The Kiribati has announced to leave the Pacific Islands forum, which meets in Suva, the capital of Fiji, from July 11 to 14.
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On the front line between the United States and China in the Pacific, a new pawn oscillates. Located in the middle of the ocean, Kiribati, with its immense border maritime economic zone of the United States and its Chinese investments (Beijing has acquired the single landing track of the island state in 2021), announced , Monday, July 11, leave the Pacific Islands forum (FIP). However, Washington was betting on this regional organization of which his relatives are part of allies, Australia and New Zealand, to make a piece to the expansionism of Beijing. The eighteen countries of the forum are brought together until Thursday in Suva, capital of Fiji.
Kurt Campbell, the coordinator for the Indo-Pacific of the White House, had clearly declared, on June 23, in Washington that “firmly supporting regionalism in the Pacific, in particular through existing institutions such as FIP “, was one of the priorities. In 2021, Joe Biden was the first president to address this forum, and the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, carried out a tour in the islands to update, in Fiji, the American strategy in the Indo-Pacific Region .
Tuesday, July 12, the vice-president, Kamala Harris, put a new project on the table. She announced to the FIP States the appointment of a first “Special American Envoy”, as part of a brand new “national strategy on the Pacific Islands”. But also negotiations to open two embassies, in Kiribati and Tonga – after that of the Solomon Islands, reinstalled in February. The “American Fund for Economic Development and Resilience of the Ocean” will be tripled, it also promised, reaching $ 600 million (around 599 million euros) in ten years, if the Congress approves. And the American agency for international development will return to Fiji.
“A failure for the United States”
During the intervention of M me Harris, in videoconference, the police expelled two Chinese defense attachés who had mixed with journalists in the square reserved for the press, noted the Guardian .
“The president of the federated states of Micronesia, David Panuelo, wanted the FIP to work because he fears China. The withdrawal of Kiribati, after that of the Marshall Islands, shows that these two countries have good relations with her” , Cleo Paskal, Canadian researcher specializing in the sector. The fragile regional organization, “perceived as a bureaucracy which first serves the needs of the great powers”, has done nothing concrete in the major recent regional crises, underlines M me Paskal: the COVVID -19, the riots of the Solomon, the natural disaster that ravaged Tonga, and the governance difficulties of the South Pacific University, managed by twelve countries of the region. “It is a failure for the United States which presented the forum as an entry point of American policy in the region. It is also a failure for Australia and New Zealand, which have more taken. “
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