As the Trump Administration continues its military build-up in the Asia Pacific, it is trying to maintain U.S. influence in the Pacific Islands, even as it ignores the dire threat posed by climate change to the region’s many island nations. The area’s low-lying atolls are vulnerable to rising sea-levels, which often manifest in dramatic king tides that push people out of their homes and pull houses into the ocean.
After Pacific Island leaders met at the Pacific Islands Forum in August to reaffirm the seriousness of the climate emergency, the U.S. State Department issued a statement acknowledging the climate risk: “The United States recognizes that addressing environmental degradation and climate change is a priority in the Pacific due to the threat posed by sea level rise and the region’s vulnerability to natural disasters,” the U.S. State Department noted in a recent statement.
Yet, only a month earlier, officials from the Trump Administration did not identify climate change as a top threat to the region. Speaking at a Congressional hearing, officials warned instead about the growing influence of China.
Emerging threats include “the impact of climate change,” Defense Department official Randall Schriver acknowledged. “But we are of course very focused on the challenges presented by China.”
The United States has long maintained a “sphere of influence” in the Pacific Islands. That sphere includes the island colonies of Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands. The U.S. military owns one-third of Guam and maintains major military bases on all three colonies.
The U.S. also wields significant control over the Freely Associated States, three island nations that are nominally independent but largely under U.S. control. These include Palau, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands. From a major military site on the Kwajalein Atoll, a part of the Marshall Islands, the U.S. military regularly conducts tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
“The strategic value of the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site at the U.S. Army Garrison at Kwajalein cannot be overstated,” Schriver told Congress. It “provides critical testing support to both offensive and defensive missile testing requirements.”
More generally, the U.S. government views the islands as keys to controlling the Pacific and constraining the rise of China. They believe that U.S. control better enables them to constrain the rise of China while keeping the United States positioned as the most dominant power in the Pacific.
“The strategic value of the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site at the U.S. Army Garrison at Kwajalein cannot be overstated.”
According to Schriver, the islands form a critical component of a logistics “super-highway” that facilitates the movement of U.S. military forces and materials throughout the Pacific. In addition, the islands function as a “second island chain” reinforcing powerful U.S. partners and allies including Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines.
“The United States views the Pacific Islands as critical to U.S. strategy,” Schriver said.
While U.S. officials view the Pacific Islands as strategic assets, the people who live there remain far more concerned about the growing threat of climate change. For years, residents of low-lying islands have been warning that rising sea-levels are going to make their islands uninhabitable.
“My husband’s [family] house was on the oceanside,” Marshall Islander Irene Ernest, who migrated to Dubuque, Iowa, told The Progressive in 2018. “We lost our seawalls. We all helped each other build it. Now we lost it. So we need to send money back home so that they can buy cement.”
Marshall Islanders hold a special immigration status, established under the Compact of Free Association Act of 1985, that allows them to live and work in the United States as reparations for the U.S. military testing that has ravaged their land. A few years ago, residents of the country’s Bikini Atoll asked the U.S. government to change the terms of another agreement that provided funds for home reconstruction within the Marshall Islands so that they could have those homes built in the United States.
More recently, a number of islands have been hit by major storms. Last year, a cyclone tore through American Samoa and a super typhoon caused major damage in the Northern Mariana Islands. The region includes “the most disaster-prone countries in the world,” U.S. official Gloria Steele told Congress in 2016.
A major hope for the region has been the Paris Agreement, which provides a framework for the world’s major polluters to reduce their carbon emissions, a primary cause of global warming. In September 2016, the leaders of the Pacific Islands Forum welcomed the initial implementation of the agreement, insisting that limiting the rise of global temperatures remained “an existential matter for many Forum Members, which must be addressed with urgency.”
Many islanders were shocked when President Trump announced in 2017 that he was withdrawing the United States from the landmark agreement. Leaders pointed to research funded by the U.S. military that shows that rising sea-levels threaten to make more than a thousand low-lying islands around the world uninhabitable by the middle of this century.
“If warming goes above 1.5 degrees Celsius, our fate is sealed,” Hilda Heine, president of the Marshall Islands, said in a video she posted to her Twitter account last year.
Pacific Islanders have made a major effort to call attention to their plight. At last year’s Pacific Islands Forum, leaders issued the Boe Declaration, which identified climate change as the “single greatest threat” to the people of the Pacific region. They also called on the United States to renew the commitment that former President Barack Obama had made to the Paris Agreement.
“The Paris Agreement is the best hope for a safe & prosperous future for all countries & for all people,” Heine later tweeted.
In May, the Congressional Research Service reported that both climate change and rising sea-levels present “an existential threat” to several Pacific Island countries.
But the Trump Administration operates in a cloud of denial. Trump has repeatedly indicated that he does not think that climate change is real; he has welcomed numerous climate change denialists into his Administration. Before he was elected, Trump repeatedly called climate change a “hoax.”
Earlier this year, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asserted that the president had made the right decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, commenting that it will “not do hardly any good for the environment.”
Pompeo has also repeatedly said that he does not see climate change as a major threat to U.S. national security. In March, he told Fox News that “I wouldn’t put it in the top five.”
Despite the administration’s denialism, some U.S. legislators are pushing back. Earlier this year, the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing in which several former officials identified climate change as a major threat to U.S. national security. “There’s no question that islands are seeing the impact of global warming and climate change already,” Senator Mazie Hirono, a Democrat of Hawaii, said during the congressional hearing in July.
But after Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska asked government officials to identify the “biggest threat” to U.S. relations with the Freely Associated States, none of them mentioned climate change. Their primary concerns were maintaining economic ties and keeping China out of the region.
“I think what we're seeing from China is a very aggressive, assertive play to try to gain their own influence,” Schriver said.
Rather than heeding the calls of their many allies and partners to act on climate change, Trump Administration officials remain focused on keeping the islands functioning as strategic assets, regardless of the consequences for the people who call them home.