U.S. Institute of Peace experts discuss the latest foreign policy issues from around the world in On Peace, a brief weekly collaboration with SiriusXM's POTUS Channel 124.

Transcript

Laura Coates: Joining us now is Dr. Gordon Peake, a senior adviser for the Pacific Islands in the United States Institute of Peace's Asia Center. He joins us now. Dr. Peake, welcome and good morning. How are you?

Gordon Peake: Good morning, Laura. I'm good. Great to be on the show.

Laura Coates: I'm glad that you're here. Thank you so much for joining us where we are now a year into a regional strategy for the US-Pacific Islands. There's a summit, you write about getting beyond the honeymoon phase, remind people about that important summit that's happening. And they're going to have a summit starting next, starting actually, today I believe. Is that right, marking one year since the first ever such summit in September of last year?

Gordon Peake: Yeah, that's right, starting in a couple of hours, Laura. So, President Biden is going to be inviting leaders from the Pacific Islands to the White House for what will be the second summit, where the United States has gathered together these leaders. The last one was about this time last year. And the fact that he's inviting them, again, is a sign that this region, which historically has been pretty neglected by the United States is now assigned a place of, in which Washington is paying much more attention.

Laura Coates: Why is that? Why are we paying more attention now?

Gordon Peake: Well, I think it's probably, it is the elephant in the room question, which is always the issue of China, which is one of the reasons why the US is paying attention. There's a number of theaters in this kind of set of power competition between the great powers, the Pacific is one of them. It's not the only one, but it is one of them. But it's also a region that the US has a lot of historical links with as well. So, as well as what's happening today. It's also a way of kind of recalling what's happened in years past. So, you've obviously got links that come from the Second World War, but you've got huge missionary links between the Pacific Islands and the United States and the Peace Corps as well. So, there's a whole multiplicity of reasons why the US is paying more attention.

Laura Coates: Has there been progress since I mean, last year's summit, they had the rollout of the US-Pacific Partnership Strategy, what has changed?

Gordon Peake: So, we wrote in a piece that we published on the USIP website, that we're now kind of still in the honeymoon phase between the US and the Pacific Islands. It's been one year since the strategy was rolled out. And it's been lots of I think, public facing activities that have happened. So you had a number of members of the Cabinet, including Secretary Blinken, Secretary Austin, that have visited the region. But one of the big issues that I think Pacific Islanders are still grappling with, they're still trying to, as they get to know, the United States in this honeymoon phase is that all US initiatives are dependent upon congressional approval, and a number of the big-ticket items that were in the strategy are still pending approval in Congress. And we all know, both of us here in DC today that we kind of seem to be barreling towards the endgame when it comes to what's happening with Congress and the budget at the minute. So, Congress is something that's really important and it's something I think that you know, the US is getting to know the Pacific Islands, but the Pacific Islands are also getting to know to the United States. And I think what's ever more clear for Pacific Islanders how important Congress is, in terms of the budget. I'm from Ireland, originally and something that took a while for me to get used to with the United States is that Congress holds the purse, Congress is the third branch of government, and without congressional budgetary approval, then you can't do as much as you'd like to.

Laura Coates: Well, when you look ahead at what, what should be going from here on out, I mean, obviously, we're a year in beyond the honeymoon phase, as you write about, but the idea of there remaining some thorny issues between the US and the Pacific Islands, or are there still things to contend with specifically that you think this summit will identify and hope to at least acknowledge and move beyond?

Gordon Peake: Let's hope so. So, there's really three issues that are kind of thorny issues that the US and Pacific islands need to kind of put on the table and address. One of them is something called AUKUS, which is a trilateral security arrangement between the United States, between Australia and the United Kingdom. And one of the issues there is that part of the arrangement is that Australia will receive nuclear powered, but conventionally armed submarines as part of the arrangement, and that makes the Pacific very, very jittery. There is a there's concern about militarizing the Pacific, there’s concern about nuclearizing the Pacific and there's one of the reasons why the Pacific is so focused on nuclear issues is because it's got history there in terms of nuclear issues. So in the 1950s, and the 1960s, 1940s, the United States, and it wasn't the only one of the great powers, detonated 67 atomic weapons in the Marshall Islands, in the Northern Pacific, and the effects of that testing, France did it too and elsewhere in the Pacific, United Kingdom did it elsewhere in the Pacific, still reverberate in the region, there's still huge rates of thyroid cancer in many parts of the Pacific where there was nuclear testing occurred. So, you know, the past may be passed for, for us here sitting in DC, but for Pacific Islanders who've got long, long memories, that nuclear legacy issue is still something that is important is something that one hopes will be addressed today. And the third issue is climate change. The Pacific may not have been most responsible for our made, has played a very, very small road role in generating climate change, but it's one of the big victims of climate change. And I saw that myself and travels that I took in the region this year. You have small islands, small little places where the water is so much on roads that your kind of kind of wading, kind of knee deep within its roads being washed away because of climate change. So, these are something issues that I think Pacific Island leaders will be hoping to get practical assistance from the United States from today and tomorrow. It's a two-day meeting.

Laura Coates: Really informative. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Gordon Peake. It's a two-day meeting and I'm excited to hear more about it. He's a senior adviser to the Pacific islands in the United States Institute of Peace's Asia Center. Thanks for joining us this morning.

Gordon Peake: Thank you, bye.