China: Biden Snubbing Papua New Guinea Shows He Doesn’t Take the Pacific Seriously

China’s state-run Global Times on Monday sneered at news of an expanded security agreement between the United States and Papua New Guinea (PNG), describing President Joe Biden’s snub of the island nation as “proof the U.S. is not taking ties with Pacific Island nations seriously.”

Biden had been scheduled to visit the PNG capital of Port Moresby this week, but the White House canceled his trip so he could return to Washington for debt ceiling negotiations. Secretary of State Antony Blinken went in Biden’s place and strove to put a positive spin on the diplomatic situation by announcing an upgraded defense pact with PNG Prime Minister James Marape on Monday.

The Global Times quoted Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) calling the Biden snub “disappointing” and a “mess,” although they were actually talking about Biden blowing off his trip to Sydney and forcing Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to cancel a planned meeting of the Quad security alliance. 

The SMH also slammed Biden’s cancellation as a “gift to Beijing” and a “victory for Xi Jinping,” lines the Global Times did not see fit to quote, since the Australian paper was predicting the Chinese paper would pounce on the diplomatic disruption in precisely the way it did.

The SMH briefly mentioned that Biden created the “perceptions of a snub” by making time for the G7 summit Japan but not Australia or PNG, but the focus of the editorial was the utter disaster of Biden undermining the Quad, which China hates.

“The Pacific is the front line of U.S.-China geostrategic competition and Biden’s failure to show up is a loss of momentum after impressive recent efforts to restore America’s standing in the region,” the SMH wrote.

The Global Times was not about to mourn Biden insulting the Quad, and did not even mention the alliance by name in its own editorial on Monday. Instead, the Chinese paper stressed how the U.S.-PNG defense pact is controversial among some residents of Papua New Guinea and noted that Marape strove to downplay the importance of the agreement even as Blinken was touting it:

The US Department of State said the new agreement would provide $45 million to help improve security cooperation, including protective equipment for the PNG defense force. […] But a draft copy of the Defense Cooperation Agreement leaked last week sparked concern in PNG about the extent of US military involvement in the country, with reports saying it gives US personnel and contractors legal immunity, allows aircraft, vehicles and vessels operated by or on behalf of the US to move freely within its territory and territorial waters and exempts US staff from all immigration requirements, according to The Guardian.

Amid protests, PNG’s Prime Minister, James Marape, on Monday denied that US staff would have legal immunity and said no amendments would be made to the constitution or laws of the country. “It is just an elevation of the SOFA [status of forces] agreement that is already in place, and this agreement will not stop us from signing other similar agreements with other countries, including China,” he said.

“The government and people of these island countries are well aware of the open secret that the U.S. wants to instrumentalize the whole South Pacific Island region, but it can be seen from their statements that they will not take sides for this reason,” the Global Times concluded, speaking through its customary “Chinese expert” mouthpieces.

The Australian government pitched in on Tuesday to counter the Chinese narrative by promoting the U.S.-PNG defense pact as a more important signal of Washington’s attitude toward the Pacific Islands than Biden’s snub.

“It’s really good that we are seeing America becoming more and more engaged in the Pacific region and specifically with Papua New Guinea. A greater American involvement in the region and in its relationship with PNG is good news for us,” said Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles.

Marles hastened to add that Australia values its “very complex relationship” with China, and does not view the U.S.-PNG pact as part of an effort to thwart Beijing’s regional ambitions.

The Washington Post quoted former Australian diplomat Mihai Sora, now a research fellow with the Lowy Institute in Sydney, sizing up the security pact Blinken announced as a solid consolation prize for PNG:

“The payoff for Papua New Guinea is that it gets more support for law enforcement and security, that’s both economically important and politically important for the government of PNG to be able to deliver,” [Sora] told The Washington Post last week, stressing that he had not seen the agreement. “The payoff for the United States is that it’s seen to do good in the region, but also it firms up its strategic access and it supports a democratic country in a region that is being hotly contested.”

The Washington Post seemed skeptical that the pact was valuable enough to outweigh the symbolic damage from the Biden snub, which also left Blinken awkwardly sitting in for Biden at a meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum trade group in Port Moresby:

The security pact was supposed to be the defining moment from a historic trip for Biden, who would have been the first sitting U.S. president to visit a Pacific island nation. The trip — to a country where two of Biden’s uncles fought during World War II, and where one died — was intended to be a statement of American commitment to the region at a time of increased competition with China for influence.

Biden’s decision to head home after the Group of Seven meetings in Japan — canceling the Papua New Guinea and Australian legs of his trip — so he could negotiate with Republicans over the debt ceiling was a blow for American credibility in the Pacific, analysts said.

As the Post pointed out, China can offer security guarantees to the Pacific Islands too, and it has already come close to negotiating a “sweeping multilateral and security agreement with almost a dozen countries in the region.” It might not be difficult for China to sweeten that deal and try again, especially if Pacific leaders see the U.S. as wholly preoccupied with preventing its government from collapsing into a fiscal black hole.