The Peril of American Neglect in the Pacific
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I'm Andrew Schwartz, and you're listening to The Truth of the Matter, a podcast by CSIS where we break down the top policy issues of the day and talk with the people that can help us best understand what's really going on. To get to The Truth of the Matter, about a terrific new article in Foreign Affairs called Peril of American Neglect in the Pacific, we have with us two of my great colleagues, Dr. Charles Adele and Catherine Pack.

Charlie is our Senior Advisor and Australia Chair at the Center for Strategic International Studies. He served on the U.S. Secretary of State's Policy Planning staff from 2015 to 2017. Catherine Pack is a Senior Fellow with the Australia Chair at CSIS and served as Director for the Pacific and South Asia on the NSC from 2021 to 2023.

It's a terrific article you guys wrote. And the hook really is China now leads the world in diplomatic presence, notably with more diplomatic outposts than the United States in Africa, Central Asia, East Asia, and

and the Pacific Islands. I want to ask you guys, what made you write this article and why does that matter so much? Well, Andrew, thanks so much for having us on. We're really excited, as the Aussies sometimes say, we're really chuffed that this piece came out in a place like Foreign Affairs.

Look, over the last couple of years, America really has tuned into the Pacific as a region that deserves more attention, more bandwidth, more resourcing. And you can see this in some of the actions that the administration, and I should say the administrations, because they started under Trump and accelerated under Biden, have taken, paying attention to the region. That's all to the good. In fact, it's way overdue. Break, break.

However, even as we've kind of ramped up our attention, we are still lagging in having boots or rather pinstripes on the ground that enable and facilitate American engagement across the region. If you simply take a tally of who and what and

and where the Chinese have presence versus where the United States have, we are way behind. It's great that we're signaling intent, but in order to maximize delivery of all the good things that we want to do with our partners across the Pacific, we need to have more diplomats on the ground. So Catherine and I wanted to write this article both to point out where we're lagging and then provide a whole host of recommendations about what both Congress and

and the administration and State Department can do to help enable and spur and boost American diplomatic presence in the region. Yeah, you know, I was struck by this article. It's a really great read, but it also has some really technical and policy recommendations in it that are unusual for even a foreign affairs piece. And in a good way, it really shows that you guys are thinking about this on a deep level. And that comes through in the article.

Why is this so complex? And Catherine, what did you guys mean and learn from doing this? Yeah, and thanks so much again for having us here on the show. I think it's so complex because there's several different factors at play here. Obviously, there's the resourcing issue, and we certainly get into that, and that's the top line. We absolutely need to resource diplomacy better at a national level.

But beyond that, there's also the issue of incentivizing the right diplomats out to the region. And there's also the need to be much more creative with how we're looking at diplomatic presence and beefing up diplomatic presence in the region. The challenges in the Pacific are vast.

The countries are very different. It is a culturally rich and diverse region. And without the appropriate number of diplomats and the right diplomats on the ground able to make relationships and build connectivity between the governments, it's really hard to keep moving forward with this great progress, as Charlie mentioned, that the last two administrations have really been able to put forward.

Catherine and I were pretty sneaky in this piece. We snuck in as many policy recommendations as possible. It reads like a CSIS report, which is great. The gold standard, Andrew. Yeah. I mean, and again, in a good way, you did sneak in these recommendations. And so when I finished reading this, I felt-

like I really knew something about where this could be going. We're really glad that you and all the other readers can nerd out on the policy recommendations here. But there is intent here because what Catherine and I have really heard a demand from is that this is an area that's of bipartisan interest, that both the administration and the Hill want to move forward on. And

And that State Department, not to mention other departments and agencies that house themselves within embassies abroad, all want to have the ability to do more on. So what this is intended to do is give a whole bunch of fodder about how we have a race to the top.

And that actually has to be a mutually beneficial relationship, both between the administration, what's it enabling, the Congress, what it is funding and allowing the ability to do, and then some tweaks and some changes to how State Department can go about enabling itself to better compete.

on the ground. Before I ask you about the U.S. and China, when it comes to diplomats in this region, is there a shortage of good U.S. people who work on this stuff? Is there something we need to cultivate here to make this happen?

