Features | Diplomacy | Oceania

What’s Wrong With US Pacific Islands Policy?

It’s the relationships, stupid. 

The China-donated ship that is the only regular transport along the Yap island chain.

There is currently an active debate about U.S. policy in the Pacific Islands. Some are saying the U.S. is AWOL in the region. Others have said this is one of the most active times for U.S. engagement, including the Heritage Foundation, which just published a detailed “policy inventory” of announced U.S. activities in the region.

What do I think? Let me start in a Pacific Islands way, with a story.

In May 2025, I took a China-donated cargo ship from Yap to Woleai atoll, in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). Several hundred Micronesians (from babies to grandmothers), five Chinese construction workers, and I slept on the deck, used communal bathrooms, and ate the food we brought along for the days-long trip down the island chain. 

By the time I got back to Yap weeks later, I had lice, parasites, and a leg wound that took U.S. military-grade salve to heal. I also had friends for life. 

Onboard the China-donated ship that is the only regular transport along the Yap island chain. Families eat and sleep on deck for up to weeks at a time. Photo by Cleo Paskal.

Why did I go? The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) had announced around $2 billion in infrastructure investments on the main island of Yap State, an island also called Yap. Meanwhile, I had heard from Micronesian friends that the Chinese were working on something in Woleai, in a different part of Yap State.

There was also a Dolly Parton angle – but that’s for later. 

People in DoD assured me (and their superiors) that everything was fine. Knowing how the U.S. government operates in other parts of the Pacific, I wondered if they had the full picture. So, I packed a bag full of tins of Chef Boyardee, bottles of water, and Dramamine and went to take a look.

Soon after I arrived on Woleai, the president of FSM, Wesley Simina, arrived on his own boat. After the traditional beach greeting, he and his entourage disappeared on one of the island’s few pick-up trucks. His wife rode on the truck’s bed.

Local kids told me he had gone to the groundbreaking for the runway. The runway? I wanted to see, so they led me on a dash through a shortcut in the jungle, past overgrown machinery left behind from the years Woleai spent under the control of Imperial Japan.

Then the woods opened up, exposing the cracked runway first built by the Japanese, rows of Chinese heavy machinery, and a stage announcing the imminent groundbreaking.

While the president’s official schedule may have said he came to Woleai for the high school graduation, it wasn’t a coincidence that he was also on the island when a Chinese state-owned company began work to rebuild an Imperial Japanese runway just over 640 kilometers from Guam.

The groundbreaking ceremony for the runway reconstruction on Woleai, Yap, on May 26, 2025. Photo provided by Cleo Paskal.

That’s me, just behind the Chinese flag.

Based on reactions, key people in the U.S. government were caught by surprise. Their “Micronesia whisperers” had failed them.

A few days later, on a School of War podcast – an interview I conducted via Starlink, while I was a ten-minute walk from the Chinese workers’ barracks on Woleai – I commented the United States wasn’t listening to the right people, and there were going to be problems moving forward with the $2 billion investment in infrastructure in Yap, unless something changed.

On June 29, 2026, just over a year later, Admiral Samuel Paparo, the commander of U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM), wrote to FSM’s President Simina that, due to a breakdown in the negotiations, “U.S. PACOM intends to move forward by assessing alternative locations across the region to meet the needs of Pacific defense.”

That may just be a negotiation tactic. But the fact the situation has deteriorated to the point that a threat was deemed necessary is one indication that, in spite of the serious attempt by the Trump administration to work more – and better – with the Pacific Islands, it is not necessarily achieving the desired outcomes.

They should have asked Dolly Parton, the late country star and all-around American icon, for advice.

Dolly Parton, Habele, and More Untapped Wisdom

Tasur with his books from Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library on Woleai Atoll, Yap. Photo by Cleo Paskal.

While on Woleai, I took an hour-long outboard motor boat trip to an island across the lagoon for an elementary school graduation. I had heard that Parton’s Imagination Library delivers free books to kids out there. It does, which was how I met Tasur.

Think about the social, political, bureaucratic and practical logistics involved in getting “The Little Engine That Could” from the U.S. state of Tennessee, where the Imagination Library is headquartered, into the hands of Tasur on Woleai. Someone helping Parton’s non-profit knows Yap well enough to do not just that, but to ensure hundreds of kids across Yap get a free book every month from Tennessee.

That “someone” is Neil Mellen and the team at Habele, an educational NGO that, for years, has provided not just free books, but scholarships and more to kids across FSM. Founded and funded by former Peace Corps volunteers and other Americans, its sister organization, Habele Research Institute, runs a comprehensive Wiki on Yap, which includes one of the largest online collections of historical material on the region.

If those involved in negotiating the U.S. military’s runway and port development didn’t read the Habele page on the topic  – and then ask to talk to the people who put it together – they might want to consider another line of work. I’m pretty sure they didn’t.

Father Francis X. Hezel at work in his office in Guam. Photo by Cleo Paskal.

I do know they didn’t spend time talking to Father Francis X. Hezel – I asked him. Father Fran, as he’s called, now lives in Guam. He has been in region since the early 1960s and literally wrote the book(s) on Micronesia. U.S. policymakers used to go out of their way to meet with him........

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