One of President Biden’s little flights of fancy, this time about cannibals in New Guinea, could prove a factor in the ever-intensifying competition with Communist China for influence in the Pacific Ocean.
The largest country in a group of Pacific island nations, Papua New Guinea, is irate following an off-the-cuff story — punched with a familiar “for real” phrase — that Mr. Biden told a group of World War II veterans last week. During the war, the president said, the body of his uncle, Ambrose Finnegan, a pilot of a crashed two-engine plane, might have been eaten by local cannibals.
From social media to official government statements, these unsubstantiated remarks — indicating backwardness in a Pacific ally — raised anger across Papua New Guinea. The tiff couldn’t come at a more opportune time for Beijing, whose foreign minister, Wang Yi, visited the country on Saturday, promising lucrative trade agreements.
“The PNG leaders are sophisticated and their relations with the U.S. are multifarious and complex, but they are politicians, and if a leader from another country insults your people you have to respond,” an Indo-Pacific watcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Cleo Paskal, tells the Sun.
“For pro-Chinese leaders” in the country, Ms. Paskal added, Mr. Biden’s story about the fate of his uncle “was an information warfare gift. For others, it might be something to add to negotiations” with America.
Visiting a Pittsburgh war memorial last week, Mr. Biden said that after his uncle’s plane was shot down, “They never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea.”
There are plenty of heroic accounts of New Guineans saving American and Australian troops during World War II at great risk to themselves. Visiting the country this week, Prime Minister Albanese of Australia highlighted “people from Papua New Guinea and Australia, serving and sacrificing together in defense of their home” while fighting the Japanese army.
No known documentation points to a man-eating incident involving Mr. Biden’s uncle.
“President Biden’s remarks may have been a slip of the tongue; however, my country does not deserve to be labeled as such,” the PNG prime minister, James Marape, said in a statement Monday. “I urge President Biden to get the White House to look into cleaning up these remains of WWII, so the truth about missing servicemen like Ambrose Finnegan can be put to rest.”
Beyond the American embassy at the capital, Port Moresby, little was done to calm the PNG’s anger over Mr. Biden’s statement. “These apparent untrue remarks by the sitting president is a low point in our bilateral relations,” the country’s foreign minister, Justin Tkatchenko, wrote on Facebook.
Meanwhile, Papua New Guinea and Communist China agreed “to facilitate the free flow of trade between the two countries,” Mr. Malape said this weekend, with the visiting Mr. Wang by his side. Mr. Tkatchenko added that a free-trade agreement would open up Chinese markets for PNG farmers.
“The South Pacific region should not become an arena for great power competition,” Mr. Wang said in an apparent swipe at America. “No country should regard island countries as its ‘backyard.’” He added that no country should “engage in zero-sum games or exclusionary arrangements.”
Last year, Washington and Port Moresby signed a defense agreement, including granting American access to the PNG’s key naval bases, ports, and airfields. At the same time, Beijing signed a security and policing agreement with a PNG neighbor, the Solomon Islands. That pact was a Chinese “foot in the door,” the commander of America’s Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral John Aquilino, told reporters at Sydney, Australia, recently.
The island nations, of which the PNG is the largest by far, are increasingly seen as key to free navigation between the Pacific and Indian oceans. Mr. Biden scheduled a visit to Port Moresby last year. Yet, the trip was abruptly canceled as congressional infighting threatened to shut down government activities.
Papua New Guinea planned a national holiday to greet the American visitor. Prime Minister Modi of India, who traveled there at the same time, was forced to shorten his visit to make room for Mr. Biden. To a warm reception, Mr. Modi called the island-nations of the Pacific “large ocean states.”
Following Mr. Biden’s no-show, then, how harmful could his current tall tale about an uncle devoured by cannibals be to a strategic American relation? Could it help Beijing get closer to its goal of turning the Pacific Ocean into its private lake?
“That depends on what Washington will do next,” the FDD’s Ms. Paskal says.
