Bougainville: The world’s next new country?

Editor’s note: This story is the culmination of a three-part series that aired on The World. To listen to part 1, click on the audio player above. Listen to parts 2 and 3 below.

Part 2:

Part 3:

Far out in the South Pacific, there is an island small in size but gargantuan in its mineral wealth.

Bougainville, nearly as big as Hawaii’s main island and just as stunning, is the most remote part of Papua New Guinea. Running beneath its soil is one of the world’s biggest veins of copper. There’s loads of gold, too, but these days, the copper may count for more.

Unrivaled at conducting electricity, copper is essential to the high-tech future many envision. It’s needed to build solar panels, electric vehicles and AI supercomputers. The problem is … global stockpiles are dwindling.

Goldman Sachs has proclaimed that “copper is the new oil.” Bougainville holds more than 5 million tons of it, equal in weight to 16 Empire State Buildings.

So, why isn’t some conglomerate busy scooping out Bougainville’s lucre? It’s an island with a weak government and no military to speak of — just the sort of place a multinational might exploit.

Because woe has come to those who’ve preyed upon Bougainvilleans before. The mining giant Rio Tinto can attest to that.

In Bougainville, on a mountain called Panguna, Rio Tinto once operated the world’s most profitable copper mine. Through the 1970s and ‘80s, shareholders raked in billions but only shaved off a measly portion for the Bougainvilleans.

This sparked a revolt initially fought with bows and arrows, and later, with machine guns snatched from security forces sent to recover the mine. Astoundingly, after waging guerrilla warfare all through the 1990s, the locals won. 

Known as “the crisis,” the episode is infamous in mining. But Bougainvilleans take pride in this resistance. Their current political leader, elected by the people, is the rebellion’s former commander, Ishmael Toroama. As a young man, he was known as a one-man guerrilla army. Some likened him to Rambo‘s rugged Hollywood movie character: striking hard, vanishing into the ferns.

“Bougainville people, we do things a bit different, maybe more like Americans,” Toroama said. “A lot of our tactics, they were Rambo-style.”

At 56, Toroama is now Bougainville’s president. He’s ditched tank tops for button-down shirts, but he’s still brawny — with a hearty, metacarpal-crushing handshake.

Bougainville’s crusade is unfinished. Toroama will not stop until he fulfills the long-held dream of his 300,000 people: founding the Republic of Bougainville. 

A nation of their own. 

If successful, Toroama would surely be the only living head of state to have fired arrows in combat.

But starting a new country isn’t cheap. Bougainville’s economy is microscopic, worth less than half a billion dollars a year, reliant on cocoa beans and coconuts. That can’t bankroll their freedom. Maybe copper can.

Toroama, the man who once violently evicted a Fortune 500 company, now seeks a fresh alliance with Wall Street. He said Western companies would get preferential dibs on his island’s copper, worth an estimated $100 billion — provided any new corporate partner evenly shares the wealth.

Paired with this offer is a message to the White House: consider planting a military base on Bougainville. The island fronts waters that connect the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the very seas that could determine whether the US upholds naval supremacy in the 21st century — or cedes it to China. (The Pentagon also needs copper for high-tech jets, warships and even basic munitions.)

“If the US comes and says, ‘Yes, we support Bougainville independence,’ then, I can say, “Well, the Panguna mine is here. It’s up to you.”’ 

In return, Toroama wants enthusiastic American support for Bougainville’s independence. He’s well aware the US can make or break any attempt to join the club of nations. Only three countries have achieved liftoff this century: East Timor in Asia, Montenegro in Europe and South Sudan in Africa. These wildly different places had one thing in common: US support.

“It’s now or never,” Toroama said. “So, come. Help us to mature the Bougainville dream.”

He believes it’s the offer of the century.

But is anyone in Washington listening?

Humans have inhabited Bougainville for some 30 millennia. Their trouble with outsiders traces back to a mid-1700s pit stop by the French nobleman Louis Antoine de Bougainville. Having “discovered” the island, he promptly named it after himself, putting it on the map.

