All across the Pacific, many of us are raised to believe that leadership is measured in relationships, not titles.
In our communities, power is supposed to be earned by showing up for people, protecting land and sea, and keeping harmony between families and villages. You demonstrate leadership by how you care, not by how often you remind people that you are in charge. That is not just custom; it is a different way of doing governance.
Set that alongside what we see in the Northern Mariana Islands today, and the gap is hard to ignore.
In recent years, CNMI politics has been shaken by overlapping corruption scandals, impeachment efforts, and federal investigations. Funds flow in, accountability diffuses, and the public is told that technical processes will take care of the rest. Cases are dismissed, charges are amended, resolutions stall. Meanwhile, the question that matters most to ordinary people—”has trust actually been repaired?”—sits unanswered.
At the same time, families are still navigating long-delayed housing and infrastructure recovery from the typhoons. Disaster recovery programs exist on paper. Action plans list hundreds of millions of dollars for housing, infrastructure, and economic revitalization. Yet applicants continue to report slow timelines, confusing requirements, and very little clarity about who decides, on what basis, and by when. The distance between the promise of recovery and the experience of waiting grows wider each year.
Layered on top of this is the acceleration of the U.S. security footprint in the Marianas.
Airfields and support facilities on Tinian are being upgraded as part of a wider military posture across the Indo-Pacific. Defense packages celebrate “wins for the Marianas” in the form of ship repair and new assets. But the same waters and lands being mapped as training corridors are also cultural seascapes, ancestral highways, and food systems. Communities have raised concerns about land use, environmental impact, and the pace of consultation. Again, the answer we’re given is that the process is being followed.
Now, a bipartisan group of four U.S. senators is preparing to fly to Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea to “smooth things over” ahead of President Donald Trump’s summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in May. The message is that American commitments in the region are reliable and relationships matter.
From the vantage point of the Marianas, that message feels incomplete.
Washington is willing to cross the Pacific to reassure Taipei, Tokyo, and Seoul. But the same system often treats Saipan, Tinian, and Rota as administrative afterthoughts—central enough for basing and budget lines, peripheral enough that relational accountability can be postponed.
The CNMI Covenant was supposed to anchor something different.
When the Covenant was negotiated, it was presented as a mutually binding commitment: a framework that would allow us to govern ourselves internally while joining a larger political union. For many families, it functioned as a shield as much as a bridge. When the Covenant is questioned, it is not only a document under review; it is our history and the protections prior generations fought to secure.
Yet the federal system still relies on territorial doctrines that treat island communities as “foreign in a domestic sense,” and in practice CNMI’s commonwealth status is often handled as a revocable delegation rather than a true partnership. When Washington wants to expand control—over immigration, labor, or strategic land use—it invokes its power. When the Commonwealth points back to the Covenant and asks for meaningful consent and co-design, it is reminded that Congress can change the terms.
That is a deeply positional view of leadership: “we can, therefore we may.”
A relational approach would look very different.
On corruption, it would insist that the goal is not just to close files but to restore trust. That means plain-language explanations of what went wrong, how systems are changing, and who is responsible if the same pattern repeats. On disaster recovery, relational leadership would measure success by whether families are back in safe housing, not by how tidy the reporting looks in Washington. On the military build-up, it would treat consent and stewardship as non-negotiable, and accept that legitimacy depends on whether affected communities experience the process as fair and responsive—not just whether the paperwork is complete.
The current Senate delegation’s itinerary raises a simple question: if four senators can visit Taipei, Tokyo, and Seoul before a Trump-Xi summit to reassure partners, why is it still so rare for high-level U.S. delegations to sit with communities in the Marianas and listen on our terms? If Washington wants to show the Indo-Pacific that it honors its commitments, it should start with the people already living under the U.S. flag.
The same standard applies at home.
We cannot demand relational leadership from Washington while accepting positional, extractive leadership from our own. Whether the issue is land leases, disaster funds, or new security projects, the test is the same: who is at the table, who sets the terms, and who carries the risk?
Our children are watching how we navigate this moment—how we respond to scandal, how we rebuild after storms, how we engage with a geopolitical agenda that increasingly maps our home as a chessboard. They will learn from us whether leadership in the Marianas is something you use to stand over people, or something you carry as a duty to stand with them.
Which one we choose will decide whose logic governs these islands in the years ahead.
By Gregorie Michael Towai (Eipéráng)
Gregorie Michael Towai (Eipéráng) is a cultural advocate and independent researcher from the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands currently residing in Oregon. He writes on Pacific governance, ocean policy, and diaspora political participation.
Editor’s note: The views and opinions expressed in this op-ed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of NMI News Service or its staff. All assertions are the sole responsibility of the writer.
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