The ocean can be a lawless place. Far from shore, the vast seas have become plagued with everything from piracy, rampant illegal fishing and environmental crime, drug smuggling, human trafficking, and even spying and espionage.
And in that mix, the U.S. and China have been competing for power and influence while frequently accusing each other of misconduct on the sea.
Under both the first presidency of Donald Trump and that of Joe Biden, the U.S. Coast Guard began playing an increasingly central role in America’s Pacific strategy. Now, as tensions with China continue to simmer and drug war operations ramp up in the Americas, the Coast Guard’s duties continue to expand -- with largely bipartisan support.
This year’s iteration of the Coast Guard Reauthorization Act authorizes $66.5 billion for Coast Guard operations for five years, along with $185 billion in total funding for Coast Guard procurement and construction for the next five years.
Along with the money, the bill also includes provisions from U.S. Rep. Ed Case (D-Hawaii) and U.S. Rep. Trent Kelly (R-Miss.) aimed at boosting Coast Guard operations and resources in the Pacific.
Case said that “our plan will significantly enhance the Coast Guard’s effectiveness, readiness and strategic alignment in the Indo-Pacific by integrating Coast Guard activities with broader U.S. defense and foreign policy goals in the region.”
The Coast Guard is unique among U.S. military branches, answering to the Department of Homeland Security in peacetime and falling under the command of the Navy in wartime. It tackles everything from patrolling, search and rescue, port security, tackling illegal fishing and hunting for drugs. It has also tracked Chinese and Russian military and intelligence activity at sea, including near Hawaii.
Kimberly Lehn, senior director at Honolulu think-tank Pacific Forum, said that it “fills a critical gap between pure military operations and diplomatic engagement.”
The latest Coast Guard funding bill calls on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to complete a study on the feasibility of “supporting additional Coast Guard port visits and deployments, including the homeporting of fast response cutters in the Northern Mariana Islands.”
It instructs Noem and Hegseth to prepare a report “on the role the Coast Guard is expected to play in the 5, 10, and 20 years after the date of enactment of this Act in providing assistance to the military departments” in cooperation with regional governments in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and in support of U.S. operations in the Arctic and Antarctic.
Case said this “will allow for better forecasting of operational, personnel, asset and funding needs. It will ensure that the U.S. engagement in the region is sustained across the federal government and help to identify any operational gaps we have in the Indo-Pacific to better safeguard American and allied national security interests, respond to articulated needs of our Pacific Island partners and counter the People’s Republic of China’s increasingly malign influence in the region.”
Borders and territory China is currently locked in a series of disputes over maritime territorial and navigation rights with neighboring countries. Beijing claims the entire South China Sea -- a critical waterway that more than a third of all international trade moves through -- as its exclusive sovereign territory. In 2016, an international court ruled in favor of the Philippines and rejected China’s territorial claims.
But Beijing has doubled down, calling the ruling “illegal” and building bases on disputed reefs and islands. China has used its coast guard in disputed waters to harass and attack vessels from neighboring countries like the Philippines and Vietnam, frequently charging, ramming and shooting them with water cannons. It also has claimed the right to detain anyone found in disputed waters it claims.
At U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s annual International Military Law and Operations Conference, which was held in Waikiki in September, INDOPACOM chief Adm. Samuel Paparo charged that China has shown “blatant disregard to the unanimous and binding, U.N. arbitral tribunal decision of 2016. We see in China’s claim to a maritime law that no one else agrees to and no one else recognizes.”
Lehn argued that the U.S. Coast Guard “provides a perfect counter to China’s ‘gray zone’ tactics in the Indo-Pacific, because it can legally do what the Navy cannot. It can conduct law enforcement operations, it can board foreign vessels engaged in illegal activity, it can train partner nations’ coast guards on maritime law enforcement. And it can do these things without triggering escalatory implications of deploying warships.”
However, the Harvard International Law Review in February cautioned that “in a region where laws themselves are in dispute, competing Coast Guards operating in close proximity and enforcing conflicting laws is a dangerous status quo.”
Though the Trump administration has had sharp words for China, administration officials also say they increasingly seek to shift focus from overseas to missions closer to home like border security and hunting drug cartels in Latin America. But Rear Adm. Sean Regan, commander of the Hawaii-headquartered Coast Guard Oceania District, said Pacific engagement remains a key part of an American vision of homeland defense.
He notes that 44% of the U.S. exclusive economic zone -- its territorial ocean waters -- actually surrounds Hawaii and the other U.S. Pacific island island territories. Regan told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that “border control of the United States of America includes all the 50 states and the territories, like Guam and American Samoa. Border control and territorial integrity matters, and that includes drugs, includes fishing, includes migration, all those kind of things that happen across the United States.”
Regan spent much of his career in the Atlantic, having mostly been based on the East Coast, though the job also took him to the Caribbean and to Africa.
He said that “not until I flew out to Hawaii did I realize how big the Pacific is, and not until I started meeting with the Chief of Police of American Samoa, or the Chief of Navy for Tonga, or a partner from Papua New Guinea, that I realized the closeness of all cultures out here and all the people, and then how they trust the United States Coast Guard as just a honest, trusted partner who tries to help them meet their objectives in the region.”
