US secures Marshall Islands military deal, keeps China at bay in strategically vital Pacific region
The administration of Joe Biden scored a big win late on Monday, keeping China and other nations out of the strategically significant western Pacific region by securing a deal with a long-time Washington partner in Oceania.
After months of haggling, the Marshall Islands agreed to renew a strategic pact granting the US military access to its land, air and sea in exchange for economic help for decades.
Washington "sought the relationship to continue its ability to deny forces of other nations access to an area of the Pacific west of Hawaii as large as Alaska, California and Florida combined", according to Phillip Muller, chief negotiator for the Marshall Islands, in a statement issued after the new deal was signed in Hawaii.
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The total assistance was four times the amount the Biden administration had "initially insisted would be the maximum", Muller said. The renewal offers US$2.3 billion for 20 years, but does not allocate additional funds for specific demands.
The archipelago was the last of the three Freely Associated States to renew its deal with the US under the Compacts of Free Association.
While Palau and Micronesia signed their renewals in May, the Marshall Islands allowed its agreement expire on September 30, demanding "compensation" for 67 US nuclear tests carried out between 1946 and 1958.
Jack Ading, the Marshall Islands' foreign and trade minister, said his country would "repurpose" US$700 million under the agreement to meet "the extraordinary needs of those who have suffered hardships and challenges from the nuclear testing programme".
"Negotiations have been long and difficult," Ading added. "There have been times when communications had broken down entirely."
Muller said the "most important improvement through this negotiation" was the vanquishing of an "ill-advised idea that the Marshall Islands would let the US continue to exercise a fundamental aspect of its sovereignty without continuing to receive assistance".
As China's economic and political influence in the Pacific has risen in recent years, the Biden administration allocated more than US$7 billion for the next 20 years in the president's 2024 budget to extend the Cofa deals. It represents the largest-ever congressional budget request for the region.
According to a 2018 report by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a Washington-based government agency, Beijing since 2013 "has significantly bolstered its involvement in the Pacific Islands region, which comprises three US territories and three countries freely associated with the United States that are important for US defence interests in the Indo-Pacific".
However, a government shutdown looms over Washington due to a partisan divide regarding federal spending. Along with pending aid requests for Ukraine and Israel, congressional approval of new Cofa pacts could be delayed.
Last year the White House hosted more than a dozen leaders from Pacific island nations and territories after the Solomon Islands signed a security deal with Beijing. Biden then promised over US$800 million across several economic programmes. The funds still await congressional approval.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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