Manus: Speck on the map that’s the new front line with China

PNG’s tiny navy gets US and Australian help as Beijing extends its tentacles to the South Pacific – the region where nowhere is more strategic than Manus Island.

Manus has found itself at the centre of a growing storm in Pacific geopolitics. Picture: Alamy/The Times

You cannot see the saltwater crocodiles lurking off the Lombrum naval base in Papua New Guinea but everyone knows they are there. The reptiles nose around the south side, where Australian engineers are building a new jetty.

“We send out drones to watch out for them,” says Sub-Lieutenant Diulo Gegera of the Papua New Guinea navy.

“There are sharks out there too, but we worry about the crocs more.”

The reptiles are not the only fierce beasts taking an interest in Lombrum. Until a few years ago this was the backwater of a backwater, a speck on the map of Manus, an island nearly 320km northwest of the mainland.

The country’s entire navy is based here: four patrol boats, which scan the ocean and occasionally nab a drug smuggler or illegal fishing boat. But today the base is a building site, as Australian contractors and American naval engineers renovate and upgrade it for new and bigger challenges.

After decades of neglect by the West, PNG finds itself at the heart of a struggle for military power and economic influence with the potential to explode one day into superpower conflict.

Beijing has shown its power in the South China Sea and is looking to the Pacific. Picture: AP/The Times

Having built military bases in the South China Sea and threatened to invade Taiwan, China has begun extending its tentacles to the South Pacific. Much of this takes the form of aid, investment and construction by the Chinese government and its state-owned companies, which have been building roads, clinics, schools and stadiums on Papua New Guinea and across its island neighbours, from Vanuatu to Kiribati.

Last year China announced a security deal with another neighbour, the Solomon Islands, which was “enhanced” last week. The full terms have not been disclosed, although they include Chinese training of the Solomons’ police, the closest thing the country has to armed forces. But the incursion of Beijing into the security arrangements of a region previously dominated by America and Australia, its ally, has been enough to galvanise governments across the world.

Leaders who formerly had little interest in the Pacific have hurried to the region – and above all to its largest and most populous member, Papua New Guinea. This year alone, Port Moresby, the capital, has hosted the foreign ministers of the US and Britain, and the leaders of Australia, Indonesia and India. President Emmanuel Macron of France will visit this month.

“PNG is the gateway to Asia and the Pacific,” says Major General Mark Goina, commander of the country’s armed forces. “Our maritime territory gives us a commanding reach to strategic sea lanes through which international commerce takes place.

“You travel through our waters to reach the South China Sea. We’re on the frontier of Australia. These are the reasons why there is enormous interest in PNG.”

Defence analysts talk anxiously of an imminent “base race” in which China will try to establish military access to strategic sites, emulating America’s large and long-established presence in Japan and South Korea. Beijing has built airstrips on reefs in the South China Sea and shows signs of preparing a naval base at Ream in Cambodia.

America, meanwhile, signed a deal this year giving it access to bases in the Philippines.

In the South Pacific, nowhere is more strategic than Manus Island. In the last year of the World War II, General Douglas MacArthur led US and Australian forces to recapture it from the Japanese. In 1944 the island briefly housed 37,000 American troops and had anchorage for 262 warships.

After Japan’s surrender, and PNG’s subsequent independence in 1975, the world forgot about Lombrum. The house where MacArthur lived on the base has been abandoned to the jungle. But the deep, sheltered waters of Seeadler Bay, on which Lombrum sits, are luring the great powers to the island again.

In 2018 America and Australia announced that they would upgrade Lombrum for PNG. When it is finished, the base will have new and improved facilities, including a jetty for its Guardian-class patrol boats, given by Australia. For the time being there are no public plans for foreign forces to be based there – which is not to say that no one is thinking about it.

A report in 2021 by an Australian naval think tank sets out five options for Lombrum, from a simple maintenance hub for patrol boats to a $US3.8 billion ($5.56 billion) base for 1750 personnel with warships, fighter jets and submarines, second in size in the Pacific only to the US garrison island of Guam.

Analysts talk of a Chinese 'base race' to rival the US military’s long-established presence in the region, such as their base in Guam, above. Picture: Reuters/The Times

“Lombrum Base could be redeveloped into the point of Australia’s geopolitical spear,” wrote the author of the report, Adam Lockyer, a professor in strategic studies at Macquarie University.

In May the US and Papua New Guinea signed a defence agreement that gives the American military “unimpeded access” to military sites, including Lombrum, for mutually agreed activities such as training, refuelling and the deployment of ships and aircraft, including spy planes.

The deal has attracted opposition in PNG. There are those who regard any US military affiliation less as a shield, more a source of vulnerability.

“Now we’ve taken sides,” Jerry Singirok, a former commander of the country’s armed forces, says, “it makes us a target.”

Mihai Sora, a former Australian diplomat now based at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, said: “It’s a strategic win for the US, but it will increase regional pushback.” He added: “It’s playing out exactly as people feared, paving the way for increased militarisation in the region.”

The Times