I started reading the second paragraph and said to myself, "What did you want us to do? Increase foreign aid?" And the answer was, "Yup," so you're thinking. This is good. Most people don't understand the purpose of foreign aid, which is to buy policy outcomes. Another way to look at the same situation is this: it's worth more to the Chinese than it is to us, so we should bow out of a bidding war before it starts because we always lose.
Now, if you want to take a multilateral approach and outbid the Chinese collectively, that might have some legs. I then have questions. If you're Biden, the opposition in Congress is going to extract concessions from you in order to go along with your preferred outcome, rather than theirs. Is it worth it? Do you have Manchin and Sinema on this? If you don't, either can torpedo your infrastructure bill, and I would argue that Biden never lets that happen this close to an election.
It's a mistake to think that foreign policy happens in a vacuum. Politics largely used to stop at the water's edge, true, but foreign policy was never totally monolithic even during the Cold War. Bob Putnam is (well, was) right about this one - foreign policy is the outcome of a two-level game where leaders are playing for meaningful stakes at both the domestic and foreign card tables. The problem with the Solomon Islands is that I think they're a much higher priority to the Australians than they are to us. Our immediate problems are in the South China Sea, due to our security commitments to the Philippines and Taiwan and their proximity to China. The Chinese can base in the Solomon Islands all they want. They cannot defend those bases from us as things stand.
As they continue to add carriers to their fleet, this becomes more of a problem. That's a problem for about a decade from now, though, not now. The people in the Solomon Islands don't much like the Australians, and debatably like the Chinese less. I can't see them reacting to basing favorably in the short term.
