What’s wrong with US Pacific Islands policy?

By Cleo Paskal

There is currently an active debate about U.S. policy in the Pacific Islands. Some are saying the U.S. is AWOL in the region. Others have said this is one of the most active times for U.S. engagement, including the Heritage Foundation, which just published a detailed “policy inventory” of announced U.S. activities in the region.

What do I think? Let me start in a Pacific islands way with a story.

In May 2025, I took a China-donated cargo ship from Yap to Woleai atoll in the Federated States of Micronesia. Several hundred Micronesians (from babies to grandmothers), five Chinese construction workers and I slept on the deck, used communal bathrooms and ate the food we brought along for the days-long trip down the island chain. 

By the time I got back to Yap weeks later, I had lice, parasites and a leg wound that took U.S. military-grade salve to heal. I also had friends for life. 

Why did I go? The U.S. Department of Defense had announced around $2 billion in infrastructure investments on the main island of Yap.

Meanwhile, I had heard from Micronesian friends that the Chinese were working on something in Woleai in a different part of Yap State.

There was also a Dolly Parton angle—but that’s for later. 

People in DoD assured me (and their superiors) that everything was fine. Knowing how the U.S. government operates in other parts of the Pacific, I wondered if they had the full picture. So, I packed a bag full of tins of Chef Boyardee, bottles of water and Dramamine and went to take a look.

Soon after I arrived on Woleai, the president of FSM, Wesley Simina, arrived on his own boat. After the traditional beach greeting, he and his entourage disappeared on one of the island’s few pick-up trucks. His wife rode on the truck’s bed.

Local kids told me he had gone to the runway's groundbreaking. The runway? I wanted to see, so they led me on a dash through a jungle shortcut, past overgrown machinery left behind during the years Woleai spent under Imperial Japan's control.

Then the woods opened up, exposing the cracked runway first built by the Japanese, rows of Chinese heavy machinery and a stage announcing the imminent groundbreaking.

While the president’s official schedule may have said he came to Woleai for the high school graduation, it wasn’t a coincidence that he was also on the island when a Chinese state-owned company began work to rebuild an Imperial Japanese runway just over 640 kilometers from Guam.

Based on reactions, key people in the U.S. government were caught by surprise. Their “Micronesia whisperers” had failed them.

A few days later, on a School of War podcast— an interview I conducted via Starlink, while I was a ten-minute walk from the Chinese workers’ barracks on Woleai—I commented that the United States wasn’t listening to the right people and there were going to be problems moving forward with the $2 billion investment in infrastructure in Yap, unless something changed.

Nothing changed.

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On June 29, just over a year later, Adm. Samuel Paparo, the commander of U.S. Pacific Command, wrote to FSM President Simina that, due to a breakdown in the negotiations, “U.S. PACOM intends to move forward by assessing alternative locations across the region to meet the needs of Pacific defense.”

That may just be a negotiation tactic. But the fact that the situation has deteriorated to the point that a threat was deemed necessary is one indication that, in spite of the serious attempt by the Trump administration to work more —and better—with the Pacific islands, it is not necessarily achieving the desired outcomes.

They should have asked Dolly Parton, the late country star and all-around American icon, for advice.

While on Woleai, I took an hour-long outboard-motorboat trip to an island across the lagoon to attend an elementary school graduation. I had heard that Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library delivers free books to kids. It does, which was how I met Tasur.

Think about the social, political, bureaucratic and practical logistics involved in getting “The Little Engine That Could” from the U.S. state of Tennessee, where the Imagination Library is headquartered, into the hands of Tasur on Woleai.

Someone helping Parton’s non-profit knows Yap well enough to do not just that, but to ensure hundreds of kids across Yap get a free book every month from Tennessee.

That “someone” is Neil Mellen and the team at Habele, an educational NGO that has, for years, provided not just free books but scholarships and more to kids across FSM. Founded and funded by former Peace Corps volunteers and other Americans, its sister organization, Habele Research Institute, runs a comprehensive Wiki on Yap, which includes one of the largest online collections of historical material on the region.

If those involved in negotiating the U.S. military’s runway and port development didn’t read the Habele page on the topic and then ask to talk to the people who put it together – they might want to consider another line of work. I’m pretty sure they didn’t.

I do know they didn’t spend time talking to Father Francis X. Hezel. I asked him. Father Fran, as he’s called, now lives in Guam. He has been in the region since the early 1960s and literally wrote the books on Micronesia. U.S. policymakers used to go out of their way to meet with him regularly. 