The ensuing centuries brought a string of occupiers: the German Empire, Australians and Japan, which seized Bougainville during World War II until the US kicked them off. After the war, Australia took over the island (again) and held it long after other Western powers deemed colonizing unseemly — into the 1970s.

This is where the modern struggle for Bougainville’s freedom really begins.

Its origins lie in Rio Tinto, an Australian-British conglomerate, blowing up much of the copper-rich Panguna mountain and reducing it to a crater more than a mile wide — one of the largest man-made holes ever created.

An American firm, Bechtel, carved roads through the island’s snarled greenery, smoothing an influx of heavy machinery and foreign employees. Adam Grisib, an electrician from Australia, was one of them.

“It was great,” he said. “Like living in a tropical paradise.”

Not far from the mine, Rio-Tinto (through its subsidiary, Bougainville Copper Limited) carved out a colonial village: Panguna Town. A slice of suburbia ensconced in forests where locals still hunted tree possums for dinner.

“We had a big, Olympic-sized swimming pool,” Grisib said. “Squash courts. Social clubs, a movie theater, a supermarket. All open to Native villagers. Of course, they didn’t belong to the social clubs. That was too expensive for them.”

At first, locals just gawked at the foreigners, said Balbina Vore, a little girl at the time. “We didn’t know how to talk to white people yet. The best we could do is sign language.”

Bougainville’s Indigenous people had no say in the obliteration of their landscape. Nor were they consulted in 1975 when Australia handed their island to yet another country. When Australia freed its biggest colony, Papua New Guinea, it tacked on Bougainville as a parting gift.

Never mind that Bougainvilleans are ethnically and culturally distinct from the Papua New Guineans — and separated from their mainland by 500 miles of cerulean waters. Thanks to the mine, the island was a tax-collection cash cow, and Australia didn’t want its ex-colony born into financial ruin.

As the years progressed, the mine kept profiting. 

And Panguna Town kept thriving.

By the 1980s, Vore was a teenager, fluent in English, attending school with foreign friends. Her white classmates looked different than anyone from the island (Bougainvilleans are proudly among Asia’s most-melanated peoples) but “it wasn’t racist,” she said. “We were invited into their homes for birthday parties. We’d sleep over and go to school together the next morning.” 

Come afternoons, they’d ride bikes down the main street or sip milkshakes at the cinema. “These were good times.”

Few Bougainvilleans enjoyed this taste of luxury. Even Vore understood it came with a price: the perversion of the natural world. She saw it in the nearby mountain stream, her people’s source of drinking water. It was contaminated by copper waste.

“Our nice river where we caught crabs and fish? It turned the color blue.” Not just any blue. A freakish, Windex shade of blue. “It was frightening.”

Her elders were seething. And plotting.

Every Bougainvillean belongs to a “clan,” as they call it, a thousands-large grouping. There’s the People of the Hornbill, the People of the Sea, the People of the Eagle and others, but all are bound by a spiritual covenant with their ancestors to defend their terrain.

“It’s something holy,” said Joe Pais, chief of the Motaha, the Hornbill Clan. “Without land, you cannot feed yourself. You can’t survive.”

Never could their ancestors have imagined whole rivers poisoned, an entire mountain erased. Rio Tinto extracted more than 1 billion tons of earth rich in copper and gold. These metals spread across the planet, becoming earrings, roofing and the wiring in electronic gadgets that no Bougainvillean could afford.

Vore’s clan, like many, is matrilineal. Women may not be chiefs, but on matters affecting land, they call the shots. In times of crisis, they can deploy their clan’s men to right an injustice.

In 1988, one of Vore’s clan members, a mine employee named Francis Ona, presented a collective demand to mine administrators: Give us billions of dollars in compensation. Their reply? No chance.

The war was on.