So first and foremost, as I said before, we just don't have the numbers, right? Globally, we do not have the numbers of people on the ground conducting diplomacy that we should for the complex global environment that we have right now. But absolutely, the Pacific is a harder region. There's a lot of leg to having a diplomatic presence, whether it's healthcare, whether it's schools, education. So it can be a tougher region to get people to. But

Also, it doesn't tend to be a place that people think of cultivating an expertise in at the moment. Sure, we have China experts. We are also starting to have Southeast Asia experts, perhaps. But very few people would consider themselves a Pacific expert. And we need more of that. And so that's a little bit of a culture shift as well.

There's not too many people who get into policy to study Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. So really, this is something you're saying we need to cultivate. Yeah, and it's fascinating. It's a fascinating region. It's got really interesting, complex challenges. And so capitalizing on that and just stepping back a little bit, too, if I could, you

when you get into why we thought of writing this report, I think it really comes down to a lot of the frustration that we feel and are hearing about. As Charlie said, this is a bipartisan issue. No one is saying we shouldn't be doing more. No one is saying we shouldn't be continuing to focus on the region. And yet,

there's still been a lag in being able to open up embassies, being able to get diplomats in the region, being able to roll out with much of our programming. And why is that? And that's part of what we were trying to do with this article is drill down on some of those hindrances and how we might get beyond. Can we be even more stark though here? We lay out in the article a couple of instances where the U.S. might have

two diplomats on the ground at a newly opened embassy. And the Chinese have somewhere between 10 and 30 with room to go up to 100.

We lay out a couple instances in the article where across the Pacific, a really broad region that has 16 sovereign nations in it, where we have no diplomatic presence at all, making us deaf, dumb, and blind to what's actually happening there. And we lay out in the article, when you think about kind of broad strokes of American strategic priorities in the Indo-Pacific, we both come from Australia, Chair. We think about Australia a lot. We think about AUKUS all the time.

This is a strategic priority. The US-UK-Australia submarine deal. Yeah, absolutely. And when we think about how many Americans are going to be hubbing out of Perth in Western Australia, we're talking several thousand within the next two to three years. Just to support the submarines. To support the submarines. And the fact that we have basically two to three very competent American diplomats, it's not

sufficient to meet the demands that the U.S. will place on that mission. All right. So this is really interesting, and I want to get to the U.S.-China piece of this. China is clearly there in these places that we're not. You just mentioned we've got two diplomats. They've got up to 30 in certain places. So let's

Let's back up a little bit and explain why. I'd love for you guys to explain why this part of the world, you alluded to it with AUKUS, is so critical to our national security. And then I want to follow up and ask you all, have we really ceded too much ground to the Chinese on this? Yeah. Let me go for a first attempt. Catherine will come in and correct anything that I say here. But look, this is an enormous part of the world. When we think about the reach of the Pacific Ocean,

and the countries that are in there, we're talking roughly 20% of the world's surface. Yeah, this is a fifth, as you point out, of the world's surface in this piece. That also really jumps out at you. It also, if we think about where that fifth of the world's surface is, this is the geographical location between the Philippines and Hawaii.

So, therefore, any strategic defense or commercial interest the United States has in maintaining its access to the entire Indo-Pacific region is critically based on our access and relationship with the Pacific Islands themselves. So, that's number one. Like, geography actually matters here quite a bit. You know, the...

The other part about why we should care about this region enormously is we're talking about more than a dozen democratic states. There is no doubt that America is deeply involved and increasingly vested in its competition between systems. These are the so-called allies and partners.

