US-China ties loom large as Blinken readies a rapid Asia-Pacific return with tour of Tonga, New Zealand, Australia
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is heading to the Asia-Pacific again this week for the third time in two months, as Washington seeks to further pressure New Zealand into toeing its China line and prove to Pacific island nations that it's a "willing partner".
Tonga will be Blinken's first stop on Wednesday to open a new US embassy in capital Nuku'alofa, followed by New Zealand on Thursday for bilateral meetings and a United States-Netherlands Fifa Women's World Cup football match, before he finishes his tour in Australia to attend an annual consultative forum alongside US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin.
"The US wants to show to these states that it is a willing partner [and] happy to provide them with assistance or capital," said Ian Hall, an international-relations professor and acting director at Griffith University's Griffith Asia Institute in Australia.
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High-level visits by US officials to Tonga, in particular, are "few and far between", Hall said - with Austin's parallel visit to Papua New Guinea this week marking the first time a serving US defence secretary has ever been to the country.
"The test is whether the US is able to provide what Pacific island countries want in terms of new infrastructure or investment," he said.
To counter Chinese influence in the region, Washington hosted a US-Pacific Island Nations Summit in September last year where a sweeping partnership and development agreement was signed with the 12 island nations taking part. The US also reopened an embassy in the Solomon Islands in February after a 30-year absence.
Hideyuki Shiozawa, a former diplomat who now works as a senior officer with the Pacific island nations programme at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation think tank in Japan, said it was highly unusual for a US secretary of state to attend an embassy opening in the Pacific region.
"Tonga will [wait to] see what concrete initiatives in development cooperation and other areas are implemented after this visit," he said, noting that the new embassy could help facilitate dialogue, development cooperation and responses to climate change that meet local needs.
Tonga received US$2.6 million in humanitarian assistance from the US last year to help those affected by a huge volcanic eruption and tsunami, and also benefits from US Agency for International Development programmes on disaster-response and climate-change resilience, according to a State Department statement on Monday. It said the island nation had also received around 48,000 Covid vaccine doses from the UN-backed - but mostly US-funded - Covax Facility.
China's then-Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Tonga last year during a tour of the region, meeting Prime Minister Siaosi Sovaleni and signing agreements for police equipment, fisheries cooperation and disaster management. Beijing also claimed to be the first to supply drinking water and food supplies to the island nation following the massive eruption and tsunami in January 2022.
After meeting with Tongan officials to discuss what the State Department called "our shared democratic values and vision of a connected, prosperous, peaceful, and resilient Pacific region", Blinken will head for New Zealand and Australia, where talks will "almost inevitably centre on China's role, despite any assertions to the contrary", said Geoffrey Miller, a geopolitical analyst at the Victoria University of Wellington's Democracy Project who focuses on New Zealand's foreign policy.
Blinken's New Zealand stop will be another opportunity for Washington to pile on the pressure, "both behind closed doors, and in a more direct fashion", as it pushes Wellington "to fall into line" with countries like Australia on external security threats, Miller said.
In recent months, New Zealand's customary conciliatory approach towards China has come under increasing pressure from Western allies who want Wellington to jointly counter Beijing's growing influence.
New Zealand is currently negotiating a new type of partnership with transatlantic security alliance Nato, which is likely to cover areas of common interest such as the international rules-based order, cybersecurity and climate change, according to reports.
In addition, "New Zealand's potential role within Aukus will almost certainly be a topic of discussion in private meetings," Miller said, adding that there will be real questions about whether Wellington's independent foreign policy approach is "on life support".
Aukus is a trilateral security pact involving the United States and Britain that centres on delivering nuclear-powered navy submarines to Australia.
Blinken this week will become the first US secretary of state to visit New Zealand since Rex Tillerson in 2017 - though Daniel Kritenbrink, assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs, visited in June; and Kurt Campbell, US National Security Council coordinator for the Indo-Pacific under President Joe Biden, went in March.
Soon after Campbell's visit, New Zealand's Defence Minister Andrew Little indicated that New Zealand was willing to explore joining the "second pillar" of Aukus, in reference to the sharing of advanced military technologies such as quantum computing and artificial intelligence.
Analyst Miller noted that Prime Minister Chris Hipkins later appeared to walk back Little's remarks, however, calling the debate about New Zealand joining Aukus "purely hypothetical" as a formal invitation to join the pact had yet to be extended to Wellington.
Miller said Hipkins is likely to brief Blinken on what the New Zealand leader described as a "warm and constructive" meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing last month, as well as New Zealand's more positive relationship with China as compared to other Western countries.
Next on Blinken's agenda is Brisbane, where he plans to attend the annual Australia-US Ministerial Consultations forum, with bilateral discussions to span security cooperation and coordinating the countries' "vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific", according to a State Department statement.
Last week, Australia and the US began Exercise Talisman Sabre, two week of military drills involving more than 30,000 troops and other participants from 11 countries, including New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga and Papua New Guinea.
Describing the exercises as "a huge show of force", Miller said they also have the aim of demonstrating to China that the US and its partners are "united and ready for any conflict", and will be observed by Blinken and Austin during a "rare joint visit".
"This highlights just how important Canberra is to Washington, and how important the wider Pacific region has become," Miller said.
The trip will be Blinken's third to the Asia-Pacific in two months, following on from a visit to China in June and an Indonesia stop earlier in July for talks with Southeast Asian officials.
Blake Herzinger, a research fellow at the University of Sydney's United States Studies Centre foreign policy and defence programme, said that this week's visits highlight the persistent emphasis the US administration has placed on the Asia-Pacific region, despite the ongoing war in Ukraine.
"[The visits] confirm that a superpower can and must deal with multiple challenges simultaneously," he said, adding that Washington was working to repair several decades of what's been called "diplomatic neglect" of Pacific island nations especially.
Blinken is also likely to answer questions on delivering Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines to Australia after US senators in a letter to Biden expressed their concerns about the state of America's submarine industrial base and its ability to support Aukus submarines, Herzinger said.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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