As the strategic rivalry between China and the United States intensifies across the Indo-Pacific, the Taiwan Strait is often seen as the key flash point. Yet whether the regional balance holds or tips into conflict will also be shaped by choices made in, by, and about the Pacific Islands—the 12 sovereign states and several territories whose archipelagos stretch across the vast ocean between the Philippines and Hawaii.

Since the first decade of this century, China has steadily expanded its presence across the region. Most Pacific governments have leaned into Beijing’s offerings—seeking infrastructure and investment, as well as the leverage that Chinese ties give them with other partners. At the same time, they have worked to preserve their own autonomy and advance a “Blue Pacific” vision of a peaceful and cohesive regional order. But as China’s influence deepens and the islands’ democratic institutions come under growing pressure, that vision risks being eclipsed.

Under the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, the United States belatedly recognized that, left unchecked, Chinese influence could erode governance and eventually turn some island nations into client states of Beijing. Over time, it could split regional consensus, deprive Taiwan of diplomatic allies, and complicate Western deterrence in the Pacific. To counter this dynamic, both administrations began a re-engagement with the region, and the Biden administration launched a government-wide Pacific Partnership Strategy and pledged $1 billion in assistance over ten years.

Since then, however, the second Trump administration has taken steps that many Pacific leaders see as disregarding their countries’ interests. With the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the islands lost USAID’s regional mission in Fiji, which oversaw programs across all 12 Pacific Island countries. The administration has also frozen tens of millions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid to the region. Other Western allies in the region have tried to fill the gap—including Australia, which has reallocated $77 million to the Pacific. But that will not be enough to counterbalance Beijing.

Meanwhile, the United States has imposed across-the-board tariffs of 10–15 percent on Pacific nations such as Fiji, Vanuatu, and Nauru. And the administration’s dismissal of climate change flies in the face of the priorities of islanders, who regard it as an existential threat—particularly those in low-lying atoll countries such as Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, and Tuvalu.

For now, the Pacific Islands have mostly sought to avoid explicit alignment with either China or the United States and its partners. At this year’s Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting in September—an annual gathering of island countries and territories together with Australia and New Zealand—the host nation, Solomon Islands, broke with tradition and did not invite any non-members. The immediate reason was to avoid controversy over Taiwan’s participation, which China opposes as part of a persistent campaign to deprive Taipei of diplomatic recognition and relevance. But a larger consideration was China’s own expanding presence in the region, which has, in turn, encouraged the United States and other powers to treat the islands more as strategic assets than as sovereign partners.

In a bid to manage this trend, the forum announced new rules on island partnerships with outside powers and made a formal declaration to keep the region free from militarization and external coercion. But to make these ideals a reality, Western partners will need to do more to help the islands protect their democratic institutions and defend their sovereignty. For the United States and its allies, it will be imperative to find new ways to address the islands’ priorities and concerns, even as they seek to balance China.

MIDDLE KINGDOM, MARITIME POWER

In the late twentieth century, Pacific Island countries and territories aligned with and relied on former colonial overlords. As they achieved independence or at least greater self-rule, they built a multilateral regional order centered on the Pacific Islands Forum, established in 1971 to coordinate policies and elevate Pacific voices. Over time, this cooperative framework helped the islands chart their own destinies, alongside broad partnerships with Western governments. After the Cold War ended, however, Western strategic interest in the islands waned: aid declined, diplomatic representation thinned, and high-level engagement became sporadic.

Against this background, most Pacific Islands have welcomed China’s emergence. Beijing’s ambitions in the region can be traced to the early years of the twenty-first century, with then Premier Wen Jiabao making a landmark visit to Fiji in 2006. Since then, China has shaped a Pacific strategy based on incrementally increasing its presence, influence, and pressure. President Xi Jinping personally signaled that the Pacific had become a priority with trips to Fiji in 2014 and Papua New Guinea in 2018. The scale of Xi’s ambition was revealed four years later, when Beijing attempted to persuade ten Pacific leaders to sign on to a Chinese-led development and security framework. Although this plan failed to win consensus, China has pressed ahead with some 50 bilateral agreements that deepen climate cooperation, enhance culture and education ties, expand trade and investment, facilitate Chinese maritime mapping and seabed mining, and establish law enforcement and security cooperation.

For many of the islands, the economic benefits China brings have been immediate and often literally concrete, in the form of extensive construction projects. Beijing has sought to frame its infrastructure investments—such as the longest wharf in the South Pacific at Luganville in Vanuatu or a restored airfield in the Micronesian state of Yap—as benign and trust-building. But China clearly has its own economic and military agenda, as well. Assessing the Pacific as relatively weakly contested, Beijing aims to become a maritime power (haiyang qiangguo) that can control the western Pacific, marginalize regional neighbors, and prevent the United States from acting as an offshore balancer that could deter it.

