Esper visit to tiny Palau highlights US-China competition

In defiance of Beijing, tiny pro-American Palau is one of only 15 states with official diplomatic relations with Taiwan, the self-governing island that China claims as its own territory. “We are concerned about China continuing to try to flip countries that recognise Taiwan today to establish diplomatic relations with China instead,” said Heino Klinck, the deputy assistant secretary of defence for East Asia.

No nation is too small or too distant from Washington, it seems, to be excluded from the Trump administration's campaign to counter China's efforts to supplant America as the dominant Pacific power. Evidence of this is Defense Secretary Mark Esper's decision to fly nearly halfway around the world partly so he can spend several hours in Palau, a Pacific archipelago of barely 20,000 people southeast of the Philippines.

There is no suggestion of a direct Chinese military threat to Palau. Instead, the island nation is an example of the sometimes obscure battleground on which the United States and China are pursuing a “great power” competition for global influence in an era of a more inward-looking Washington and an increasingly assertive and ambitious China. The power struggle is intensifying on multiple fronts and is seen by some an an emerging “cold war” akin to the mostly non-shooting conflict that played out between the United States and the former Soviet Union until the collapse of Soviet communism in 1991. In defiance of Beijing, tiny pro-American Palau is one of only 15 states with official diplomatic relations with Taiwan, the self-governing island that China claims as its own territory.

“We are concerned about China continuing to try to flip countries that recognise Taiwan today to establish diplomatic relations with China instead,” said Heino Klinck, the deputy assistant secretary of defence for East Asia. “We find that destabilizing, quite frankly.” The United States made that very switch itself when it recognized Beijing as the sole legal government of China in 1979, although Washington maintains unofficial relations with Taiwan and sells arms to Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act..