurate with strategic developments. The United States has entered a close security partnership with Australia under the auspices of the AUKUS deal, which includes the United Kingdom. Even as the United States has strengthened its military alliance with Australia, it has failed to make an equivalent investment in diplomacy. As part of AUKUS, the United States plans to rotate up to four Virginia-class attack submarines out of the Australian port of Perth by 2027. To do so, Washington will have to station many more Americans—civilians and military—in western Australia to help with the maintenance and supply of these vessels. But the United States is not ready to manage such an endeavor. The U.S. consulate in Perth has just a handful of staff, clearly insufficient for the task of supporting more than 2,000 new American residents that the buildup would require.

Chinese diplomats vastly outnumber U.S. diplomats in the Pacific, sometimes by ten to one.

Even where the United States has, or will soon have, a diplomatic presence in the Pacific, the State Department’s bureaucratic requirements get in the way of its expansion. The United States has announced the opening of embassies in Kiribati, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Vanuatu; the reopening of a USAID mission in Fiji; and the return of the Peace Corps to the region. But bureaucratic, legal, and legislative hurdles delay these efforts. It took two years for the embassy in Vanuatu to open, and the promised embassy in Kiribati has yet to materialize. The United States has only a handful of diplomats in the Solomon Islands and Tonga, with no ambassador and few or no consular services.

China does not have this problem. After Nauru recognized China this year, it took Beijing all of five days to establish an official embassy there. Meanwhile, the United States still does not maintain an embassy in Nauru, relying instead on diplomats 1,400 miles away in Fiji. Although a strong diplomatic presence does not guarantee successful diplomatic outcomes, it is a prerequisite for establishing and maintaining key government relationships and effectively implementing national security priorities.

One of the primary reasons for recent delays in beefing up the U.S. presence in the Pacific is the mandatory security requirements for U.S. diplomatic installations. Many of these requirements are misaligned with the realities on the ground in the Pacific. For example, the State Department requires an embassy building to have a 100-foot setback from the perimeter of the property. But that is nearly impossible on the narrow atoll island of Kiribati, where such a setback would likely land the embassy in the water. Although waivers for these requirements exist, the fallout for senior personnel in the aftermath of the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi has created an environment of excessive caution, to the detriment of needed action.

Security requirements exist for legitimate reasons, but uniform global policies are unnecessarily restrictive and do not consider the unique circumstances of these smaller island states. Instead of simply granting waiver authority to the State Department, Congress could establish different security requirements for certain countries or regions, such as those that are less developed or smaller, or where there is a low likelihood that an embassy will come under attack. Most Pacific Island countries would easily qualify for reduced security requirements using these metrics, which would allow American diplomats to more easily ramp up their activities there.

A THICKER PRESENCE

Wherever these diplomats are housed, the United States needs more of them everywhere in the Pacific. China has many more diplomatic personnel there, and Beijing uses this disparity to underline the notion that Washington is an unreliable actor in the region.

There are numerous ways to bolster the diplomatic workforce, many of which are within the purview of the State Department, such as offering staff additional incentives to serve in remote locations. One of the most significant steps the State Department could take to signal that Pacific diplomats are valued and have a viable career path would be to create an independent Bureau of the Pacific, separate from the existing Bureau of East Asia and the Pacific. Currently, the entire region is covered by a single deputy assistant secretary of state. With 16 countries—including the major U.S. ally Australia—the region certainly deserves several deputy assistant secretary positions and a standalone or specially allocated budget. Creating new levels of bureaucracy can sometimes result in slowing things down, but in this case the creation of an additional bureau would allow officials to better direct attention and resources to a critically under-resourced region.

Moreover, changes by both Congress and the State Department are needed to maximize the effectiveness of personnel already on the ground, especially in smaller posts. An embassy of ten to 15 diplomats, never mind a mission housing only one or two, should not be expected to fulfill the same administrative requirements as larger posts. The State Department is taking some steps to relieve this burden, waiving many reporting requirements for posts under a certain size, but some reports are congressionally mandated and must be drafted by the officials posted abroad. A diplomat who must write a 27-page human rights report, one among many required annual reports, is not conducting diplomacy. Reports on subjects such as human rights and human trafficking are certainly important, but critical information could be distilled into abbreviated formats, saving time for both the preparers and the readers. Diplomats are American representatives—their purpose is to be out and about in their host country, not just compiling reports at a desk.

