Hawaii Coast Guard crews remain busy across the Pacific as President Donald Trump’s administration shakes up U.S. government policy at home and abroad. The Honolulu-based Coast Guard Cutter Midgett is sailing across the South Pacific conducting operations with island nations.
The U.S. has been competing with China for influence in Pacific island nations under Trump’s first administration and under former President Joe Biden. However, Trump’s freeze on foreign aid — as well as vows to roll back environmental efforts at a time most Pacific island nations consider climate change their No. 1 threat — has many leaders in the region scrambling to make sense of what they can expect from the U.S. under Trump’s second presidency.
As the Midgett makes its way across the South Pacific, its crew has sought to reassure communities in the region of U.S. commitments.
During a port call in New Zealand earlier this month, the cutter’s commanding officer, Capt. Matthew Rooney, told reporters during a Feb. 9 media conference that since Trump took office his crew has been undertaking “the same mission that it always is with us. We provide a partnership, and if there’s any sort of technical support, assistance (needed), we’ll provide that, as requested by our friends and partners.”
The Midgett set sail for its current South Pacific voyage before Trump took office. The mission is in support of Operation Blue Pacific, the Coast Guard’s ongoing mission in Oceania with a major focus on protecting fisheries from illegal and unreported fishing operations.
The Midgett, which was commissioned in 2019 and home-ported in Honolulu, is one of the Coast Guard’s largest and most advanced cutters. In 2021 the Midgett joined the Navy in responding to a Russian naval operation in the vicinity of Hawaii’s maritime border, deploying a drone to help monitor the operation.
Coast Guard operations across the Pacific islands fall under the service’s District 14, headquartered in Honolulu at the Prince Kuhio Federal Building. In addition to rescue operations and port security, in recent years the service has focused on protecting fisheries from illegal overfishing and partnering with Pacific island nations — efforts that began ramping up during Trump’s first presidency.
Protecting stocks of migratory fish that people across the Pacific — including here in Hawaii — rely on to feed their families has been seen as an inherently international effort. In 2020 the Coast Guard declared that illegal fishing had surpassed high-seas piracy as the No. 1 global security threat at sea, arguing that it destabilizes economic and food security in coastal communities and encourages other forms of crime and corruption.
Under both Trump and Biden, the Coast Guard’s presence in the Pacific has grown, and its operations have become more central to regional strategies to challenge Chinese influence. Several Pacific island nations have signed onto Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, a series of infrastructure projects aimed at promoting trade with China.
Most recently, the Midgett sailed to the island nation of Tuvalu, where during a three-day operation it participated in at-sea boardings of fishing vessels in Tuvalu’s exclusive economic zone alongside local law enforcement for the first time over a decade, and conducted a high-seas boarding and inspection under the authority of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission.
Thirteen “ship riders” from Tuvalu, including representatives from the country’s Fisheries Department, Maritime Police and other agencies worked aboard the Midgett during the operation.
The U.S. has ship rider agreements with several countries, which allow foreign authorities to operate from aboard Coast Guard vessels — essentially deputizing them and their crews to conduct boardings and enforce local laws and regulations. Many island nations lack navies or coast guards of their own to protect their vast waters.
“Not only did we work alongside our partners in Tuvalu to conduct critical maritime law enforcement operations, but the experience also provided invaluable training for our crew,” Rooney said Friday in a statement. “From the deck plate level all the way up to command and control, integrating with our Tuvaluan counterparts was seamless and incredibly beneficial for all involved. We learned a great deal from each other, and this experience will undoubtedly pay dividends in future operations.”
But illegal fishing isn’t the only threat to Pacific fisheries. Warming waters are projected to change tuna migratory patters, driving fish farther from the shores of Pacific communities and into the open ocean where industrial fishing fleets won’t have to pay for permits that support island economies.
The South Korean-based Green Climate Fund announced Tuesday that 14 Pacific island nations will receive $107 million to help the tuna-dependent countries create an advanced warning system to track changes in tuna migration away from their maritime territories, potentially threatening their economies.
The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change created the Green Climate Fund in 2010 to help developing countries adapt to climate change. Trump announced this month that he was rescinding $4 billion in U.S. commitments to the fund.
A recent report by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank closely aligned with the Republican Party, said that “the current era of great power competition between the U.S. and China requires elevating the Pacific Islands to a higher level of importance when considering resource allocation.” The report asserted that under Biden the U.S. had “overemphasized” climate change as a “vital American interest” in its dealings with the Pacific — but it also argued the U.S. may need to engage with climate change talks “to be taken seriously in the region.”
Lately, the Coast Guard also has begun to more closely track drug smuggling in Oceania. Operation Blue Pacific commander Capt. Jennifer Conklin told the New Zealand Herald, “We’ve seen an increase in trans-criminal organizations, so the drug networks, the drug trafficking going through the Pacific islands.”
Trump made fighting against drug cartels and traffickers a central part of his campaign. In addition to routes across the American borders, Latin American cartels have used Pacific island communities as transit points along the so-called Pacific Drug Highway to move drugs to New Zealand and Australia. New Zealand’s illicit drug market is worth an estimated $2 billion, while Australia’s is estimated at $11 billion.
