Washington’s Blue Pacific problem

On 11 June, Donald Trump signed a proclamation (Opens in new window)reopening nearly 1.3 million square kilometres of Pacific Ocean to commercial fishing. Three marine national monuments – areas previously set aside for protection at Papahānaumokuākea near Hawaii, the Mariana Trench near Guam, and Rose Atoll near American Samoa – had their fishing restrictions lifted in a single signing. This is the third ocean rollback (Opens in new window) in just over a year, starting with the reopening of the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument in April 2025.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick described it as a win for American seafood competitiveness. But Washington’s broader strategic commentary has framed it as something else: a move to plant a renewed US commercial and maritime presence in waters where China’s distant-water fishing fleet (the largest (Opens in new window)in the world) has operated for years. It is looked upon as a deliberate move to counter the well-documented illegal and unregulated activity stretching from American Samoa (Opens in new window) and Guam to Hawaii’s own exclusive economic zone (Opens in new window).

This framing assumes that presence is the currency which wins this contest. It probably has the mechanism backwards.

For the past decade, the United States has held a genuine asset in the Pacific that has nothing to do with ships or trade deals: a reputation, however imperfect, for taking ocean conservation seriously in a region whose own political identity is built on it. Pacific Islands states have themselves championed a “Blue Pacific”, seeing ocean stewardship as a paramount issue.

Washington’s most concrete demonstration of alignment with that worldview was with Kiribati. In 2009, the United States and Kiribati signed a sister-site partnership directly linking Papahānaumokuākea – the same monument just reopened for commercial fishing – with Kiribati’s own Phoenix Islands Protected Area. Five years later, the two countries formalised a wider arrangement, the Phoenix Ocean Arc Agreement, signed by Kiribati President Anote Tong and pairing the Phoenix Islands Protected Area with the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. At the time, these agreements were held up as a model of what cooperation between a large power and a small Pacific state could look like.

This history makes the rollbacks awkward in a manner that goes beyond the realm of domestic fisheries politics. Reopening a monument that once anchored a flagship conservation partnership, in order to commercially compete in the same waters that China is criticised for overfishing (Opens in new window), does not project strength. It projects inconsistency. The narrative Washington has relied on for years – that it protects what it says it will protect, unlike Beijing’s distant-water fleets – gets harder to make with a straight face once the protection itself becomes subject to modification whenever domestic politics demands it.

No Pacific government has commented publicly on the June proclamation. This silence is worth sitting with rather than reading as approval. Pacific leaders have spent the past several years building an assertive, self-authored regional identity around ocean stewardship, most recently through Fiji’s proposed Blue Pacific Ocean of Peace Declaration (Opens in new window), calling for partnerships that respect sovereignty rather than treat the region as a stage for great-power competition. It was adopted at last year’s Pacific Islands Forum meeting in Honiara. A unilateral US decision to deregulate its own marine monuments, justified partly by reference to countering China, sits incongruously next to a regional declaration that explicitly rejects that framing. It would not be surprising if a Pacific leader, or Beijing, eventually pointed out this contradiction publicly. Better for Washington to reckon with it now than to be handed the talking point later.

None of this means the proclamation has no domestic logic. Commercial fishing interests have lobbied for access to these waters for years, and the administration’s claim that the existing federal fisheries laws can manage the ecological risk is contestable, rather than absurd. This is not to say that the decision was reckless on its merits as a domestic policy; it is an argument that Washington has not reckoned with what this decision costs it somewhere else. Strategic competition with China in the Pacific is increasingly leading to more presence in the form of more patrol boats, more fishing access, and more flags on more water. But the Pacific has never been won on presence alone – the region’s own leaders have said (Opens in new window) as much. What they have rewarded, when they’ve rewarded anyone, is consistency: a partner whose stated values hold up when nobody outside the room is checking.

Washington just spent some of that consistency to win a fight that was, by its own framing, mostly about fishing licences. Whether the trade was worth it will depend less on how many boats reach those waters, and more on whether the Pacific notices the difference between a partner that protects what it says it will, and one that protects it only until the politics changes.