I don’t usually respond to media hits but every now and then a piece comes out that’s so utterly divorced from reality that it makes you think that the author just fed a headline into an AI program and then published the resulting AI hallucination. Starting with the very first sentence—which says that I traveled to the Solomon Islands last week—this is a breathtaking example of academic/journalistic malpractice. I've never been to the Solomon Islands (last week or otherwise) but during my first year as Deputy Secretary of State in the second Trump Administration made two trips to the Pacific Island nations: the first to Papua New Guinea, Palau, and the Marshall Islands in September 2025 and the second to Tonga, Fiji, and Samoa in February-March 2026. On both trips, I signed a number of landmark economic and security partnership agreements, and indeed the second trip was in conjunction with an Economic Forum that we organized in Honolulu to bring together Pacific leaders with the American private sector. And I'm heading back to the region later this month to attend the Pacific Island Forum leaders' conference (which I was scheduled to attend last year until they disinvited all non-member nations) in Palau, and then plan to visit the Solomon Islands and likely other Pacific nations. All of this is detailed on my official X account as well as other official @StateDept announcements, but the piece addresses none of this in its zeal to declare a "palpable" "absence of vision and dearth of deliverables" in a "sorely neglected" region. I'm perfectly happy—indeed, eager—to engage in a policy debate, but here there's nothing to debate because under the leadership of @POTUS @realDonaldTrump and @SecRubio we're engaging with the region more closely and productively than ever before. Aloha and stay tuned.