Locals stole explosives from a storage building, planted them on electrical poles and blew them down, killing power to a mine that ran 24 hours a day. Clan members blocked the serpentine, American-built roads and ambushed buses shuttling foreign employees to work. Ona declared that no longer would Bougainvilleans remain “passive observers of our own exploitation” for “capitalists whose hunger for wealth is quenchless.”

Many of Panguna Town’s expatriates were oblivious to the locals’ rage. “That was an absolute shock to me,” Grisib said. “I had no idea the Natives lost their Native lands and stuff to the mine. And that was pretty shameful.”

Retaliation was swift. Papua New Guinea sent squadrons that were armed and trained by Australia. Their mission: crush the uprising, recover the mine. Quelling a disgruntled mob should’ve taken weeks.

But this was something much more profound: the start of a liberation movement spreading islandwide.

Bougainville is virtually unknown in the US, but the converse is not true at all. American influence reverberated through the revolution from the very start.

Almost all Bougainvilleans are Christian, mostly Catholic. Americans weren’t the first to evangelize the faith but, in the early 20th century, they accelerated its spread. Every proselytizer soon realized that, of all the Biblical figures, Mary was Bougainvilleans’ favorite, sometimes more so than Jesus.

Clans that already exalted women naturally took to Christ’s mother. To this day, many revere Mary as a maternal force to beseech in disastrous times. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as calls to armed revolt spread, Mary was a patron saint of sorts: an icon around which clans could rally in their fight against ecological annihilation.

“It was a holy war,” Pais said. “Before battle, people prayed over the rosary.”

Going into battle required otherworldly bravado, especially at the outset. Incoming waves of Papua New Guinean troops hunted resistors with heavy weapons: M-60s, a machine gun so heavy it needed a tripod, plus .50-caliber rifles and grenade launchers.

The rebellion’s stockpile was paltry. “We did not have any military-type weapons at that time,” said Laurie Patrick, a former rebel whose village overlooked the mining pit. “We only had bows and arrows for hunting birds and possums.”

Now they were hunting soldiers. Ancient projectile weapons were good enough to harass and wound platoons, but as one ex-rebel said, “I used a bit of bow [and arrow] but realized, no, this cannot take me through.” They could never win the war, he said, with “sticks and stones.”

“I was only 22 then, and my mind was very clear. I remembered one interesting thing: When the Americans, the Allied Forces, left Bougainville after World War II, they dumped a lot of rifles.”

That rebel was Ishmael Toroama. He joined his comrades in scouring the island for rusty American firearms. They repaired the guns and started taking down Papua New Guinean patrols. From slain soldiers, the Bougainvilleans gained up-to-date weaponry. Bit by bit, they evened the odds.

Toroama stood out for his wits, bravery and biceps. Few could comfortably heft an M-60, a thick chunk of steel nicknamed the “pig.” Clad in bandanas, the fighters took inspiration from an American icon whose movies screened at the cinema. “First Blood. Sylvester Stallone,” Toroama said with a grin. “The Rambo.”

By the early 1990s, the rebels had a name: the Bougainville Revolutionary Army. Toroama ascended to its highest ranks. Bougainvilleans with actual military experience also joined, teaching advanced tactics. Among them: Pais. He was not yet chief of the Hornbill Clan, but he’d served Australia’s army during colonial times, discharging as a major.

The chief and others remember Toroama as fearless, if not a bit reckless — a notion reinforced by his own war stories. Toroama still relishes telling them. When asked about his partially mangled left arm, he said, “We were on the beach one day. Along came two patrol boats. The first one, I smashed it up … using the M-60. The second boat came, and our boys fought hard.” While sprinting to grab more ammo, Papua New Guinean troops fired an RPG. Hot shrapnel nearly ripped his arm off.

With Australian-supplied gunboats and helicopters, Papua New Guinea enforced a vicious blockade. Shoot-on-sight orders applied to any incoming ship, even those ferrying food or medicine. To survive, Bougainvilleans tapped into what Pais calls their “superpower”: symbiosis with the natural world.