Absolutely right. Absolutely right. And this used to be at forefront of how America thought about the world strategically. I mean, if we think about World War II, we know that geography really well. But because of a whole host of reasons, because a whole host of resourcing issues, this is an area where we haven't been as relevant and as...

as present as we could have been. And guess what? Other countries have paid attention and have moved where we have not. So this is a catch-up effort that we're pushing for. All right. So along those lines, Catherine, I want to ask you, you guys point out a really good example on this that's pretty stark. You talk about how...

how the nation of Nauru has recognized China this year instead of its previous recognition of Taiwan. And then you point out that it took Beijing five days to set up an embassy after that happened. And meanwhile, the United States still doesn't maintain an embassy in Nauru. Most Americans have no idea what Nauru even is. They think it might be like a fantasy movie. And instead, what the United States is doing is relying on diplomats

1,400 miles away in Fiji. That's got to be a big bit of a problem, doesn't it? Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, diplomacy by flying in, flying out or temporary TAD diplomacy has never worked, right? It's never been the right answer. COVID taught us it was the worst answer, right? We had zero access to countries and to governments that we previously at least had been able to touch with every once in a while.

The Chinese have clearly embraced the fact that diplomacy on the ground is the first step in being able to gain influence and enact programming in any of these countries. And they made that clear by their ability to roll out immediately. Those plans were most likely in concert for quite some time. But yet we had no idea because, again, we had no one on the ground to be able to alert us to the fact. We can't do much in five days in the United States, which is a bit of a problem, I guess, right?

Yeah, it is. You know, Catherine and I have been lucky enough this week, we've had a group of student journalists from Temple University in Philadelphia in here at CSIS. It's part of our boot camp, our Ideas Lab boot camp. Exactly. And we've been running them through a boot camp on the U.S. relationship with the Pacific Island region. It's been really a fantastic spread. We've had ambassadors from several different countries in the region. And we've

One of our guest speakers made the point that America should really be invested in this region first and foremost because of humanitarian issues. These are people who have

amazing challenges in front of them. First and foremost, climate change, right? Several of these Pacific islands will not exist in 10 years, and this needs to be a really high priority. I absolutely agree with that, but also think it's really important here in Washington to say that we should be motivated by our humanitarian impulses and guided by our strategic interests. And this is an area where the two of them overlap especially vividly.

Catherine, you both talk about changes that need to be made by Congress and the State Department to maximize the effectiveness of the personnel that are already on the ground, especially in smaller posts. But there's also, as Charlie alluded to before, there's a lot of recommendations in this piece that Congress and the administration, the next administration, really need to consider. Can you go through a few of those?

Yeah, certainly. So first and foremost, our hesitation or our delay in being able to roll out embassies and opening embassies has really hampered us. It's taken us more than two years to open the embassy in Vanuatu that was announced at the first Pacific Island Forum Summit with the president. We are still yet to be able to open an embassy in Kiribati. And even when we do, we might have one or two people on the ground. Some of this comes down to, frankly, very technical requirements.

requirements that are in place for very good reasons, especially post-Benghazi, that have to do with standoff distances. And I don't want to run through all the specifics here. There's plenty of documentation out there. And yet many of those either don't really fit with Pacific Islands or aren't necessary. And in some cases, like a country like Kiribati, are actually impossible to meet. Now, is there a waiver requirement?

Hold on, tell them why it's impossible to meet in Kiribati. In Kiribati, a 100-foot displacement from the embassy to the gate, for example, might put you in the water in some places. I mean, there is literally such a crowded island on such a narrow atoll. It is just not physically possible. And the terrorist threat in these locations is, for the most part, quite low. We could very easily be looking at some modifications. There is waiver authority to this. And people would have a great view out their window of the office, not to mention. We could put it out on the window.

dimension, I guess. But they just don't make sense. It's a bit irrational. There is waiver authority to the State Department, but that's asking a lot for the State Department, especially post-Benghazi, to be able to sign waivers in multiple locations repeatedly. Instead, there should be just a different technical requirement for certain locations, such as in the Pacific Islands. We're also not going to be building the same infrastructure in some places. There just isn't the possibility to have certain types of infrastructure. And yet,

we need to be a little bit more flexible with how we have people on the ground. And I think what our intent was when we were scripting all these recommendations was simply to think through how we could further enable American presence. And that means that there are homework assignments for both the Congress that wants to do this and

and also for the State Department and other departments and agencies that want to be present. So again, one can't do it without the other. As Catherine was just talking about, if Congress wants to do this, it has to do more than just say, please do this. It has to

