The United States is still debating whether to reinforce its military presence inside the first island chain, under the shadow of Chinese missile trajectories, or fall back to the second chain - or beyond - in Oceania. ![]() While the United States, Australia, and Japan are undertaking robust (albeit belated) soft power efforts to dull China’s expanding influence, questions around employing hard power loom. Covering approximately 59 million square miles and containing more than half of the free water on Earth, the Pacific is by far the largest of the worlds ocean basins. Not all Chinese advances have been successful, but China is making inroads across the southern reaches of the region. It includes Australia, the smallest continent in terms of total land area. The glint of the Sun reflected from smooth water is near the center. Beijing’s tactics involve using presence, investment, diaspora, elite ties, corruption, and pressure to acquire diplomatic relationships and logistics access. Oceania is a region made up of thousands of islands throughout the Central and South Pacific Ocean. The Pacific Ocean covers virtually all of the visible disk of the Earth in this picture. The Pacific Islands are particularly important to China’s “counterinsurgency” strategy, which seeks to prevent reinforcement of the United States’ position inside the first island chain - a string of islands that encloses the seas immediately off China’s eastern coast. Recently, China has been trying to take advantage of that neglect by advancing its economic, resource, and diplomatic interests in the region. The average depth of the ocean is about 3,688 meters (12,100 feet). It also sits between Asia and Australia as well as between Asia and North America and Australia and South America. The explorer Ferdinand Magellan named the ocean El Mar pacifico, which means the peaceful sea. It covers more of Earth’s surface than all the dry land put together. The United States has retained an arc of territories and bases across the northern reaches of Oceania, though it has at times neglected the underlying relationships that support this access. The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of the world's five oceans with an area of 60.06 million square miles (155.557 million square kilometers.) It stretches from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean in the south. The Pacific is the largest of Earth’s oceans. The Pacific island clusters of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia share a geopolitical reality: they lie in the main space that separates the world’s two biggest powers. PacIOOS empowers ocean users and stakeholders in the Pacific Islands by providing accurate and reliable coastal and ocean information, tools, and services. The name the Pacific Ocean dates back to the 16th century.
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