Last week, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau traveled to the Solomon Islands to meet with the country’s new prime minister, Matthew Wale. The trip would have been rather unremarkable except for the fact that Landau is the most senior Trump administration official to have visited the Pacific islands—a vast region of 16 nations and territories, not including Australia or New Zealand—that President Donald Trump and his team have sorely neglected since returning to office last year. Once, in April 2025, Trump mentioned Fiji as one of the many countries worldwide that would face his trade tariffs—and he seems to have little to no actual interest in the region. Although Landau’s announcement of the U.S. Peace Corps’ return to the Solomon Islands was laudable, the Trump administration’s absence of vision and dearth of deliverables for the region is palpable.
It is even more remarkable considering that the first Trump administration prioritized the Pacific islands as a new frontier in the intensifying battle for influence between China and the United States. Micronesia and Palau, for instance, received visits for the first time from sitting secretaries of state and defense, respectively, and Trump himself met with all three leaders of the U.S.-partnered Freely Associated States (FAS)—comprised of Micronesia, Palau, and the Marshall Islands—for a historic summit at the White House.
Last week, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau traveled to the Solomon Islands to meet with the country’s new prime minister, Matthew Wale. The trip would have been rather unremarkable except for the fact that Landau is the most senior Trump administration official to have visited the Pacific islands—a vast region of 16 nations and territories, not including Australia or New Zealand—that President Donald Trump and his team have sorely neglected since returning to office last year. Once, in April 2025, Trump mentioned Fiji as one of the many countries worldwide that would face his trade tariffs—and he seems to have little to no actual interest in the region. Although Landau’s announcement of the U.S. Peace Corps’ return to the Solomon Islands was laudable, the Trump administration’s absence of vision and dearth of deliverables for the region is palpable.
It is even more remarkable considering that the first Trump administration prioritized the Pacific islands as a new frontier in the intensifying battle for influence between China and the United States. Micronesia and Palau, for instance, received visits for the first time from sitting secretaries of state and defense, respectively, and Trump himself met with all three leaders of the U.S.-partnered Freely Associated States (FAS)—comprised of Micronesia, Palau, and the Marshall Islands—for a historic summit at the White House.
The second Trump administration’s neglect of the Pacific islands is also a departure from the Biden administration, which continued the first Trump administration’s focus. In 2021, President Joe Biden participated in a virtual summit of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), followed on 2022 by another virtual appearance by then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Biden further signed a landmark security deal on coast guard cooperation with Papua New Guinea, reopened the U.S. Embassy in the Solomon Islands after it had been shuttered for nearly three decades, and added more embassies in Tonga and Vanuatu. Biden also renewed the Compacts of Free Association with the FAS, giving Washington security dominance over a large swath of the Pacific. His administration further issued new policies of geostrategic significance—including the “Pacific Partnerships Strategy” as the first standalone U.S. national security strategy for the region.
But Trump 2.0 has been mostly missing in action in the Pacific. Other than Landau’s visit, the administration has only announced a new initiative to collaborate with the Cook Islands on deep-sea mining of critical minerals. What’s worse, the Trump team has adopted policies that harm the United States’ standing there. The most destructive by far has been Trump’s denial of climate change, viewed as an existential issue by the entire region.
During his first term, Trump’s positive engagement with the Pacific islands allowed residents there to look past this fundamental disagreement. But this time around, Trump’s decision to effectively eliminate the U.S. Agency for International Development has impacted the region in serious ways across not just climate adaptation and disaster preparedness but also public health, fisheries management, and humanitarian assistance.
Trump’s reckless war against Iran, meanwhile, has detracted what little attention on the region there was. It has also caused a global energy crisis that has disproportionately impacted the region, given its near-total dependence on imports of fuel and other products. As supplier countries such as Australia and Singapore themselves face steeper costs, those costs become even steeper when passed on to island states. The war is also contributing to rising inflation, which has made it more difficult for governments to adapt to the needs of their people.
Perhaps most importantly, the Pacific island nations’ economic lifeblood—tourism—is now in serious jeopardy as potential customers decide to save money in the crisis by skipping their intercontinental vacations. Trump’s trade tariffs have further inflamed relations across the region.
