Australia has a growing security nightmare in the Pacific region, and America’s political dysfunction is making it worse.

Consider the Marshall Islands, Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia. Those nations, dotted with palm trees and surrounded by turquoise waters, sit to the north and north-east of Australia. They are strategically located between China, Japan and the United States – three of the world’s four largest economies – but sit closest to Australia.

Australia’s caught in the middle between China’s expansion in the Pacific and the growing concern about the United States’ commitment to protecting the region. Credit:

Presently, those Pacific nations are embroiled in a row with the US, which escalated last month when their leaders warned in a letter that it was pushing them into the arms of China.

The US has a treaty with those three countries known as the Compacts of Free Association agreements [COFA]. It guarantees the US exclusive military access to their territories and surrounding waters. In return for those military rights, the US provides them $US7 billion ($10.7 billion) in financial assistance over 20 years.

The US has had a military base on the Marshall Islands since World War II, and it’s where the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defence Test Site is located. On Palau, a new radar system for the US Air Force is being built.

The COFA treaty was signed off last year, but the funding has been delayed in the lead-up to the US presidential election because of political point-scoring between Republicans and Democrats. The COFA funding was supposed to be included in the National Defence Authorisation Act, but was removed to save money.

In February, the leaders of those three Pacific nations sent a letter to American lawmakers stating the stalled funding had created “opportunities for economic exploitation by competitive political actors in the Pacific”. Alan Tidwell, the director of the Centre for Australian, New Zealand and Pacific Studies at Washington’s Georgetown University, says it was a strong rebuke of the US.

“They’ve implicitly threatened, we’ll throw our lot in with the Chinese,” he observes.