Eyes on the ocean In recent years, tackling illegal fishing has been top of mind in the region. In 2020, during Trump’s first presidency, the Coast Guard declared that it had eclipsed high seas piracy as the top global security threat at sea, with service leaders arguing that overfishing was threatening food security and economies in coastal communities, ultimately creating conditions for more crime and corruption.
Gov. Josh Green said in remarks to military lawyers and diplomats from around the region that gathered in Waikiki for INDOPACOM’s law conference that “illegal fishing threatens not just our livelihoods and our ecosystems, but it’s a political threat too in ways that some people, perhaps outside this room, will not understand. There is an incursion of activity, and people chip away at rule of law and chip away at international standards and norms.”
The Chinese fishing fleet, which is both the world’s largest as well as heavily supported with government subsidies, has received particular scrutiny. China also has been accused of using its fishing fleet for much more than just fishing, including at times using vessels to spy on other countries and to stake out Beijing’s interests.
In May 2022, the leaders of the United States, Australia, Japan and India -- the grouping of countries known as “the Quad” -- signed an agreement to launch the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness with the goal of getting a better picture of illegal fishing, smuggling and other clandestine activities at sea. Regan said he will be attending a meeting of Quad officials in Australia in November.
The four countries have increasingly sought to boost cooperations between their coast guards, including joint patrols. In 2023, Japan assigned a coast guard officer at its Honolulu Consulate as its first coast guard attache in Hawaii to help coordinate with U.S. officials in the region.
China, for its part, has accused the U.S. of harassing its fishing vessels by targeting them for boardings and inspections and condemned “ship rider” agreements that allow other countries to call on U.S. Coast Guard cutters to help them enforce local laws. Chinese diplomats have called boardings done through those agreements “illegal.”
Palauan President Surangel Whipps Jr., who also attended INDOPACOM’s law conference, complained of blatant illegal fishing by Chinese boats in his country’s waters as well as incursions by Chinese research vessels that he alleges were spying on undersea internet cables and mapping out the sea floor.
“With that comes organized crime, and with that we have drugs, human trafficking and other things that come into Palau,” Whipps said. “We also have drugs washing up on our shores … and we know where the drugs are coming from, most of them from China. I don’t think they’re so much intended for profit, because we’re a small nation, but I think it’s also to weaken our community.”
Pacific ‘Drug Highway’
Drug use has been on the rise in both the islands of the West and South Pacific as narcotics flow through the islands from both Asia and Latin America. In particular, Latin American drug cartels have made increasing use of Pacific island communities as transit points along the so-called “Pacific Drug Highway” to bring cocaine and meth into New Zealand and Australia.
New Zealand’s illicit drug market is worth an estimated $2 billion, while Australia’s is estimated at $11 billion.
In August, a Fijian court handed down jail sentences ranging from 15 years to life after the country’s largest-ever drugs trial. Fijian police seized nearly 5 tons of meth in the town of Nandi in January 2024 that were apparently bound for Australia. Months after the bust, Fijian government minister Pio Tikoduadua told New Zealand’s 1 News that “if we do not solve this drug problem in Fiji soon, our nation is going to be a nation of zombies.”
“When I’m talking to my (regional) partners, drugs have overtaken (illegal fishing) as the priority,” Regan said. “That doesn’t mean (fishing) is not a priority, it’s still a priority … My sense is, drugs are staying longer there. In the past, the drugs have kind of flowed through and around the islands and now stay in the islands.”
Drugs like meth, fentanyl and cocaine also have made their way to Hawaii, but law enforcement officials say most of those come by air, smuggled by both passenger and freight planes. Most of the drugs moving by sea are bound elsewhere. However, Regan said they’re still a concern explaining that “they’re going through the region. I argue that drug money goes back to Central America and the Western Hemisphere, and then still impacts Americans.”
Since declaring “war on drugs” in 1971, successive U.S. governments have spent untold billions of dollars. Despite decades of wide-ranging operations by law enforcement, intelligence agencies and military organizations around the globe, both drug trafficking and consumption are by most assessments now at their highest levels in recorded history.
In September, the Trump administration controversially began lethal military strikes against alleged drug traffickers in the Carribbean. It has so far provided no evidence publicly that those killed were traffickers. On Thursday, Adm. Alvin Holsey, who oversaw U.S. military operations in South America, announced his resignation ess than a year in the position as strikes continue to escalate.
But in Oceania, counter-drug operations look much more traditional. Regan said that during a recent patrol, Honolulu-based Coast Guardsmen helped South Pacific island authorities that requested help doing boarding and searches on sailboats, which authorities believe to be a prime avenue for moving drugs through the Pacific islands.
“If that’s what they need, that’s what we provide,” Regan said. “I’m seeking to provide what our partners want, in a manner they want it, at the time they want it, in a way they can take it. And we’re very attuned to that, because what we don’t want to do is overload them. We also don’t want to miss what they want to accomplish in their their waters.”
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