provide resourcing, and it has to go further and maybe shift some of the requirements that it has that are global to make them more specific and bespoke to this really important region. And kind of capitalizing on the departments and agencies, I think there's a creativity piece as well. We tend to think of the State Department only when we think about diplomacy, and yet there are many other departments and agencies that are much more active internationally now and have a vested interest

and could do a lot of really amazing work, such as the Department of Agriculture working on desalinizing some of the soil in some of these locations with sea level rise, or Department of Energy working on some of the connectivity issues. Department of Transportation to help with the infrastructure on these. Absolutely. And yet very few departments and agencies have much of an international budget or the ability to deploy attaches and regular people on the ground. So we need to be a little more creative with how we do this. And that really, again, gets back to Congress.

There's a really terrific quote that you all use in this piece to underscore the importance of this. And it comes from former Secretary of Defense General James Mattis, who famously said in 2013 when he was head of CENTCOM, quote, if you don't fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately. That's really what this is, isn't it?

Absolutely. I mean, diplomacy is really the front line of American influence abroad. Without having diplomats on the ground, there is no way we are able to maintain and gain influence and work with our partners and allies around the world. That preempts potentially the need for conflict, the need for the Department of Defense to get involved. And I think that is exactly what the former Secretary of Defense Mattis was saying. Look, I'll be even more blunt than that, if you don't mind. I mean, what does

diplomatic presence get us, it gets us the relationships that we need. What are diplomats there to do? They meet with foreign leaders, they navigate local customs and cultures, they identify opportunities for U.S. collaboration, they report on the emerging challenges, they combat disinformation, and they support our democratic principles.

Without this, if God forbid we ever get to a crisis, without that presence on the ground, what Mattis was saying is you have to fight your way back in. And that is just so much more expensive in blood and in U.S. treasure. So why not invest in this up front so that you have the relationships that we need to make sure that our presence is there, is welcome, and is useful?

You also have another really terrific quote in here, and it comes from John F. Kennedy in his speech to the University of Michigan in 1960, where he talks about...

If we don't have this kind of ground game that you're talking about, then we can't compete. And isn't that the root of this? We can't compete with China in this region unless we have, as you say, pinstripes on the beach. Yeah. You know, it's funny. When Kennedy made this speech, it wasn't even a speech. He was talking with a bunch of University of Michigan students during his campaign in 1960. And he flipped out a challenge to them and said, I need you to

to be willing to serve America abroad. You can clearly hear echoes of that in that amazing first inaugural address that he gave, right? Yeah, and this is sort of the precursor to the Peace Corps also, isn't it? That's right. That's exactly right. And what Kennedy was doing there, and let's not kid ourselves, 1959, 1960, was a moment of...

intense geopolitical competition, right? This is before he meets Khrushchev in Berlin. This is before the Cuban Missile Crisis. We are looking at them, they are looking at us. And what he is trying to do here is reimagine how America can use all the tools and all of its natural resources to compete more effectively. And he's challenging the American people and American students here to be more willing to compete in that lane.

That, I think, is really what we're calling for. To compete more effectively, as Catherine said, we have to be more creative in how we show up, where we show up, and what we're willing and able to do.

Yeah. And as Charlie was saying, this is it's not just about formal diplomacy and formal diplomats. Right. As JFK was alluding to is this idea of building relationships and the beauty of something like the Peace Corps. And I'm glad you brought that up is the Peace Corps is one of the most popular tools of influence that we have in the entire Pacific region.

There is probably not a Pacific leader out there that doesn't either have a personal relationship with a Peace Corps volunteer or have a family member that has a personal relationship with a volunteer. And yet the Peace Corps has had to slowly withdraw from the region. We're starting to get them back, but they are not resourced to the extent that we need them to be to be able to establish themselves across the region.

To both of you, thank you. This article, The Peril of American Neglect in the Pacific, really points out that we need a better ground game in that region. Thank you for laying it out here on Truth of the Matter. You can read it at Foreign Affairs. It's on the homepage right now. Great. Thanks so much for having us on, Andrew. Thank you.

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