“We managed. If someone was shot by an SLR [the L1A1 Self-Loading Rifle, Australia’s standard infantry weapon], we used herbs from the bush to heal them,” he said. As for food, the island’s copper-rich volcanic soil is incredibly fertile, sprouting fruit and tubers. “Mother Nature fed us. We ate cassava, taro, sweet potato. And coconuts, of course.”

The coconuts weren’t just for eating. 

Some Bougainville high school teachers, displaced into a rebel camp, had an epiphany. What if they synthesized coconut oil into biodiesel — to fuel trucks liberated from the old mine?

“At first, it was just an experiment,” said former rebel Russel Narokas who witnessed one of the early attempts. He was astonished when a truck, filled with amber liquid mixed up in a jungle lab, started up. This was a game changer. Now, they could crisscross the island on dirt roads, keeping up with the invaders. “You couldn’t see the fumes [the exhaust was invisible], but you could always smell it, that real coconut smoke.”

Long underestimated by outsiders, the Bougainvilleans proved themselves savants, fending off a modern army by extracting maximum utility from nature. They even constructed hydropower turbines from the mine’s scrap parts.

But of the half-dozen former fighters whom The World interviewed, all attributed these feats not to their own intellect but to higher powers. God inspired their epiphanies, ancestors, or unseen forces pulsating through nature. Their Christianity mingled freely with Indigenous beliefs—in spirits that speak without words.

“Nature can speak,” said former rebel Patrick. For example, a branch falls from a tree, crashing at the feet of rebels on patrol. “That is nature stopping us, saying, ‘Turn back.’ On many occasions, we later found out that, if we’d gone that way, we would’ve gotten killed.”

Roughly 20,000 people died, about 10% of the population at that time. Many were civilians denied basic medicine by the blockade. Not since World War II had the South Pacific seen so much killing.

By the early 2000s, Toroama was the Bougainville Revolutionary Army’s commander. A rare non-Catholic on the island (he is “born again,” following the Ohio-based United Church of Christ), Toroama felt God calling him to end the war.

“I seek guidance from a man that is higher. Who runs spiritual affairs. I said, ‘OK, I’ll lay down my strength. But what’s next?’” God’s response, according to Toroama: “‘You’re now on your second phase.’”

He and other rebel leaders met their adversaries, gripping arrows. Together, they snapped them in two and flung them onto the dirt — a gesture of peace.

The rebels agreed to put down their weapons under several conditions in a deal reached with Papua New Guinea’s government. Bougainville would become semi-autonomous, electing its lawmakers and president — they did so for the first time in 2005. As for totally breaking free, they’d revisit that later.

Five years ago, later came knocking.

A referendum backed by the United Nations — and funded by the US and other Western powers — asked Bougainvilleans: Would you like independence?

About 98% voted yes.

Toroama has been busy ever since. Elected president in 2020, he is determined to found a nation-state that will forever ensure that this island’s inhabitants rule themselves — as did their ancestors for eons.

Achieving this requires detaching from Papua New Guinea. At some point, its lawmakers will decide whether to honor the referendum and let Bougainville go. Fewer than half would likely vote to turn the island loose, according to Luther Wenge, a prominent Papua New Guinean parliamentarian and provincial governor.

“They’re afraid,” Wenge said. “Papua New Guinea is a country of so many cultures, so many tribes. They’re afraid that, should they approve [Bougainville independence], other parts of Papua New Guinea might also call for independence.” 

Wenge, for one, believes Bougainville deserves its freedom. But fellow lawmakers may not join his camp, he said, without a nudge from outside the country — perhaps from Western powers, such as America and Australia, supplying Papua New Guinea with vital aid.

If only some benign superpower would throw its weight behind this project: the Republic of Bougainville, a democracy where English is widely spoken, Christianity is near-universal, and the soil holds minerals key to a clean-energy, high-tech future.

What a perfect addition to Team America. So goes the Bougainville government’s pitch, anyway. 

Toroama said he won’t dangle this opportunity forever.

“If nobody listens, I have another card to play. My final card.”

It’s not a card the White House will like.

