Eleventh International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

Since the establishment of the United States, the Pacific has been a crucial interest for both economic and security reasons. As early as 1825, U.S. president John Adams required a better navy to ensure the “flourishing of commerce and fishery extending to the islands of the Pacific.” And, as recently as 2012, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton affirmed that America knew the Pacific Islands were “strategically and economically vital and becoming more so.” The Trump administration tried to reintroduce this long standing concept with its call for a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” and extended the strategic geography of the Western Pacific to spread into the Indian Ocean region. Though it seems to many global risk analysts that we are making the shift to the pacific too late, the U.S. has had over a century of homeland security built up in the region. This presence of the military has been split into three main regions in the South Pacific: Hawaii, Guam and the Federated States of Micronesia. The region remains strategically vital to the U.S. for two key reasons. First, it is in U.S. interests to prevent the emergence of a regional hegemon that could threaten America and its allies; and second, the U.S. wants to maintain the free flow of goods and ideas to Asia.