The island’s foreign minister said U.S. President Joe Biden would sign defense and surveillance agreements with the nation where his uncle perished in World War Two.
State Department papers filed to Congress reveal that U.S. development aid to PNG, the South Pacific’s most populated nation, will double to $32 million, including $25 million to address their security priority of climate change.
Washington wants to discourage Pacific island states, which span 40 million km of water, from security relations with China, a growing concern with Taiwan tensions.
The White House announced that Biden would visit Port Moresby on May 22 on his route to a Quad meeting in Sydney. He’ll meet 18 Pacific island leaders.
Foreign Minister Justin Tkachenko told Reuters that the U.S.-PNG Defence Cooperation Agreement was finalized last week, “which now allows us to officially sign it when Biden comes here.”
In an interview, he claimed a second deal would allow the U.S. Coast Guard to patrol PNG’s large exclusive economic zone with PNG officials as “ship riders” and cover satellite monitoring.
We can use U.S. satellite security systems. “Signing that will help monitor our waters, which we can’t now,” he added.
“It will be a fantastic agreement protecting our natural resources from being illegally poached and stolen, especially our fishing,” he continued.
China has a decade of infrastructure projects in the region and signed a security accord with the Solomon Islands this year, which banned U.S. Coast Guard boats from its seas.
Xi Jinping visited the area three times, including PNG, in 2018, but Beijing failed to negotiate a security and economic accord with ten nations last year.
Biden’s visit will emphasize PNG’s regional security relevance and have personal meaning.
Biden visited Australia in 2016 and recalled that two of his uncles were flyers in PNG during World War Two, one of whom perished in an aircraft crash in May 1944.
The U.S. push across the Pacific to free the Philippines relied on PNG. Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong has urged Australians to study history to grasp “the strategic importance of Pacific islands to Australia’s security needs.”
Local media warned that a Pacific-launched Chinese missile assault would leave Australia defenseless.
University of NSW professor David Kilcullen, a former special advisor on counterinsurgency to the U.S. Secretary of State, warned Reuters that Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles on the Pacific islands might block U.S. and Australian fleet mobility and crucial commerce routes.
“A U.S.-China conflict could play out across the whole Pacific, including Melanesia and the Polynesian islands, not just in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, which puts PNG and the Solomons firmly in the spotlight,” he added.
China and Solomon Islands deny their security treaty enables a navy installation.
After meeting with Pacific island leaders last year, the U.S. announced an $800 million economic aid package, which Congress must approve in deliberations expected to go until autumn. An official told a congressional panel that Vanuatu and Kiribati had not consented to U.S. embassies.
Pacific leaders believe Biden’s encounter with them restored confidence.
“We have felt at times, to borrow an American term, like a flyover country,” Pacific leaders told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Fiji last year.
“Small dots spotted from plane windows of leaders en route to meetings where they spoke about us, rather than with us, if at all.”
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