Eighteen months into the second Trump administration, the United States still has no Senate-confirmed ambassadors to the Pacific Islands. There are sixteen Pacific island nations and territories in the region, not counting Australia and New Zealand, and none of them has a US ambassador.
The first Trump administration treated the Pacific Islands as a new frontier in the competition with China. It created a Pacific Islands directorship on the National Security Council and hosted the presidents of Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands at the White House, a first. Secretaries of state and defense made the first-ever visits by sitting cabinet officers to those countries. The Biden administration kept the pace: it reopened the embassy in the Solomon Islands after a closure of roughly thirty years, opened new embassies in Tonga and Vanuatu, signed a coast guard cooperation deal with Papua New Guinea, renewed the Compacts of Free Association, and published the first standalone Pacific strategy in US history.
The second Trump administration has done almost nothing. Its most senior gesture was a visit to the Solomon Islands by Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, who met the new prime minister and announced the return of the Peace Corps. It has collaborated with the Cook Islands on deep-sea mining of critical minerals, and that is the list. Trump’s only mention of the region since returning to office was naming Fiji among his tariff targets.
Its policies have done the rest of the damage. The Pacific Islands consider climate change an existential threat, and the administration denies it. The elimination of USAID cut into climate adaptation, disaster preparedness, public health and fisheries management across the region. The Iran war and the energy crisis hit the islands hardest because they import almost all their fuel. Tourism, the region’s economic lifeblood, collapsed as travelers stopped taking intercontinental vacations, and the tariffs made sure nobody forgot who was responsible.
Beijing, meanwhile, has been consistent, which is its own kind of advantage. When China test-fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile into the South Pacific in July, it notified Japan, New Zealand and Australia in advance and did not notify the United States. The State Department condemned the test but reaffirmed American commitments only to allies and partners in general, without naming a single Pacific island country. China had already convened a meeting of Pacific foreign ministers, expanded its agreements with the Cook Islands and the Solomon Islands, and kept up a steady cadence of senior visits. It sent a missile into the region and a minister to the meetings; Washington sent a statement.
The signals from Washington’s own language are not reassuring. The defense secretary avoided the term “Indo-Pacific” at the Shangri-La Dialogue, and the president renamed Indo-Pacific Command back to Pacific Command. The strategy is visibly narrowing to East Asia, to Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, the allies that matter for the immediate fight. The Pacific Islands, which sit in the middle of the second island chain and could offer the distributed basing the Pentagon says it needs, have been left out of the picture that replaced the old one.
People in the region have noticed. They say Washington needs to match its rhetoric with substance and delivery, and that too many promises have been left unfulfilled. That is the polite version. The impolite version is that the United States is losing the Pacific the same way it loses most things now, not to a rival’s victory but to its own absence. Beijing does not need to win the islands; it only needs to show up, and it does. The chairs on the American side are empty, and the room is filling up.