The White House has ignored the Pacific islands to such an extent that, when China test-fired a ballistic missile that landed in the South Pacific earlier this month, the administration treated the incident as more of a long-term arms control problem rather than a threat to the region. Although the U.S. State Department condemned the test, it reaffirmed U.S. defense commitments only generically to “allies and partners.” It neglected to mention the Pacific Island countries—despite China’s missile landing in their neighborhood—and thus missed the opportunity to instill some confidence that Washington is still a reliable partner.
More broadly, the administration has not engaged in any major diplomatic initiatives to quell the region’s growing concerns over Beijing’s destabilizing behavior. More than 18 months into his tenure, Trump has zero Senate-confirmed ambassadors to the region, reflecting a lack of seriousness about engaging the region, all the while failing to reassure it that Washington will continue to maintain peace and stability through deterrence.
For its part, China has continued to stay focused on the region. Since Trump returned to office, Beijing has convened a meeting with the foreign ministers of Pacific island countries , expanded implementation of strategic agreements with partners such as the Cook Islands and Solomon Islands, and maintained a steady cadence of senior diplomatic engagement. Regardless of whether these initiatives produce major breakthroughs, they reinforce the perception among Pacific governments that Beijing remains consistently focused on the region while Washington’s attention has waned.
Indeed, according to one senior interlocutor from the region whom I recently spoke with, “the U.S. really needs to revise and improve its diplomatic culture if it is to catch up with China.” The official added that Washington “needs to match its rhetoric with the appropriate substance and delivery. Too many promises in the past have been left unfulfilled.”
A sustained lack of attention to the Pacific islands could have real consequences for Washington’s Asia strategy going forward. In recent months, it appears that the White House has been backing off its conceptualization of the region as the “Indo-Pacific,” including India and the Indian Ocean region, in favor of a resurrection of the “Asia-Pacific” that emphasizes a narrower, East Asia-focused strategy of deterrence vis-à-vis China.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore glaringly avoided use of the term “Indo-Pacific,” and he has often referred to certain U.S. allies in the first island chain, namely Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, as “model allies” for their pledges to spend a higher share of their GDPs on defense. During his visit to Southeast Asia last week for an ASEAN foreign ministers meeting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio not only met with his counterparts from the Quad (which comprises Australia, India, Japan, and the United States), but also with the so-called Squad, a parallel grouping that swaps out India for the Philippines, thereby underscoring the importance of first island chain defense. Besides wrecking the U.S.-India relationship last year, Trump also decided as commander in chief to rename Indo-Pacific Command back to Pacific Command.
All of this adds up to a United States that is more worried about maintaining deterrence in the Taiwan Strait, East China Sea, and South China Sea than perhaps previously thought. That makes the second island chain—which stretches from Japan to Palau—and the other Pacific islands beyond it even more important. U.S. territories—American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam—and the FAS, with which Washington has a unique military agreement, serve as the core of a second island chain strategy aimed at supporting U.S. military deployments closer to China. Pacific island nations, especially the FAS, could provide their bases, ports, and airstrips in a future war. They occupy some of the most strategically valuable real estate in the Pacific, giving the United States access to vast air and maritime operating areas that would be indispensable in a prolonged conflict.
Additionally, the Pacific islands, though farther from a potential primary theater of conflict, could offer their territories in a distributed fashion to avoid an overconcentration of U.S. troops and resources in any one location. This is critical, since both the range and lethality of Chinese weapons continue to improve, as demonstrated by Beijing’s recent ballistic missile test. Finally, better U.S. relations with Pacific island nations could prevent Beijing from expanding its own security partnerships across the region.
Of course, not everything is or should be about U.S.-China competition. Yet even judged by the administration’s own objective of competing more effectively with China militarily, neglecting diplomacy, development, and the priorities of Pacific island governments is likely to prove counterproductive because it ultimately demonstrates that Washington is not a credible and reliable partner, whereas China’s image there is on the rise.
If the Trump administration truly believes that strategic competition with China will be decided in the Western Pacific, then the Pacific islands should be receiving more—not less—attention from senior U.S. policymakers. Deterrence is built not only with military prowess but also with sustained diplomacy and trusted political relationships. Trump’s first administration understood that reality. His second administration appears to have forgotten it.