Washington's Hysterical Response to the China-Solomon Islands Agreement

Washington D.C., home of the monumental overreaction, is at it again, this time threatening China and the Solomon Islands over a security agreement negotiated between the two.

Forget the fact that 99 percent of Americans couldn’t point out the Solomon Islands on a map, or that we have dozens of military bases and installations in the region, some our Australian allies say we may need to preemptively invade – that according to David Llewellyn-Smith. 

The truth is there is no justification for assuming US and Australian prerogatives trump those of all other states. Trade between China and the island nation is almost 100 times that between the US and the Solomons. Thousands of Chinese live or work in the Solomon Islands, and Chinese capital and businesses have proliferated in the past two decades. Though it isn’t reported in the mainstream western media, anti-Chinese riots on the islands have periodically resulted in the destruction of Chinese business and attacks on its citizens – most recently in 2021.

It is worth pausing here to reflect on how Washington might have reacted under similar circumstances. It seems unlikely its actions would have stopped with diplomatic complaints and an eventually negotiated arrangement for a Chinese police presence to protect its citizens and their property.

More likely, an aircraft carrier battle group would have been dispatched and the matter settled unilaterally.

Apart from the fact Washington’s intemperate response is likely to alienate key regional fence-sitters like the Philippines, India, and Indonesia, it also lays bare the obvious emptiness of U.S. and western rhetoric about the right of states to choose their own security policies and the inviolability of borders.

Grumbling in the developing world, including among the other BRICS countries, about the U.S. provoking Russia into a rational if unreasonable response to threats to its security are growing – something even mainstream hawkish outlets like the Economist acknowledge. Seeking to draw more black and white lines over distant security concerns is likely to continue this trend of alienating states clearly seeking non-alignment in Cold War Two.

As usual, in its reaction to the Solomon Islands’ agreement with Beijing, Washington is damaging America’s foreign relations and our national security, misconstruing the nature of the agreement and stoking domestic anti-Chinese sentiment. Of course, many Americans died in retaking the islands from the Japanese during the Second World War. And their sacrifice was tremendous, but that isn’t why Washington is acting belligerent.

Just as in the case of Ukraine, so-called “Great Power Competition,” a euphemism for the strong fighting over which of the weak each will lord it over, is to blame for this new threat to global security. Meanwhile, “whataboutism” is a rhetorical device meant to prevent our critically thinking about these policies or their context.

But these insane policies have to stop. Confrontation everywhere, anywhere, for anything and everything, with no sense of proportion is going to lead only to disaster both at home and abroad. We should not, as long-time hawk Robert Kagen suggests in Foreign Affairs, fight the Russians and Chinese over anything and everything; but rather, as Eliot A Cohen recommends, by returning to history, to statecraft, to accepting other states can be permitted to act without oversight from Washington.