Over five years ago, I published a set of novel arguments on the rapidly approaching renegotiations of the Compacts of Free Association, the agreements that the United States has with the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of Palau and the Republic of the Marshall Islands.

One of those arguments was for the U.S. government to develop a National Strategy on Free Association prior to formally entering the renegotiations.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration ignored that recommendation. Instead, they took the route of path dependency, charging forward with the COFA renegotiations without taking the time to think carefully about the social ontology of free association.

By social ontology, I don’t just mean the question of what counts as free association.

I also mean what should be the set of rights and obligations that are incumbent on all parties across a wide range of contexts (e.g., foreign aid, immigration rights, military access). That is where the power of a social object really rests.

If the National Security Council at the White House had taken the time to conduct an in-depth study on free association and its implementations, then President Biden and his chief advisors would have known that free association remains poorly conceptualized and widely misunderstood within the U.S. government and allied countries.

This is despite the fact that billions of dollars of American taxpayer funds have been invested in the existing compacts over the last couple of decades.

As a consequence of this strategic planning oversight, the U.S. government still does not understand the suitability of the concept of free association beyond a very narrow range of contexts (i.e., Freely Associated States). That is problematic because free association might be a good idea for other bilateral relationships now (e.g., Kiribati) or in future contingencies (e.g., Cuba, Faroe Islands, Greenland, New Caledonia for France, West Papua for Indonesia).

To compound matters, the U.S. government still has not been able to achieve very strong alignment between the U.S. compacts of free association and similar agreements of American allies and partners. Upon those agreements rest the external territories (e.g., Australia), crown dependencies (e.g., United Kingdom), overseas collectives (e.g., France), and realm associations (e.g., Denmark, Netherlands, New Zealand).

The Trump administration should therefore take a different approach to free association than its predecessor.

In my personal opinion, that should start with a Day One issuance of a National Security Study Memorandum on reconceptualizing free association to align with higher-level goals and objectives. 

That would not only provide a platform for establishing free association as a national security and foreign policy interest of the U.S. government.

It would also provide a mechanism for directing the assistant to the president and the National Security Advisor, in coordination with the secretaries of Defense, Interior, Justice and State, to conduct an interagency review and develop a National Strategy on Free Association.