A Critical Response to Mr. Surangel Whipps Address at the 81st UN General Assembly on September 23, 2026

By: Richard N. Salvador

This address presents itself as a defense of climate justice, Pacific sovereignty, multilateralism, and peace. Its central weakness, however, is its selective application of those principles: strong words about the vulnerability of small island states, but far less scrutiny of the conduct of powerful allies and partners.

Palau is right to demand climate justice. It is indefensible that small island states, among the least responsible for global emissions, must take on debt to protect themselves from sea-level rise, food insecurity, coastal erosion, storms, and climate-related infrastructure loss. Grant-based finance, debt relief, loss-and-damage funding, and a financial system that recognizes island vulnerability are matters of justice, not charity.

The speech is also correct that the Pacific is not an “empty expanse” for missile tests, military exercises, strategic competition, or resource extraction. The region is home to sovereign peoples, living cultures, fisheries, and ecosystems. Its history of nuclear testing, military occupation, extractive development, and externally imposed priorities should make every Pacific leader wary of turning the region into a battleground between larger powers.

But those principles must be applied consistently.

It is not enough to condemn China’s missile activity while saying little about the long-standing militarization of the Pacific by the United States and its allies. Nor is it credible to invoke international law only when geopolitical rivals violate it, while remaining silent when strategic partners expand military infrastructure, conduct live-fire exercises, or deepen security arrangements across Pacific lands and waters.

Mr. Surangel remained silent about the continuing Amerikkkan military buildup in Palau and the wider Pacific. He did not directly address the bases, surveillance systems, airfields, ports, logistics networks, and security arrangements being developed as part of a growing US-China strategic confrontation. Palau has the sovereign right to choose its partners and security relationships. But sovereignty does not remove the need for honest public discussion about the risks that military expansion creates.

When military infrastructure becomes normalized without adequate public debate, Pacific states can be drawn into conflicts they did not create and may not be able to control. The consequences could include miscalculation, escalation, regional confrontation, and a wider multinational conflict between the United States and China.

The same silence applies to RIMPAC 2026, the Amerikkan-led military exercise involving more than 30 countries in and around Hawaiʻi from late June through July. For over a month, U.S. and allied forces conducted live-fire drills, weapons training, and other military activities affecting Hawaiian lands and surrounding Pacific waters. These exercises raise environmental, cultural, and political concerns, particularly in a place already burdened by a long history of US militarization.

This context was largely absent from the discussion surrounding China’s launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile with a dummy warhead into Pacific waters. China’s missile launch should not be ignored or excused. Any ballistic-missile test in or over the Pacific deserves serious concern. But criticism loses credibility when it treats Chinese military activity as uniquely threatening while minimizing or ignoring comparable military activity by the United States and its allies.

If Pacific leaders and media are serious about peace, sovereignty, environmental protection, and the principle that the Pacific must not become a theater of geopolitical competition, then they must hold every power to the same standard. They must criticize China’s missile test, but they must also question the US and allied militarization of Hawaiʻi, Palau, and the wider Pacific.

The Pacific cannot credibly be called an “Ocean of Peace” if militarization is condemned only when carried out by US rivals.

Regarding sovereignty and dependency, the strongest phrase in the address is that “sovereignty is lived.” Sovereignty is not simply a flag, a United Nations seat, or a legal formula. It is the practical ability of a people to feed themselves, protect their environment, preserve their culture, determine their development priorities, and make political decisions without coercion.

But sovereignty also requires freedom from dependency. When island governments must accept strategic bargains, externally designed projects, unsustainable loans, or military arrangements in order to obtain basic infrastructure and climate resilience, their freedom of choice is limited—even if the agreement appears voluntary. This is what the late Pacific Islands scholar Teresia Teaiwa called “militourism,” to describe the mutually reinforcing relationship between militarism and tourism, especially in colonized and strategically important island places such as Hawaiʻi, Guam, and other parts of Oceania. Militourism is “a phenomenon by which military or paramilitary force ensures the smooth running of a tourist industry, and that same tourist industry masks the military force behind it” (See Damon Salesa, “Teresia K. Teaiwa: Crying Salt Water,” The Journal of Pacific History 53, no. 1 (2018): 96–102).

For this reason, Pacific governments should be wary of all forms of geopolitical courtship. Whether assistance comes from Washington, Beijing, Tokyo, Canberra, Brussels, Taipei, or any other capital, the central question should be the same:

1. Does this partnership strengthen local capacity, public accountability, and long-term self-determination?

2. Does it respect environmental safeguards, labor standards, customary authority, and community consent?

3. Does it leave Pacific governments with greater control over their future, or greater dependence on an external power?

4. Does it serve people’s needs, or primarily the strategic interests of the donor?

The Pacific should not have to choose between neglect and instrumentalization. It deserves relationships based on equality, transparency, reciprocity, and respect.

Climate justice cannot be separated from the global structure of power. Many Pacific states face high energy costs, food insecurity, debt, limited health infrastructure, and narrow economic choices not because their people failed to plan, but because colonial histories, unequal trade, extractive industries, and external dependence have shaped their circumstances.

Renewable energy, storage, resilient infrastructure, fisheries management, and climate finance are necessary. But they cannot become new vehicles for outside institutions, investors, or foreign governments to dictate policy, capture resources, or impose debt.

A just transition must be democratic as well as green. It must include communities, customary leaders, workers, women, youth, fishers, farmers, and Indigenous knowledge holders—not only foreign consultants, private investors, and political elites. The relevant question is not simply whether the ocean is being “managed,” but who manages it, for whom, and for whose benefit.

The question of Taiwan should also be discussed with greater precision. UN General Assembly Resolution 2758, adopted in 1971, restored the People’s Republic of China’s rights at the United Nations and recognized its representatives as the only lawful representatives of China at the UN. It expelled the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek, ending the Republic of China’s representation of “China” at the organization. The resolution did not establish Taiwan as a separate UN member state.

From the one-China position, Taiwan remains a Chinese province governed separately since the Chinese Civil War and should not be treated as a permanently separate sovereign state. Those who hold that view may describe Taiwan as a breakaway or renegade province. Yet whatever position one holds, the future of cross-Strait relations must be pursued peacefully, without coercion or war, and without allowing the issue to turn the Pacific into a battlefield for US-China rivalry.

The address closes with a valuable vision of multilateralism: every voice matters, every form of knowledge has value, and even small states can help guide the world toward a common shore.

But multilateralism will be judged by whether powerful countries are willing to hear inconvenient truths, not only about climate finance, but also about militarization, colonial legacies, debt, extraction, nuclear harms, foreign interference, and double standards in the application of international law.

Mr. Surangel quoted a Palauan saying: “Msisichau e ng kmedang a meched = Be strong and do not give up; the shore is near.” It is an appropriate message for Pacific peoples who have endured repeated external pressures and crises. But reaching that shore requires more than ceremonial language. It requires climate justice, peace, sovereignty, and international law to be applied consistently, without exceptions for powerful states and without sacrificing Pacific peoples to the ambitions of others.