The U.S. diplomatic presence no longer matches strategic needs in the Pacific.

More broadly, Washington must allocate more resources to the State Department. As General James Mattis famously said in 2013, when he was head of U.S. Central Command, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately.” Congress will have to act to ensure the State Department gets the funds it needs to deal with the magnitude of today’s threats.

The proliferation of challenges across multiple sectors—from energy and climate change to food security and health care—has expanded the role of the diplomat. Although larger U.S. embassies have long housed personnel from other departments and agencies, such as USAID, the Departments of Defense and Commerce, and the FBI, smaller posts also need staff with this range of expertise and responsibility. Departments and agencies traditionally considered domestic bodies, such as the Departments of Transportation, Energy, or Agriculture, are finding themselves increasingly focused on issues abroad that directly affect U.S. strategic interests. These departments may already have a presence overseas, but they do not have sufficient funds to keep pace with a changing global environment. Maximizing the breadth of U.S. interagency power will require reimagining how the United States appoints diplomats. Congress should require these departments to place attachés in key countries and regions—and fund them accordingly. Such additional staffing would help the U.S. government follow through on key strategic initiatives, such as the U.S.-Pacific Transportation Partnership, launched in September 2022 with the aim of enhancing connectivity between Pacific islands and the rest of the world.

Of course, the best diplomacy is often conducted through nontraditional means, especially in complex and far-flung regions such as the Pacific. Arguably the most popular and successful engagement the United States conducts in the Pacific is via the United States Coast Guard and the Peace Corps, both of which yield exceptionally positive results for a relatively low cost. Both excel at building relationships on the ground and meeting critical local needs such as protecting fisheries or supplementing educational shortfalls.

Yet both agencies remain woefully underfunded. The Coast Guard has managed to play a greater role in the Pacific, including by deploying three larger vessels to Guam that can patrol as far as Papua New Guinea, but it will need more money to further expand the number of personnel and ships it can deploy in the Indo-Pacific. The overall Peace Corps budget has remained relatively flat for the last decade, even as more countries have asked Washington for a Peace Corps presence. The United States should also consider innovative ideas such as establishing a permanent mission to the Pacific Islands Forum, the region’s principal intergovernmental organization, similar to how the United States established a mission to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 2010 (the first non-ASEAN country to do so). And it should create a diplomatic reserve corps of retired or former U.S. diplomats who could fill strategic gaps in an ever-evolving geopolitical landscape.

THE GROUND GAME

Over half a century ago, during another period of intense strategic competition, U.S. President John F. Kennedy mapped the way forward through a host of institutions, ideas, and initiatives founded in the belief that on-the-ground diplomacy was essential to the survival of a world free from authoritarianism. “How many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service?” Kennedy challenged a group of college students at the University of Michigan in 1960. “On your willingness to do that,” he said, “I think will depend the answer whether a free society can compete.” This call to action, echoed in his inaugural address, is generally credited with serving as the inspiration for the Peace Corps and fueling greater American interest, participation, and contribution in the world. To compete today, the United States needs diplomats to meet with foreign leaders, navigate local culture and customs, identify opportunities for collaboration, report on emerging challenges, combat disinformation, and support democratic principles. None of that can happen, however, if these people are not on the ground, establishing connections, and promoting the country’s interests.

The status quo of half-hearted diplomacy in the Pacific will not suffice at a time when China is ramping up its presence in the region. The United States must make a concerted effort to rectify its diplomatic shortcomings after decades of relative neglect. China represents the United States’ defining foreign policy challenge of the twenty-first century. Some have called this competition a modern-day iteration of the “Great Game,” the British-Russian competition for influence in Central Asia in the nineteenth century. Others have urged the United States to play “a long game” in the contest with China. Maybe so. But what the United States urgently needs if it is to compete effectively is a better ground game.