To further this Pacific vision, the People’s Liberation Army needs access to ports and airstrips. So far, the PLA has not sought to establish actual military bases, which would undoubtedly draw countermeasures from the United States and other Western powers. By instead building infrastructure and leasing or investing in potential dual-use logistics facilities on the islands, China can acquire the footholds it needs more quietly, often with local buy-in.

Thus far, Chinese actors have directed most attention to the Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu. But they are by no means neglecting others. China in this sense views the Pacific Islands as a network that can support its broader strategy across enormous ocean expanses. With time, this will enable the Chinese military, Coast Guard and research vessels to operate routinely in the central Pacific, Antarctic waters and ultimately the approaches to North and South America.

BREAKING THE CHAINS

As military scholars Andrew Erickson and Joel Wuthnow have noted, Chinese analysts have adopted the American concept of successive chains of islands (daolian) running north-south across the Pacific Ocean. As Beijing sees it, the three island chains serve as springboards for Western military deployments, benchmarks of the PLA’s own force projection, and concentric Western lines of defense and containment that China must break.

Until now, most international attention has focused on the first island chain, which wraps along the coast of Asia from the Kuril Islands through Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines, to Borneo. Since roughly 2012, when Xi came to power and China became increasingly assertive in the Pacific, Beijing has persistently stepped up its military presence in the Taiwan Strait and claimed maritime sovereignty over large parts of the seas within this chain—despite international rulings to the contrary.

Yet the second island chain, where many of the Pacific Islands are located, has also become a geopolitical testing ground. Running from the north Pacific through Micronesia and Melanesia, this broad arc of countries and territories is where Western interests collide with China’s emerging power projection across the Pacific. South Pacific sea lanes that link Asia with Australia pass Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands, making those countries strategically significant for Australia and potential pressure points for Beijing. A third conceptual chain stretches from the Aleutian Islands through Hawaii, Kiribati’s Line Islands, and French Polynesia. For now, China is not directly asserting influence there, but signs of nascent Chinese interest in atolls such as Kanton, Kiritimati, and Hao suggest longer-term ambitions.

Just as Taiwan and Hawaii are critical defensive links for the United States and its allies in the first and third chains, Guam, an unincorporated territory, is the linchpin of U.S. deterrence in the second island chain, allowing the U.S. military to respond rapidly to military contingencies in the first chain. But over the past decade, the PLA has introduced intermediate-range ballistic missiles such as the DF-26—often dubbed the “Guam killer” (Guandao shashou)—capable of striking Guam and other second-chain islands.

In September, Beijing also showcased new hypersonic missiles that Chinese media claim can “break” the island chains. In response, the U.S. military has sought to harden, disperse, and distribute its assets more widely across the region, notably by expanding airfields in the Northern Mariana Islands and Micronesia. Both developments have heightened Pacific Island concerns that they could become U.S. staging bases—and, hence, Chinese targets.

To anchor its growing influence, Beijing has tried to build formal and substantive relations with all the Pacific Islands. Since 2019, Kiribati, Solomon Islands, and Nauru have switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China, leaving only the Marshall Islands, Palau, and Tuvalu maintaining ties with Taipei, despite persistent Chinese pressure. For China, muscling Taiwan out of the region and embedding its own assets there is part of its larger aim to dominate the maritime approaches to the first chain, be able to deny and disrupt Western military operations and logistics between there and the second, and develop the blue-water naval capabilities to distract and divert in the third.

At the Pacific edges of what Beijing’s policymakers call China’s greater periphery (da zhoubian), the PLA and China Coast Guard are also rapidly increasing surveillance, intelligence gathering, and force projection—often using “gray zone” tactics. For example, Chinese research vessels have probed the waters of Micronesia and navy ships have expanded defense diplomacy. In 2024, PLA Navy destroyers visited Vanuatu and Tonga, and in a rare missile test, the PLA Rocket Force sent an intercontinental ballistic missile into the South Pacific. In February, a Chinese naval task force circumnavigated Australia and conducted live-fire exercises in the Tasman Sea. Australian analysts see these as unsubtle demonstrations of China’s growing capability to coerce Canberra.

Pacific Island officials fret about a spiral of militarization, and with good reason. In a clash between China and Taiwan, for example, multiple war-gaming scenarios indicate the PLA could seek to thwart Western intervention by striking military targets, cutting undersea cables, and disrupting transportation along and between the island chains. The consequences for the Pacific Islands could be catastrophic—particularly if fighting coincided with one of the region’s frequent natural disasters.

