As President Biden’s point man on the Pacific sets sail for the Solomon Islands, some in Washington are questioning whether the rescue mission will suffice to keep the strategic spot from becoming a subsidiary of Communist China. 

The National Security Council’s Indo-Pacific coordinator, Kurt Campbell, is leading a delegation of officials from the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Agency for International Aid that this week will travel to Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and the Solomon Islands, with a stop at Hawaii.

The delegation “will meet with senior government officials to ensure our partnerships deliver prosperity, security, and peace across the Pacific Islands and the Indo-Pacific,” according to an NSC spokeswoman, Adrienne Watson. The mission, she adds, will “build” on Secretary of State Blinken’s trip to the region in February, during which he announced America would open an embassy at the Solomon Islands capital, Honiara. 

Communist China has long aspired to control the Pacific — or at least the entire area to its east until Hawaii — and has taken over one strategic spot after another. Washington critics accuse the White House of neglecting allies in the region and thus driving them into Beijing’s arms. 

“The Biden administration has been all but willfully alienating our Indo-Pacific allies and creating acute risks to American national security,” a spokesperson for Senator Cruz told the Sun. The White House has declined to engage “not just the Solomon Islands but also the Marshall Islands and other regional allies,” allowing Beijing to “make dramatic security gains.”

Some Pacific watchers wonder about the wisdom of meeting with officials of the Solomon Islands government, which represents a small number of elites that maintain deep ties with Beijing. 

A longtime Solomon Islands watcher at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Cleo Paskal, says the American delegation should instead show support for opposition leaders that, like the majority of the Islanders, would prefer ties with America.

Meeting solely with government officials “makes these people look more important than they actually are,” Ms. Paskal says, adding that “the vast majority of the population in the Solomon Islands don’t want the deal with Beijing” to be finalized.

She referred to a recently leaked document that detailed a draft agreement between Beijing and the government of Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare. 

The pact would create a base in the Solomon Islands for the naval arm of the People’s Liberation Army. Since the middle of the last decade the PLA’s navy, which has grown much faster than America’s, has taken over one neighboring island after another in an attempt to turn the Pacific into a Beijing-owned lake. 

Mr. Sogavare is widely seen as Beijing’s man at Honiara, reversing a long tradition of strong ties with America and the West. The Solomon Islands, for one, has long maintained full diplomatic relations with Taiwan — until Mr. Sogavare in 2019 severed ties with Free China and established relations with Beijing instead. 

In December Mr. Sogavare accused Taiwan of instigating a parliamentary no-confidence vote against his government, which accused him of corrupt, self-enriching ties with Beijing. 

Dismissing Mr. Sogavare’s allegations, Taipei’s foreign ministry issued a statement expressing hope that Solomon Islanders will be able to “express their views and support for freedom and democracy in a peaceful and rational manner.”

The Taipei statement urged the Honiara government to “listen to the people and refrain from trying to follow China’s authoritarian model of governance, which goes against the long-standing tradition of democracy and unity in the Pacific region.”

Underlining the Solomon Islands’ strategic importance, the 1942 battle at its Guadalcanal is widely seen as a World War II turning point that helped usher in the American victory in the Pacific. The locals fought valiantly in that battle alongside American troops.

One American PT boater, Lieutenant John Fitzerald Kennedy, was rescued there by two courageous Solomon Islanders after his boat was sunk in a Japanese ambush. JFK invited the two rescuers to his 1961 inauguration but Britain, which at the time ruled the Solomon Islands, barred them from traveling. Instead, London sent its own representatives to Washington. 

Australia and New Zealand, which have long represented the democratic alliance in dealing with neighboring the Solomon Islands, devised a policy that unsuccessfully attempted to turn the government away from its Beijing sympathies, Ms. Paskal says.

The Biden administration, she says, has “doubled down on the Australian-New Zealand model.” Rather than backing the pro-American opposition, including women’s groups that are very influential in local politics, she says, it meets with the corrupt, pro-Beijing elites. 

Yet, many Pacific islanders “play baseball and drive on the right side of the road,” Ms Paskal says, and therefore they prefer to deal directly with America to communicating with Washington through Australia and New Zealand. And they certainly prefer American-style governance to Communist China’s model.

As America deepens involvement in the European battle against Russia, Washington has largely neglected the Pacific, where a crucial battle with Communists China is quietly intensifying.