In early December, the crew of U.S. Coast Guard cutter Myrtle Hazard sailed through the night, anchored off the island of Palau in the Pacific Ocean and boarded a group of Chinese boats to help seize tens of thousands of dollars worth of cucumber. illegally harvested.
The fast response cutter, which operates about 6,600 kilometers from the continental US and about 750 kilometers from its home port in the US area of Guam, is part of the Coast Guard’s latest growth area: it helps counter China’s growing navy in the Pacific. to work.
China has used coordinated action by its fishing fleets, coastguard and navy to establish its presence in the South China Sea. It is also increasing in the South and Central Pacific. Chinese fishing fleets have come into force around island nations such as the Republic of Kiribati and Tuvalu, which have some of the richest tuna fisheries in the world, and the Chinese fleet has also settled in the area, including a stopover by warships in Sydney in 2019 and visits of a ship hospital ship to Fiji in 2018.
The U.S. Coast Guard is building in response in the region. In the past few months, it has based two of its most advanced new cutters in the U.S. territory of Guam, nearly 4,000 kilometers closer to Shanghai than to San Francisco. Another one should arrive in the coming months. For the first time, the Coast Guard has a supporter from the US Embassy in Canberra, Australia, and another fan will move to Singapore next year.
The Coast Guard has gradually increased its activities in the Western Pacific and near the shores of China. It deployed cutters to the Western Pacific for more than ten months in 2019 to work with the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet. One, the USCGC Bertholf, crossed the Strait of Taiwan in a tone of defiance to China, the first American coastguard vessel to undertake the highly politicized voyage.