A new Cold War has come to the tropics.

A struggle between China and the US, with both countries sending money, diplomats and even warships to win over the South Pacific.

At play are 14 island nations. Fiji, Vanuatu, Kiribati and Micronesia are among them, along with others that seldom make international headlines. All are small (the Solomon Islands is Haiti-sized), while some are tiny. The Republic of Palau would fit inside Chicago with room to spare.

But location trumps size in this game between superpowers. Because these islands form a chain reaching deep into the Pacific, whoever controls them would have an edge in any war fought between the East and West.

This logic was clear to Imperial Japan when it attacked Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor; it is clear today to the Pentagon, which clings to the militarized island of Guam; it is clear to China’s Xi Jinping, vowing to become a “great maritime power,” rather than a country whose navy gets boxed in close to its shores.

Not every US congressperson is attuned to this Pacific struggle, but those on “The Select Committee of the CCP” are. This collection of House of Representatives lawmakers opposes China’s Communist Party — to put it mildly. Rep. Neal Dunn of Florida speaks of “unraveling and severing the CCP’s viperous coils around the Indo-Pacific.”

Toroama and his cabinet, in seeking out US politicians likely to sympathize with their pitch, have met several committee members face to face. They include Dunn, Wisconsin’s Mike Gallagher (since retired) and Aumua Amata from American Samoa.

“We’ve talked about the Coast Guard,” said the former rebel Patrick, now President Toroama’s right-hand man, serving as Bougainville’s first secretary. “Our president likes the idea of two or three, maybe a fleet of Coast Guard” on the island.

Emphasizing the US Coast Guard is strategic. While China sways South Pacific countries with juicy loans and infrastructure projects — medical clinics, bridges — the US proffers military might. Nations such as Vanuatu or Fiji technically rule vast oceanic zones but lack strong navies to patrol them, namely against illegal Chinese fishing boats. US Coast Guard ships will sporadically take these countries’ sailors aboard, then sail out to stop offenders.

Bougainville’s leaders speak of something much grander. They’re open to hosting a permanent US military base available to any branch. They’ve even suggested a location: Cape Torokina, where the US built an airfield during World War II.

“You have a military base here already,” Patrick said. “It’s just overgrown by bush. You just come and clean it up, and there you go.”

For now, Bougainville’s contact with Washington relies on an unofficial backchannel: John Kuhns, an American venture capitalist and novelist who has lived on Bougainville, off and on, for nearly a decade. Kuhns, 74, is a Harvard alum with friends in high places. His appeal to Wall Street and the White House: Get behind Bougainville independence soon.

“The United States,” he said, “would be out of its mind to let this opportunity pass.”

Kuhns is a veteran investor who’s helped build infrastructure from Central America to China. He said that when presenting a pitch, it’s wise to acknowledge any bad news early on.

So, here it is. 

Bougainville barely keeps the lights on. Its power grid sputters out constantly. The banks often run out of cash. The entire island is served by only 10 doctors. Most roads look like the surface of the moon. The average family drinks rainwater because they don’t have indoor taps.

There’s also political risk. 

Kuhns is tight with Toroama, calling him “an absolutely incorruptible man who wants the best for his people.” But the president’s desires are not sacrosanct. Bougainville is not run by a dictatorship that can bark orders to compliant subjects. It is an astonishingly democratic place, where the primacy of “clans and tribes” and their “spiritual connection” to the land is being written into a new, post-independence constitution.

Any corporate investor must please a broad cross-section of society. Give Bougainvilleans a raw deal, Kuhns said, and you’ll go down in flames — as history shows.

Kuhns, under his investment firm Numa Numa Resources, has developed his plan to reopen the mine — one that, he said, will benefit foreign investors (himself included) and locals. He proposes sharing roughly half of all mining profits with the islanders: enriching clans, paying for hospitals, roads, a decent power grid, everything an emerging nation needs.

(Since divorced from Rio Tinto, Bougainville Copper Limited is also attempting to mine Panguna mountain, but it did not respond to an interview request.)

