‘Like a dagger to the heart of the American heartland’:

By Jayvee Vallejera

A map that displays all of America shows how central the Pacific is to the United States—straddling vast areas that go from Alaska in the north to American Samoa in the south—and highlights how important this region is to protecting the American heartland.

That vast corridor of peace and security that spans nearly 3 million square miles and connects the Pacific to the seas of other allied nations is a problem for China, said Cleo Paskal of the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

In her opening statement before a U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission hearing, Paskal said China wants to be in a position to reshape the world to its own liking and knows the important role of the Pacific.

“[China] studied World War II and it knows how important the central Pacific is,” she added. “If it remains outside of Beijing’s control, there would be limits on its expansions and ambitions, including with Taiwan.”

The question, though, is whether the U.S. sees what former American Presidents William McKinley, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan knew all along: “If a hostile power takes the Pacific, it’s like a dagger to the heart of the American heartland,” Paskal said.

Quoting CNMI Gov. Arnold Palacios, Paskal said the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam and America Samoa, along with with Palau, Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands, firmly anchor America’s position in the Pacific.

That America’s prosperity is tied to a free and open Pacific has been the position of generations of American leaders, Paskal said. That can only be secured by limiting the influence of those who want exclusive control of the region. That used to be the Spanish, the British, the French, the Germans, the Japanese, and now China.

This is why, Paskal said, that China has been targeting the Pacific region as a whole and the U.S. territories and the COFA states in particular, using methods that Philippine Army Chief of Staff Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr. describes as illegal, coercive, aggressive and deceptive, or ICAD.

Paskal said her written testimony to the commission, which monitors the national security implications of the trade and economic relationship between the United States and China, contains many examples of these tactics.

“China’s goal is not hidden. In 2008, then-commander of [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command] Adm. [Timothy] Keating said a senior Chinese official suggested to him, ‘You take Hawaii East; we’ll take Hawaii West.’ There is no word on what would happen to those Americans living in Guam or the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands,” she said.

Paskal warned that, in its effort to control the Pacific geographical pivot of history, China will destroy communities and families, including Americans in places like Guam, to do it.

What can America do against this? Paskal recommended what she calls “block and build”—blocking China’s ICAD activities while building economic and social resilience.

“You cannot have one without the other,” she added.

China uses commercial fronts to engage with other countries, such as offering them substantial loans, but Paskal said it doesn’t want to see independent economic growth in those countries; it wants to create economic dependencies and destroy autonomy.

Therefore, any attempt to build real prosperity also has to block the expected attacks and sabotage from China, she added.

Blocking alone won’t work, though.

The region is hurting economically, she said. If any moves against China is focused solely on blocking, social disruptions caused by increasingly desperate economies can open pathways for China. This is where actions to build these economies can come in.

“The U.S. might invest a hundred million putting up an airfield in a Pacific island country…but if you don’t go after the strategic corruption and what’s going on on the ground in terms of that ICAD activity, all you’re going to be doing is build an airfield to China,” she said.

She likened the “block and build” tactic to kinetic warfare, where you both attack and defend in order to make any headway.

“China treats this as war and we should take it no less seriously,” she said.

Paskal said her written testimony contains recommendations on laws that Congress could pass to strengthen the United States’ position.

On top of that, she also recommended a visit to Pacific island countries, which no sitting U.S. president has ever done.

“If President Trump chooses to visit a Pacific island country, if he [goes] to one of the Compact states, it would really show the enduring depth and importance of the relationship,” she added.

She also recommends expanding the role of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in the National Energy Council to include overseeing and coordinating blocking and building in the Pacific to ensure that it gets the attention it needs, especially in coordinating inter-agency efforts to block China’s ICAD activities.

She said this will also ensure that the funding cuts happening across the federal government will not affect the compact states and U.S. territories.

“We and the people of the Pacific have been here before. World War II shows us the cost of underestimating the importance of the central Pacific,” she said.

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