The United States was not the only country to vote in a knife-edge election on 5 November. Palau, a picturesque archipelago between the Philippines and Guam, has found itself on the frontline of growing US competition with China in the Pacific. It went to the polls in a race whose results will be watched closely in Washington and Beijing.  

What happens in Palau – a strategic cluster of some 350 remote islands in the western Pacific and home to barely more than 18,000 people – matters. Palau hosts American military installations and straddles crucial shipping lanes that Washington would need to dominate in any potential conflict with China – and it is one of a shrinking cohort of countries that recognise Taiwan.

While Palau may have become increasingly important to strategists in Beijing, Taipei and Washington, its battle at the ballot box has been a family affair. President Surangel Whipps Jr, who has held office since 2021, is campaigning against his brother-in-law, and former president, Tommy Remengesau Jr, in the tightest election since Palau achieved independence from the United States in 1994. 

It is a rematch of a campaign that Remengesau, a Palauan chief who has previously spent two stints as president from 2001 to 2009 and 2013 to 2021, narrowly won eight years ago.

If the results are as close as many expect then it will still take days of waiting for ballot boxes carrying the votes of Palauans in the US to be shipped back and counted before a clear winner emerges. 

It is unlikely that the election in Palau will make headlines. They rarely do. Palau goes to the polls every four years at roughly the same time as the US, whose political system it models. But elections elsewhere in the Pacific have become closely watched affairs as observers sift through rumours about the tiny islands’ strategic inclinations and where they might fit on the chessboards of wargaming diplomats. 

Beijing has been on a diplomatic blitz across the Pacific in recent years, whittling away the few remaining friends of Taiwan in the region. But playing off China and Taiwan, both of which offer millions in aid and generous assistance packages, can help remote Pacific islands drive a hard bargain. Nauru, another Pacific microstate, was enticed to stop recognising Taipei in January 2024 following promises of support from China. Tuvalu, which went to the polls soon after, was rumoured to have been considering following suit under a newly elected prime minister.   

Palau claims that China has been trying to bully it into drifting into its orbit. President Whips, who has emerged as an outspoken critic of Chinese aggression since he was first elected in November 2020, told me in June that Beijing had tried to sway him to abandon Taiwan during that campaign. 

‘You’re a businessman. You understand the potential that China has? If you need a million tourists, we can give you a million tourists,’ he claims to have been told over the phone by a Chinese diplomat. ‘It is basic economics.’ 

Whipps told me that China has tried to undermine his administration and intimidate Palau for refusing to buckle. He claimed that China was behind a major cyberattack that leaked sensitive diplomatic documents related to its ties to Taiwan and the US, and other officials said that China had been meddling and influencing politicians with dodgy deals. It was revealed in 2023, for example, that a business tied to Chinese security services had tried to partner-up with the main newspaper in Palau. Criminal gangs tied to Chinese authorities  have also been active in Palau. 

‘The fear is real,’ Whipps told me, dressed in his trademark colourful, floral-patterned Hawaiian shirt. ‘We should be concerned.’ 

Palau maintains close ties to Washington through an arrangement known as the ‘Compact of Free Association’. This gives the US exclusive military access to Palau in exchange for a 20-year deal worth $900 million, recently renewed after lengthy delays. Nearby Micronesia and the Marshall Islands have similar relationships with the US.

While China would surely be happy to see Whipps ejected from office, this does not mean that Tommy Remengesau is necessarily ‘pro-Beijing’. If he is elected, Remengesau is likely to tone down Whipps’ rhetoric and tack towards a more neutral approach. It seems unlikely that he will quickly abandon Taiwan. 

Remengesau is not an unknown quantity. He maintained ties with Taiwan during his 16 years in office and has given no sign that he wants to revise the relationship. He has made veiled remarks that seem to suggest that he is clear-eyed about the risks that betting on China, which triggered an economic crisis when it banned tourists from visiting Palau under his watch in 2018, can carry with it. 

Whipps and Remengesau are divided though on whether the solution to Palau’s problems with China is more US troops. There are already US radar installations in Palau, but Whipps has campaigned energetically, under the slogan ‘presence is deterrence’, for a beefed-up military footprint in the form of a missile defence battery, a push that has been controversial domestically and has stalled.  

Critics, including Remengesau, claim that it is unclear why tiny Palau needs more US troops. It would only make Palau more of a target, others say. Remengesau has also pointed out, not unreasonably, that Whipps’ family firm has benefited handsomely from defence contracts tendered by the US for its existing projects in Palau.  

Such differences can matter because Palau, along with Micronesia and the Marshall Islands, form a strategic beltway across the Pacific. US strategists envisage using them as staging posts and fall-back areas that could be used to shuttle troops around if bases in nearby Guam and East Asia are attacked in the opening phases of a major conflict with China. 

Washington is often accused of taking these countries – relations with them are managed not only by the State Department but also by the Department of the Interior – for granted. The names of many islands of Palau, such as Peleliu, are remembered by Americans mainly as the sites of brutal battles against the Japanese during the Second World War.  It seems, frustrated Pacific analysts sigh, that the US can sometimes forget that it is dealing with three fully independent states. Many Palauans serve in the US military and Palau is covered by many US federal programmes and services.  

One former US intelligence analyst recently told me that while the competition with China in the South Pacific often grabs headlines, the real strategic contest that matters, from a security perspective, is unfolding in the three US-affiliated states of the northern Pacific: Palau, the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia. South Pacific nations such as Fiji or Tonga are too far away to be vital security interests to the US and too remote for China to be able to offer a genuinely concerning military alternative to Australia and New Zealand.

In the early stages of a war with China, existing US bases in Guam and East Asia, and South Korea are expected to be quickly targeted. In such a scenario, military assets including fighters and frigates would need to fall back to more remote locations such as Palau or the Marshall Islands. Without existing infrastructure ready to host them in friendly countries like Palau, however, the US could even find itself pushed all the way back to Hawai‘i. The US has waged such a war before. In the 1940s, it took the US almost four years of bloody battles and island-hopping to reach Palau after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The US has, therefore, modernised an abandoned Second World War-era Japanese airfield on Palau and invested millions in similar projects in Micronesia and the Marshall Islands. 

The US election will dominate the attention, even of many Palauans, in the coming days. What happens in Washington matters everywhere. But competing with China in the Pacific is a long-term battle. Those planning ahead should also check in on Palau.