The United States has launched a diplomatic offensive in the Pacific, sending President Joe Biden’s top security advisor Jake Sullivan to court regional leaders in a sudden escalation in its response to China’s security deal with the Solomon Islands.
Sullivan joined Biden’s Indo-Pacific chief Kurt Campbell in lobbying the Pacific on Thursday after the Australian government failed to convince Honiara to abandon the deal with Beijing. The security agreement could see Chinese naval vessels and troops based less than 2000 kilometres off the Australian east coast and cut off vital supply lines to the US and Asia in the event of a conflict.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan will visit the Pacific region following the signing of a security deal between China and the Solomon Islands.Credit:AP
Labor leader Anthony Albanese on Thursday said “it was beyond comprehension” that Foreign Minister Marise Payne had not been sent to Honiara after a draft was leaked of the agreement on March 24.
“The United States very much relies upon Australia and sees Australia as playing that key role of partners in the Indo-Pacific,” he said. “Australia and Scott Morrison have just gone missing.”
Labor has put the mishandling of the deal at the centre of the federal election campaign. The opposition has abandoned its relative bipartisanship on foreign affairs to neutralise the Coalition’s perceived strength on national security and Chinese Communist Party influence.
“The security agreement between China and the Solomons is a massive failure of our foreign policy,” Albanese said while campaigning in Bomaderry in southern NSW. “We are closer here today to the Solomon Islands than we are to Perth. That shows how strategic they are to Australia.”
Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Thursday said that he had known “for some time the risk of a deal such as this coming about”.
The federal government was aware of China’s broad intentions in the region but did not have details on the proposal for Chinese troops and vessels to protect infrastructure in the Solomons until the draft was released in March.
“I can’t go into all the details as to how Australia is able to know the specific information, as they are security matters,” said Morrison. “But what I do know is we have always been very conscious of that threat of China being able to influence a nation in our region.”
Sullivan met with the President of the Federated States of Micronesia David Panuelo on Thursday. Micronesia, which is made up of more than 600 islands, lies less than 1600 kilometres north of Honiara. Like the Solomons, it is on a key shipping route between the South China Sea, the Philippines, Japan and Australia.
“The two discussed the existential threat posed by climate change to Pacific Island nations, and voiced common concern about the People’s Republic of China and the Solomon Islands signing a bilateral security agreement,” the White House said in a statement on Thursday morning.
The presence of Campbell and Sullivan in the Pacific in the middle of the war in Ukraine highlights how gravely Washington views China’s rising influence in the region.
China’s President Xi Jinping told the Boao Forum on Thursday that China was “willing to put forward a global security initiative” but offered few details on what this would mean beyond the existing structure of the United Nations.
“We must adhere to the concept of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security, and jointly maintain world peace and security, insist on respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries, and not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries,” Xi said.
Xi did not specifically mention the United States or other Western governments but urged governments to abandon “the Cold War mentality” while condemning bloc politics, camp confrontation, unilateral sanctions and “long-arm jurisdiction”.
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