Pacific Sacrifice Zones in Washington’s Frontier Imagination

I just published new research in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs called “Geopolitical Sacrifice Zones in US Strategic Thought: Erasure, the Frontier and the Blue Pacific.” (unpaywalled!)

I’ve written previously about the need for a more critical strategic studies—a research effort that takes the problems of war/military force as perhaps a starting point but not an ending point; something that sets peace as its aim and accounts for the myriad harms unleashed by the actions of states practicing power politics. This article delivers on that promise.

To offer some context, when I wrote Pacific Power Paradox a few years ago, I did so with a Pacific-Island blind spot—a book with Pacific in the title was mostly about US relations with East Asia. For most of the past 50 years, the Pacific has been almost non-existent in the imagination of US politicians, think tankers, and military strategists. The book was designed to reflect that.

Still, I felt like it wasn’t enough to simply echo America’s erasure of this continent-sized region and leave it at that; I owed the Pacific my critic eye. And events were forcing me in that direction anyway.

I had been watching “great-power competition” with China wash over everything for years. And for a while (2019-2022), US politics itself was dominated by fear-mongering and red-baiting about China. For precisely that reason, suddenly, the Pacific reappeared in Washington’s imagination. US national security bros of all sorts were now thinking and talking about the Pacific, but entirely for its potential as a place to secure a marginal advantage as part of their confrontation with China.

The Pacific was once again caught in America’s imperial gaze; not a good thing. Over the decades, the Pacific had gotten accustomed to a certain set of problems (neglect by the rich and powerful, imperial legacies nobody cared to resolve). But from about 2018 onward, the Pacific was being forced to deal with another, more existential reality that insisted on superseding these things—imperialist geopolitics.

The national security state now wants to use the Pacific as a spatial fix for the insecurities that US foreign policy causes. It’s possible for Washington to exploit Pacific-Island nations this way because most of the region has been carved up into Western (US, Australian, French, and to a small extent New Zealand) spheres of influence. Some nations are even non-sovereign.¹ That carving up happens primarily because the region’s people are not seen as equals in international society, when they are even seen at all.

There’s a lot of evidence that the US in particular imagines the Pacific as a strategic frontier; a tabula rasa to play out fantasies of great military battles; a space that can be sacrificed for the sake of minimizing damage to the US homeland in hypothetical wars that are more likely to be brought about by the fact of planning for them in the first place. US strategy takes active advantage of the fact that key Pacific nations—foremost Guam but others as well—lack self-determination. Indeed, US military thinking as it currently exists depends on treating the Pacific as a frontier that must be controlled-and-sacrificed for the sake of America’s power position in a status game with another empire-state.

Consequently, the Pacific is far more fractured than it would like to be. It’s not a victim of its geography; it’s a victim of an elitist American imagination that glorifies the ends of US foreign policy while discounting its predatory means. Statecraft is increasingly about offloading to others the pain we generate through our choices. As if spatial fixes to insecurity were possible rather than self-defeating.

Because the Pacific has been structurally weakened by hierarchy, outside powers have been free to continuously engage with the region in a manner that led to its underdevelopment (in the Walter Rodney sense). Even those Island nations that can claim to be self-determining peoples are made perpetually dependent on foreign assistance and military spending.

Putting aside that this is all profoundly unjust, it’s also counterproductive. It is not actually in the interest of working-class Americans to render this vast region into an object of imperialist competition. Ironically, I also don’t think it’s in the interests of America’s ruling class either.

Anyway, it took a while to figure out how to articulate the problem that I just explained above. I first had to become obsessed with reading everything I could about the Pacific; my Track 2 trip to Fiji in late 2023 was part of that process.

Following that period of immersive study, it became maddeningly clear that imperialism is the root cause of Pacific insecurity today—not only as a historical matter—though few dare say so. That’s not solely a US problem…but America’s share in that problem is larger than anyone else’s. And so drawing out how US security elites think about the Pacific—and what that means for exploitation in the Pacific—needed to be the priority focus of my initial efforts.

That’s the story on this research. This article has my soul in it in a way that few other things do. Hopefully it can spark something for some of you, despite being scholarly. Here’s the abstract:

Bridging the critical concepts of the spatial frontier and sacrifice zones with strategic thought, this article argues that Washington’s recent geopolitical ‘rediscovery’ of the Pacific primarily represents an imagining of the Blue Pacific as a new frontier for geopolitical competition; a site toward which its military strategy can redirect adversary violence. Unconsciously erasing actually existing social and political structures across the region is a condition of possibility for exclusionary strategies based on a prejudicial rationality that, ironically, risks heightening regional and US insecurity. This insight corrects a common category error claiming that the US goal in the Pacific is ‘strategic denial’ when it is more precisely described as control in the name of strategic denial. The risk that entire Pacific nations become zones for extraction or wartime sacrifice increases when policymakers imagine it as a blank canvas for a ‘great game’.

1. I talk about this in the piece, but Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, New Caledonia, and French Polynesia are all formal colonies denied self-determination. Still.