While strategic competition between the United States and China certainly impacts Pacific Island nations, regional leaders are wary of getting lost in higher-level geopolitics at the expense of their own citizens’ security needs. To further build U.S.-Pacific security cooperation, the conception of security needs to expand beyond traditional issues, to include human security challenges such as climate change, economic development and the legacy of nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific.
USIP spoke with several regional experts about how the climate crisis is threatening the territorial and economic stability of many Pacific Island nations, why keeping the Pacific a nuclear-free zone should be a security imperative, and what the United States can do to help resolve the region’s longstanding issues in a just and fair way.
