A speech by senior US officials to commemorate a WWII Pacific battle comes amid tensions with China.
They are hundreds of miles from the nearest continent - an archipelago of over 900 islands home to a population smaller than that of the single US city of Seattle - but a tiny nation in the South Pacific has become a new front in the battle for supremacy with China.
Stretching thousands of miles, spanning across hemispheres, the 12 island nations and myriad of territories that make up Oceania are the gateway to Asia from the Pacific. Three island nations in the North Pacific - Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands - give exclusive military use rights to the US, while the South Pacific Islands, including the Solomons, are a passage to Australia and New Zealand.
A renewed focus on the Pacific only began under the Trump administration, experts say, after China's growing influence could no longer be ignored, resulting in the leaders of three North Pacific nations coming to the White House for the first time in 2019. In the weeks before the security agreement with Beijing had been leaked, Secretary of State Antony Blinken had announced plans to reopen it.Caroline Kennedy is the US ambassador to Australia and recently made a trip to the region
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