PERMANENT CONTEST

Alongside its growing military presence in the region, Beijing has sought to become a preferred provider of internal security expertise, training, and equipment. China’s Ministry of Public Security now works with police in Fiji, Kiribati, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu; PLA defense attachés offer similar assistance to the militaries of Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and Tonga. The China Coast Guard’s recent registration of 26 ships with the Western & Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, an intergovernmental body that promotes sustainable fishing, underscores Beijing’s aim to become a leading enforcer of the high seas. Security and human rights experts worry that these activities may also provide Beijing a way to disseminate authoritarian doctrines and politicize defense and law enforcement.

In its diplomatic and economic activity, China is already rivaling the United States and slowly closing the gap with Australia. For now, Canberra still has the most officials working on Pacific countries and is their leading donor. But as part of its overall strategy to strengthen ties, China has hosted frequent state visits for Pacific leaders and gatherings of officials, offered scholarships and cultural exchanges, and deployed Chinese medical teams and a PLA hospital ship. These efforts have begun to shape Pacific perceptions.

All the Pacific Islands that have diplomatically recognized Beijing have also joined its Belt and Road Initiative, including most recently the Cook Islands, which signed a comprehensive strategic partnership agreement in February, rattling officials in New Zealand, its constitutional partner and strategic guarantor. These accords are weaving a new web of economic and political relationships and jolting traditional Western partners to shore up their own influence. Australia has responded with a slew of its own initiatives, including a landmark mutual defense treaty with Papua New Guinea signed in October. Australia’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, says her country is in a permanent contest.

Chinese investments often involve extensive corruption.

Trade, financing, and development assistance now link most Pacific Islands to China. Some countries, such as Tonga, have become increasingly dependent on Chinese credit. Chinese engineering companies dominate construction sectors, and other Chinese enterprises have become key players in Pacific economies. Although some islanders and observers criticize Chinese loans and projects as unsuitable, unsustainable, or coming with hidden strings attached, the general view from most of these countries is that China delivers—typically more quickly and with less red tape than Western competitors.

Yet these deals and projects often involve extensive corruption. In island after island, politicians, civil society representatives, journalists, and analysts allege that Chinese interests have used bribery and other unethical incentives. They report such methods as coercion, election interference, media manipulation, and use of proxies who are linked to organized crime networks or the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front, an international network of the party that operates globally to capture foreign elites and shape narratives about China abroad. Although few cases have been proved in court, surveys indicate many islanders believe corruption is widespread and safeguards are inadequate.

Regional analysts also warn that China has been targeting island elites with lavish financial and political rewards for supporting its strategic preferences. This has already been reflected in the shifting voting patterns of the 12 Pacific Island countries at the UN General Assembly: in 2000, on resolutions where China and the United States disagreed, Pacific votes aligned with China’s just 54 percent of the time. By 2024, that alignment had risen to 86 percent. To be fair, such support for China is at least partly motivated by frustration against Western partners for failing to deliver on climate financing and critical infrastructure. But it suggests how quickly China has gained sway.

HANGING IN THE BALANCE

By now, many Pacific leaders understand what is at stake in China’s bid to bring the region into its orbit. Despite its tangible benefits, engagement with Beijing is posing new threats to governance, political stability, environmental sustainability, national security, regional consensus—and potentially self-determination. The Pacific norms and institutions that hold elites accountable, ensure rule of law, and sustain independent news reporting all show signs of strain. The sheer disparity in scale with Beijing that the islands face—China’s population is 1.4 billion compared with their combined 14 million—imposes an extreme imbalance of power.

Pacific peoples insist that their islands are not just links in strategic chains and are making clear that they form a unique, self-governing community with a right to define its own vision and destiny. They have been asserting their priorities, such as dealing with climate change, promoting sustainable development, and addressing nontraditional security threats, through such initiatives as the Pacific Islands Forum’s Boe Declaration on Regional Security, the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent, and now the Ocean of Peace Declaration, which the forum adopted in September.

Yet in the face of China’s ever-expanding influence, Pacific-led efforts will only succeed with steadfast support. One positive step would be for the U.S. Congress to adopt the Pacific Partnership Act, legislation that would mandate the administration to put forth a formal Pacific Islands strategy, that would likely facilitate increased and more predictable U.S. financing, deeper cooperation on maritime and security challenges, and better coordination with other partners. Following through on such a strategy would be a powerful signal of U.S. commitment to the region.

The United States can build a better model of engagement that recognizes the islands’ own interests even as it enhances U.S. national security. American and Pacific Island interests are already aligned in seeking to deter aggression and coercion in the Pacific. But to sustain that deterrent capacity, the United States and its partners must recognize the political, economic, environmental, and social concerns of the islands themselves. Supporting the islands’ sovereignty and democratic institutions, and sincerely addressing their interests, is not only good for Pacific peoples. It is a cost-effective way for Washington and its allies to preserve the fragile balance that keeps the Pacific as peaceful as its name.