
The Biden administration struggled with adequately advancing US national security and foreign policy interests in the Pacific islands. The problem was that the White House failed to select the right business concept to pursue.
What is needed is not simply a strategic pivot. What is needed is a business transformation. That requires more than reform and modernisation. It requires a radical rethinking and restructuring of the core business processes of the US embassies and consulates to the Pacific island countries.
Until that happens, Washington’s foreign policy establishment will be unable to afford to compete with revisionist authoritarian powers seeking to displace US influence in the Pacific islands.
Unfortunately, such organisational change cannot be achieved overnight. Among other things, it will require new executive leadership teams, and ambassadorial confirmations for Pacific island countries are notoriously slow. However, that does not mean that the new Trump administration cannot change the status quo at US diplomatic missions in the region by the end of the first 100 days. Here are four suggestions that could help to get the ball rolling.
First, the administration should systematically assess the strategic planning of the State Department in the Pacific. As a matter of policy, each mission is supposed to create a multi-year strategic plan that declare the United States’ whole-of-government priorities in ‘a given country’.
The plain meaning of the phrase ‘in a given country’ suggests that the requirement is to produce an integrated country strategy for every independent state of concurrent accreditation. In practice, that does not always happen. For example, the US embassy to Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Tonga, and Tuvalu produced a single integrated country strategy for what it refers to as ‘five diverse and geographically distant Pacific Island nations’.
The Trump administration should consider providing different guidance and instructions to missions that cover multiple countries. That revision might stipulate that the mission is to produce separate integrated country strategies for each of the countries, followed by an integrated mission strategy that synthesises the individual country plans.
Second, Trump should re-evaluate the concurrent accreditation of the diplomatic staff at the US embassy in Fiji to Kiribati, Nauru, Tonga and Tuvalu. These countries span the Pacific’s cultural subregions, Fiji being part of Melanesia, Nauru and Kiribati within Micronesia and Tonga and Tuvalu forming part of Polynesia.
The Trump administration should consider restructuring the US diplomatic footprint across the region. While current arrangements may reflect logistical and resource constraints, a more strategic approach would create three subregional complexes of US embassies, consulates and consular agencies. Within each of these complexes, key business functions would be centralised to promote efficiency and thereby reduce costs.
Under this strategic approach, the Melanesian complex would be composed of the US embassies in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. The Micronesian complex would be composed of the US embassies in Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia and Palau. And the Polynesian complex would be composed of the US embassies in Samoa and Tonga and the US Consular Agency in French Polynesia.
Under this structure, it would make sense for the concurrent accreditation for Kiribati and Nauru to shift to the US embassy in Marshall Islands until the US embassy in Kiribati is established. Similarly, it would make sense for the concurrent accreditation for Tuvalu to switch to the US embassy in Samoa.
Third, the White House should re-evaluate the regional diplomatic posture of the US in foreign dependencies and areas of special sovereignty. In the Caribbean, the US has an independent mission for Aruba, Curacao and Sint Maarten, which are constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. In East Asia, the US has an independent mission for Hong Kong and Macau, which are special administrative regions of the People’s Republic of China.
In the Pacific, the US recently established diplomatic relations with the Cook Islands and Niue, self-governing states in free association with New Zealand. Following these precedents, the Trump administration should re-evaluate the diplomatic terminology used to describe other foreign dependencies, areas of special sovereignty and sovereign independence movement territories across the region.
Fourth, the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of State should address the gap that exists in inspections of the US embassies in Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. Under the Foreign Service Act of 1980, the office is required to inspect every US diplomatic post at least once every five years.
Unfortunately, that requirement is rarely met in practice, thanks to waivers from the United States Congress. The most recent inspection reports for the US embassies in Fiji and Samoa were a decade and a half ago. Shockingly, that was before the US pivot to Asia ever really started in earnest.