No matter what, Kuhns said, neither Bougainvilleans nor the outside world will allow such vast copper reserves to stay in the dirt. According to his firm’s analysis, Rio Tinto only tapped about 30% of Panguna’s copper and gold, leaving behind an estimated $100 billion worth in the pit. Bougainville is sitting on a fortune in copper, a metal for which Silicon Valley has a screaming demand.

“It’s great for everyone to say, ‘We want a fleet of electric vehicles and trains and so forth. And we also want AI computation to reach the moon,” Kuhns said. “All of that involves specialty metals, starting with copper.”

“There are going to have to be a bunch of big holes dug around the Earth — and people aren’t going to like that. The good thing about Bougainville is the hole is already dug.”

The Panguna mine remains a grim sight. It looks like an atomic bomb went off, vaporizing a mountain and leaving behind a canyon-sized chasm. If the Eiffel Tower were teleported to the bottom, its spire would not surpass the mine’s rim.

A stream streaking through the pit is still neon turquoise — just as Vore, the former Panguna Town schoolgirl, recalled it. Today, rogue miners extract precious metals from left-behind mining waste using toxic chemicals, keeping the pollution going. Local parents warn kids: Don’t splash in the water; it’ll burn your skin.

“All this has to be addressed before the mine can be reconstructed,” Kuhns said. “We’ve got to be environmentally responsible.”

Wendy Bowara, a woman living near the mine, sits at the top of her clan’s hierarchy. When asked how long her ancestors have inhabited these mountains, she laughed, sending echoes into the chasm. “Forever, maybe?”

Though dressed modestly in a T-shirt and rubber sandals, Bowara is a powerbroker. She’ll help determine which corporation, if any, gets to dig up the rest of the copper, potentially worth the entire gross domestic product of Costa Rica. If outside forces malign her people, she and other women can summon a resistance, as her mother’s generation once did.

“My ancestors, in their graves, maybe they are worried,” Bowara said. “Because one big mountain got lost. And now, there’s a huge hole.”

But the damage is done, she said. Sacrificing so much land and life must amount to some grand purpose. “There’s hope this hole will save my country and develop our homeland.” Someone should mine it, Bowara said. Responsibly. But soon. “I’m always dreaming that, one fine day, Bougainville will be like the US.”

Not long ago, Bowara saw America with her own eyes. In November 2023, she joined Toroama and others on a Bougainville government delegation to Washington, DC. Bowara came along to represent the voice of matrilineal clans. First Secretary Patrick came too.

The delegation arrived full of optimism. After painstakingly crafting their would-be nation’s offer to the US, Toroama and Patrick were ready to present it to those who might advance their cause: a high official at the State Department.

They waited around Washington. But no such meeting took place.

The Bougainvilleans were snubbed.

“I was a little bit embarrassed,” Patrick said. “We were told the Secretary of State really wanted to meet with us, but he was focused on Israel and things going on in the Middle East.”

Kuhns, who’d arranged the visit, was embarrassed, too. More than a little bit, he conceded.

“Here’s this guy, Ishmael Toroama, who’s traveled all this way, who’s sitting on some of the most-valuable mineral deposits in the world, sitting on the best deep-water port in the Pacific region, and he’s saying, ‘I want to be friends with America. Can you please help me? Can you talk to people across the water in Papua New Guinea and work this out?’ And they wouldn’t even see him.”

Whoever takes control of the White House in 2025 will hear from Bougainville’s leaders, Kuhns said. But he fears that America’s opportunity to shape the island’s future is slipping away fast.

“President Toroama has got to do what’s best for his people,” Kuhns said. “And if the United States isn’t going to make a move, he’s going to look somewhere else.”

The capital of Bougainville is Buka, a beach town, facing sapphire waters that seem to reach into infinity. Here, amid towering coconut palms and pastel-painted buildings, the government’s leaders convene to govern themselves — so long as they do not make laws contradicting those of Papua New Guinea.

