For American policymakers, one concern over China’s advances on Taiwan is the fact that American territories sit just hours from Taipei. Some of America’s key defense corridors in the region run across neighboring small island nations. Cleo Paskal argues that China’s influence operations there threaten U.S. security at this geographic front line.
Paskal is a nonresident senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where she focuses on the Indo-Pacific. She spent more than a decade at Chatham House in London and built her expertise through years as a travel journalist.
“I think I saw China first in terms of what was happening in other countries because of China,” she says. While visiting Tonga, she observed that Chinese newcomers had taken over roughly 80 percent of the retail sector. “This wasn’t normal economic competition,” she says. Local family shops that once extended informal credit and social support were displaced by businesses focused on extracting profit. “They were sucking out the capital from the country,” she says, “while at the same time killing this local social network.”
Observing small Pacific societies allowed her to identify how Chinese state-linked actors target specific ministries, elites, and economic chokepoints. “This is not a normal country, and it’s not interacting with the rest of the world in a normal way,” she says.
Paskal organizes Oceania into what she calls “three and a half different regions,” ranked by strategic importance to the United States. American territories such as Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands sit at the top. Guam lies roughly four hours from Taiwan. “America is in Asia,” she says, warning that any conflict over Taiwan would likely require China to neutralize Guam first.
She says that visa-free entry for Chinese nationals into the Northern Mariana Islands should raise alarms. “You can get on a plane in Macao, and you can step onto U.S. soil without a visa,” she says.
Paskal’s second tier of nations includes the Freely Associated States in the packing order, including Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands. “If anybody asks you who is the U.S.’s closest ally, it’s going to be these three countries,” she says. The United States holds defense responsibility and strategic denial rights there, resulting in what she calls a “corridor of freedom across the center of the Pacific.” Control of this east-west corridor proved decisive in World War II. “One hundred thousand Americans died,” she points out, “because Japan… had taken control of the center of the Pacific.”
China is targeting these regional states aggressively, particularly those that recognize Taiwan. Beijing seeks to “undermine the U.S. position” and pressure leaders to switch diplomatic recognition, Paskal says.
Other Pacific Island nations form Paskal’s third tier, with Taiwan-recognizing states comprising the “point five” of her 3.5 tiers. She recommends that strategies for each tier must differ. “It’s quite important to disaggregate,” she says. “This isn’t one big mass.”
Paskal describes China’s approach in the region as “triple use,” combining commercial, military, and corruption. Infrastructure projects serve strategic purposes and entail cultivating elites in ways that can be corrupt. “Unless you go after the corruption, nothing else will happen,” she says. Blocking “illegal, coercive, aggressive, and deceptive activity” must accompany building viable alternatives.
Faith-based organizations, she argues, represent an underappreciated counterweight. Missionary aviation groups provide medical evacuations and supplies in remote areas. “They distort economics for good,” she says, contrasting their work with profit-driven or politically motivated projects.
China’s Pacific strategy in the region is succeeding wherever there are governance gaps or economic desperation. Paskal argues that countering China requires prioritizing America’s interests in its own territories, strengthening alliances across the central Pacific corridor, and raising the cost of corruption for local elites.
“You have to change that cost-benefit analysis of the individual on the ground,” she says. Without the shift, Paskal warns that China’s commercial facades and strategic inroads will persist.