Not anymore, even though PACOM’s Joint Task Force Micronesia is also based in Guam.

Father Fran, an American Jesuit, set up Micronesia Seminar Library, a physical, comprehensive collection of books, videos, articles, periodicals, photos and more covering the sweep of Micronesian history, culture and politics.

Father Rich McAuliff, another American Jesuit, has also been in Micronesia for years, and is on Yap taking care of the Library.

Given the changes to the local economy that $2 billion in investment might bring—Yap Island has a population of around 7,000—it would also be helpful to talk to Americans in the business community, like Mark Hartman, about complexities around access to financing, human resources, logistics, land rights and the regulatory environment. Hartman wrote a brief for Habele to try to inform the U.S.-Pacific Investment Summit. It is, as he says, the basics, but even that is usually overlooked. 

The DoD negotiators (and any others, including from the State Department, Interior Department, etc.) also would benefit from extensive conversations with the fine folks at Pacific Mission Aviation, a missionary airline that has been providing free medical evacuations, search and rescues and more in Yap for over 50 years. 

PMA pilots, almost all of whom are American, are the only ones regularly using the Woleai airfield. They know every runway, rock, and reef in the region. Almost every family in Yap has a story about good that the PMA has done.

At the Ulithi High School graduation last year, Simina, the FSM president, was the opening act; Amos Collins, a PMA pilot, gave the keynote.

As Brock Welge, the PMA’s director of maintenance, said in a recent interview: “Probably the biggest misconception people have is how long it takes to build relationships out here… I’ve been out here since 2019 and I’m just now starting to feel accepted and integrated into the community. Which is amazing, but it takes a long time to build those relationships, sometimes lifetimes.” 

Yes, the U.S. government is paying much more attention to the Pacific island region than it has in years. There is also a desire for a new approach, which is needed. That new attention and new money are attracting new “experts.” There are myriad reports being commissioned by various parts of the U.S. government on how to understand the region, and what to do about it.

Few of these reports are written by people who have lived and worked in the region (or in some cases even visited), or who have spoken directly with Americans on the ground.

For those “reporting on” Yap, the smartest of them will steal liberally from Habele Institute—if they (or their AI) can find it. That will ensure their contracts are renewed, but won’t help keep Habele and its relationships going.

I used the example of Yap and the wide range of Americans to learn from—

note that I haven’t even started with the locals, another obvious point of engagement—because this should be one of the locations with the most focus.

Yap is the site of the potential $2 billion investment, with close to $1.4 billion of that location-specific, as specified by the National Defense Authorization Act. And yet there is no permanent U.S. government presence in Yap, outreach to Americans on the ground is limited, there is little effective attempt to develop understanding and trust with locals. This can’t be done by AI. The same applies to other locations across the region. 

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There are some attempts to have “presence.” For example, the Army’s Oceania Engagement Team has two people on Yap, though there have been frequent personnel changes to the team. However, unlike in some other locations, the deployment has not resulted in building meaningful relationships. Especially given the lack of comparative knowledge, this particular presence may give a false sense of understanding of Yap.

That gets to the heart of the problem. And it’s why, unlike the usual pieces about the area that focus on geography, this article is about people. Any successful U.S. policy in the region needs to be about relationships and trust.

And this isn’t a benign environment.

That Chinese state-owned company that rebuilt the Imperial Japanese runway on Woleai? It’s now rebuilding a bridge on the main island of Yap, and is working on secondary roads. Its people are settling in for the long run, establishing their own relationship networks, ones designed to cut off ties to the United States and other democracies.

It’s not an accident that a Chinese operator tried to take over the PMA’s routes from Yap to Palau. Washington may not have identified who is important in providing human security in Yap, but Beijing has. And they are working to undermine the Americans doing just that.

While the new money, approach, and attention from Washington are promising and needed, we’ll know things have really changed when someone from the U.S. government rides on that transport ship through the outer islands of Yap,

alongside locals, at least some of whom will likely be U.S. military veterans, and starts to see for themselves what’s really going on.

That may not happen, because the U.S. embassy has likely heard just enough to know that the ship isn’t safe. Someone thousands of miles away may even be writing a report on it. But if Washington wants to know why the FSM and Yap governments, left on their own, won’t replace it with something seaworthy, how China fits in, and what Japan can do to help, they’ll need to talk to a new set of people.

In the meantime, just like much in the rest of the region, that ship will sail on, shrouded by a cloud of potential, imminent disaster that could easily be blown away by asking the right people the right questions. 

This article, originally published in The Diplomat, is republished here with permission.

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