Toroama stays in this sun-bleached capital when he must. But he prefers the island’s center, his birthplace. It is a lusher world shadowed by tree canopy, alive with hornbill calls and the shrieks of wild boar — a place where, on the right day, ashen smoke lifts from a volcano.

The president keeps a home in Arawa, the largest town in the island’s center, and former hub for mining employees. Located downhill from the Panguna mine, the town’s streets are still lined with relics from the mining era, namely thick, industrial pipes that once pumped a copper-rich slurry to a nearby port, then onto idling ships that exported Bougainville’s natural bounty overseas. Today, the pipes are empty.

Toroama’s official residence here is a modest, two-story wooden house. He met with The World on a Sunday morning and dressed as he’d just returned from church: leather shoes with an Oxford shirt hugging his solid frame. Bougainville’s cobalt-blue flag was tossed to an outside wall next to a clock honoring the island’s unique time zone, one hour ahead of Papua New Guinea. 

Behind the home is his green sanctuary: a small garden. “I come out here every morning,” he said. “It’s not that pretty, but it’s medicinal.” The president tends to ginger, lemons and taro leaves big as elephant ears. Sometimes, when he’s stressed, he’ll kneel down, roll up his sleeves and plunge his fingers into the dark soil.

He’ll close his eyes. And listen.

Connecting with the soil, he said, creates a “spiritual atmosphere.” Nature offers “guidance, showing the way forward.” While explaining the ritual, the president smiled. “I can’t change. Nobody has ever beaten me, so I’m still doing the same old stuff.”

The president has a lot on his mind. Bougainville’s government is racing to finish writing a new constitution by early next year. At the same time, Toroama is trying to negotiate a clean break with Papua New Guinea. But no matter what its parliament decides, he said, the island will go independent. 

No later than 2027.

“You just have to let my people go,” Toroama said. “We have reached the point of no return.”

America’s executive branch has yet to grant him an audience. In the meantime, Toroama said, China keeps calling. No country churns out more solar panels or electric vehicles. Its state-owned enterprises, just like Silicon Valley firms, need copper badly.

China’s Communist Party may not make a natural partner for Bougainville, an emerging democracy where officials pray to Jesus before meetings. But Beijing’s track record of supplying what Bougainville most desperately needs — basic infrastructure — outshines that of America, at least in the South Pacific.

Consider the Solomon Islands, a country next door to Bougainville. For decades, the US has largely ignored it. 

But China hasn’t. The fanciest building in the Solomon Islands is a new, 10,000-seat sports stadium. Down the street, crews are building a $90 million, state-of-the-art hospital. Both are gifts from Beijing. Top Solomon Islands officials also enjoy expenses-paid trips to China where they walk up red carpets to meet Xi. One such island leader, the ex-premier Manasseh Sogavare, now tells his citizens that American greatness is a big lie.

“Go to every major city of the United States of America,” he said in a speech this year. “You’ll see beggars sitting on the street. It’s supposed to be the No. 1 economy of the world.”

Beijing’s coup de grace in the Solomon Islands? A pact allowing Chinese security forces to set up shop on the island’s shores. As Chinese state media recently boasted: “Solomon Islands has firmly stood on the right side of history.” 

It’s hard to imagine Toroama going this route. But not impossible.

“If nobody listens, I don’t care. Bougainville has resources,” Toroama said. “The Chinese card is available. I can play that card.”

There’s not much Rambo left in the president. He’s middle-aged, with silver in his beard. He speaks of peace, not bloodshed, sounding more like an impassioned pastor than a warrior. 

But the intensity is still there. Toroama is clearly frustrated with Western diplomats who give mellifluous speeches about the global fight for democracy but won’t return his calls, even when he offers up his island’s most-sacred possession — its very soil — to corporate America and the Pentagon.

Strolling through the serene garden behind his home, Toroama spoke about lessons nature conveys when he stops to listen. Patience, he said. Self-control. But he will not wait around forever. “We have reached the point of no return.”