Washington Loves Guam...TO DEATH!

A senator in Guam wants US statehood. But its struggle for self-determination is a feature, not a bug, of empire.

By all accounts, Pete Hegseth is an absolute monster. During his confirmation hearing to be Trump’s secretary of defense, he displayed a mix of ignorance (eg, “Name a country in ASEAN”—fail), shoddy judgment, a refusal to answer questions honestly, and an undeserved, barely contained rage that reminded of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.

Amid all this, there was one moment when Hegseth was asked, “What do you think our most important strategic base is in the Pacific?” Hegseth could only reply, “In the Pacific, Guam is pretty strategically significant.”

It was perhaps the most strategic thing he said in the entire hearing, and it was not an errant comment.

When you go up for a confirmation hearing, the department you’re going to lead staffs you with binders full of background papers and talking points. Every sort of question is gamed out in advance with answers. I’ve written these binders for many a political appointee.¹

Biden’s Secretary of the Army, Christine Wormuth (one of my former bosses), commented in 2023 that US strategy in the Indo-Pacific relies on distributing forces across multiple geographic centers, and “Guam is going to be the most important one of those distribution centers.” Many Pentagon officials have said the same over the past couple years. So identifying Guam as a priority object for the US military was unquestionably in the binders of prep material that Hegseth would have received from the Pentagon.

But Hegseth is not just getting staffing from the Pentagon. When he came up for confirmation, he was also getting support from the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing-turned-full-MAGA institution whose policy wonks have also said Guam is “strategically important.”

What do these various Washington actors mean when they say Guam matters? Unfortunately, it’s for dehumanizing reasons; Guam has tactical value in the context of a catastrophic war with China.

But it’s easy to misread what it means to be strategically important.

For instance, a senator from the territory of Guam, William Parkinson, is lobbying for Guam to become America’s 51st state. He’s putting forward a resolution in Guam’s legislature to make the request of Washington. We owe statehood to Guam if they want it. But I also think they’re better off not pursuing the statehood path, which has next to no chance of succeeding. Parkinson’s own messaging helps reveal why:

If we do not claim our place in the Union, we risk becoming a vassal of China…The geopolitics of the United States favor statehood for Guam.

But this is not true.

Looking at the Pacific today, there is not a single Island nation that qualifies as anything close to a “vassal” of China, and China does not seek subjugation of that sort. There’s just no evidence for it.

The Compact nations, however—as well as Guam and CNMI—are very much vassals of the US. The fact that you would have to ask to be incorporated in the federal system and are likely to be denied it is evidence of the very subordinated status Parkinson claims to fear.

Those in Guam seeking statehood (many seek either independence or “free association”) are not wrong for wanting to shed their coloniality, and they are right to recognize the unique level of peril they face as a consequence of their colonial status. Scaremongering about China might convince think-tank elites, but it’s not going to sway politicians looking at the electoral map, nor a national security state that gets everything it wants from Guam just the way it is.

Believing that full incorporation is remotely realistic misses why anyone in Washington spares a thought for Guam in the first place. The geopolitics of the United States favors not statehood but rather extracting maximum value from Guam while maximally forsaking it—which is what empires do to their colonies.

I’ve written about this before, and so has Kenneth Kuper—a political scientist and Guam’s leading military strategist. Guam occupies an important geography in the American warfighting imaginary because it’s inseparable from how the US military thinks about war fighting against China. Positioned between the American West Coast and East Asia, Guam facilitates power projection toward China and provides a degree of “defense-in-depth” against missiles and ships coming from East Asia toward the US mainland.

Because Guam increases US offensive and defensive capacity during a hellscape war, Guam is dubbed important. The trouble is that this amounts to war commodification—Guam is important as an object for warmaking done at Guam’s expense. It is literally a sacrifice zone in US military strategy, without which the US cannot hope to fight a war (that nobody wants) at an acceptable cost.

You see, the costs that Guam’s land and people incur never count in the way that strategists assess the larger balance of forces and plan military operations. The only thing that counts in strategy-brain is the damage that war would do to US military installations, which occupy close to 1/3 of Guam’s territory. But the homes and towns abutting US bases in Guam? Nah. The people displaced from land enclosed by military construction in Guam? Nah.

To say that a place has strategic value means that it’s a place from which powerful states extract security, which more than likely comes at the expense of the place in question. It is the job of local politicians to sell a story that says otherwise. While this is true of many US allies, at least they have sovereign governments that are able to consent to warmaking arrangements. Meaningful consent is flagrantly absent in Guam’s case. By design.

1. The fact that nominees receive A TON of prep is all the more reason Hegseth’s bed-shitting during the confirmation hearing is leaps and bounds more worrying than it even appeared. All he had to do was memorize some scripts.