The Solomon Islands trip
========================

The Solomon Islands trip is a reporting assignment John Kiriakou announced on 19 November 2025, in answer to a viewer who had served in the Peace Corps in Palau and Micronesia and asked whether he had ever been to the South Pacific.

Never been, going anyway

His answer to the question was short: "No, but I'm dying to go."

The plan he then described is specific. "But I'm going to go to the Solomon Islands in July with Jeremy Kuzmarov of CovertAction Magazine, and we are going to do some live on-the-ground reporting on this kerfuffle between the United States and China over who should have access to Japan's World War Two era military bases."

The route adds a second first: "we're going to get there through Fiji, which I've also never been to. And we're going to spend about ten days on Guadalcanal. I'm excited about it."

Why the Solomons

The islands are the site of the first sustained American offensive of the Pacific war, and the airfields and anchorages built for that campaign are the physical infrastructure now at issue. The competition Kiriakou describes is not over new construction but over who is permitted to use what is already there, a category of dispute that runs through much of his commentary on Chinese activity abroad, from port access to policing arrangements.

The assignment also places him in the field for a publication he writes for regularly rather than in a studio, which is unusual in the period the corpus covers. He offers no thesis in advance; the trip is announced as reporting rather than as argument.

The response in the room

The host's reaction was enthusiastic and geographically weary in equal measure, everyone he knew who had been to Tahiti or to the Micronesian island of Yap had loved it, "even though it takes 50 million years and 16 flights to get there."

That remark led directly into the shutdown-era complaint about air traffic controllers that follows it in the transcript, and the travel plan is not returned to.

See also

- CovertAction Magazine
- China's base in Djibouti
- Chinese overseas police stations
- John Kiriakou
