American power projection in Pacific facilitates colonization of indigenous lands – Guam proves

[Van, “Trapped By Empire,” Dissent, February 8th 2023, , Accessed 6/20/23, JCP – PL]

The specter of geopolitical violence looms anytime Washington turns its attention to the Pacific.

In 1898, the Treaty of Paris ended the Spanish-American War and transferred Guam and the Philippines to the U.S. empire. In the Second World War, the United States focused on the Pacific not just as a theater of war but also as an avenue to reclaim colonial territories. In the early Cold War, the Pacific had fleeting importance to policymakers as a site for nuclear testing. And during the Vietnam War, the United States used its Pacific territories—in particular Guam—to stage large-scale bombing and counterinsurgency campaigns across Southeast Asia.

As America’s rivalry with China has accelerated in recent years, U.S. moves in East Asia tend to draw the most attention—including expanded military base access in the Philippines just announced this February. But the United States has begun focusing on the Pacific once again too. In May 2022, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited eight Pacific nations during a ten-day tour that sought (but failed) to secure a region-spanning “Common Development Vision.” In classic one-upmanship, the White House answered by hosting a U.S.-Pacific Island Summit four months later.

As official policy, the United States seeks a “free, open, and inclusive” region. In practice, it seeks to preserve and expand the U.S. sphere of influence in the Pacific to preclude China from doing the same. That intention is evident not just in its explicit warnings to Pacific nations against cutting deals with China, but also in the guest list for the summit. The White House invited twelve countries but Guam—one of the world’s seventeen remaining territories denied self-governance—was not on the list. Instead, its governor was part of the U.S. delegation. And in the “Pacific Partnership Strategy” the White House issued in parallel with the summit, Guam was mentioned only once, in a list of U.S. territories.

The obvious reason for this is that the United States is Guam’s colonizer. To this day, the U.S. military occupies roughly one-third of Guam’s landmass. And the Pentagon has plans to expand that presence further still.

Guam exists as an imperial relation within U.S. liberal internationalism—a key node in what historians call America’s “pointillist empire.” Guam’s relative absence from how the White House portrays the Pacific is a politically convenient blind spot. Exclusionary control of Guam is logically incompatible with the claim that the U.S. government is defending a “rules-based order”—the very claim it uses to justify rivalry with China. But it is essential to U.S. strategic machinations in Asia.

Unfortunately, Washington’s narrative erasure of Guam has also trapped the territory in an existential Catch-22. The Chamorro—the indigenous people of Guam—are actively seeking self-determination. The government in Guam has appointed a Commission on Decolonization (some version of which has existed since 1980) to advise the country on its options ahead of a plebiscite to determine its future, which is hard to schedule without confidence that the United States would allow Guam to decide its own fate. But the ongoing practice of “empire without imperialism”—preserving formal empire-like control without a formally imperial ideology to justify it—has saddled all of Guam’s strategic choices, including the status quo of indefinitely deferring self-determination, with substantial downsides.