MANILA - The Philippines has emerged as a frontline state in the rivalry between
the United States and China for Southeast Asian power and influence. Locked in
a bitter territorial dispute with Beijing in the South China Sea, and with no
prospects of a diplomatic resolution in sight, Manila has moved to bolster to
its long-standing strategic alliance with Washington.
As China fortifies its military
and administrative hold on disputed islands in the Spratly Islands and other
South China Sea territories, the Philippines is effectively reverting to its
pre-1992 state of strategic affairs, an era when the US helped to determine the
island nation's security and provided strong steering to its foreign policy.
Against China's growing assertiveness
in the region, including a naval standoff over a contested shoal earlier this
year, Manila is turning back on almost two decades of relative strategic
independence, beginning with the Philippine Senate's refusal in 1991 to extend
the US's lease at Subic Bay naval base, a military presence nationalistic
lawmakers then assailed as a vestige of colonialism and affront to national
sovereignty.
Fast forward to the present,
Manila is now actively, if not desperately, courting US military support
vis-a-vis China. Certain Philippine officials have even signaled an openness to
hosting greater numbers of American soldiers in the country on a rotational
basis; constitutional provisions bar the establishment of foreign military
bases on Philippine soil, a nationalistic reaction to the US's previous use of
the country as a military staging ground.
The two sides already hold annual
joint military exercises, known as "shoulder to shoulder". These are
staged ostensibly as practice counter-terrorism operations, but have recently
included exercises that could be construed as targeting China, including in
areas adjacent to contested South China Sea territories.
The Philippines has also been at
the center of revitalized diplomatic efforts among America's regional treaty
and strategic allies, including Japan, Vietnam, and Australia, to form what
some view as a US-led "string of pearls" aimed at containing China's
purported expansionary zeal in the region, including its growing naval
capabilities in the South China Sea.
At the same time, Manila has
pushed the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to adopt a binding
code of conduct for the South China Sea, while calling for international
arbitration to settle its conflicting maritime claims with China. Both moves
have put Manila at loggerheads with Beijing and play to existing US positions
on the issues.
Strategic sacrifice
With regional tensions on the
rise, questions are mounting about the strategic wisdom of the President
Benigno Aquino government's current course. Those concerns have tended to focus
on four key interrelated issues, namely:
a) The loss of strategic
flexibility and national sovereignty to an overreliance on the US;
b) Uncertainty over America's
commitment to Philippine national security, especially in the event of an armed
confrontation with China, and the depth of Washington's declared strategic
"pivot";
c) The sincerity and
effectiveness of Manila's diplomatic efforts, especially on its calls for a
regional code of conduct and ASEAN-led conflict resolution;
d) The rising economic and
political costs of confronting China, a major trading partner and source of
investments.
The crisis in China-Philippine
relations is a product of several factors, ranging from the murky nature of the
United Nations Convention on the Laws of the Sea (UNCLOS) and lack of an
effective regional conflict management mechanism, to growing popular
nationalism and military expenditures in China, to deepening geo-strategic
competition between a rising China and embattled America over natural resources
and for regional maritime primacy.
The escalating territorial
conflicts in the Spratlys and other maritime areas are in this context a subset
of deeper systemic imbalances, as well as a reflection of weaknesses in the
region's emerging security architecture. UNCLOS, which has motivated
overlapping claims within the South China Sea, represents one of those
structural flaws.
With each claimant country
projecting a 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone from its immediate
shores, with different parties adopting divergent interpretations of the
convention, the entire South China Sea is now plagued with contested claims
among Brunei, China, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam. Those
tensions have recently intensified between the China and the Philippines after
a series of incidents at sea.
"China's baselines are all
expressed in its coastal geography through a U-shaped line in the (South China
Sea) and in several offshore places. This exceeds those allowed by the UNCLOS
and international law," says Chester Cabalza, a professor at the
Philippine National Defense College. "On the other hand, the Philippines,
being an archipelagic country, is entitled to enclose large bodies of water
within the baselines and assert sovereignty over it."
The only way to peacefully settle
these differences will be through either bilaterally agreed upon arbitration by
an international body, or under the aegis of a multilateral regional
organization with an enforcement capacity to implement binding rules of
behavior. Yet China has so far refused to subject its claims to international
arbitration, while regional organizations such as ASEAN lack the power and will
to intervene.
China, citing its wide sweeping
nine-dash line map, has even refused to acknowledge that its claims in the
South China Sea are contested. Those ambitious claims could have grave
strategic and economic implications for the region's smaller countries and as such
have coaxed former critics and adversaries in the region into Washington's
strategic embrace.
"If you take the doctrine to
its logical conclusion, it means that [China] will have the final say or
sovereignty over who passes through such an important international waterway by
subjecting it to internal waterway regulations," said prominent Filipino
intellectual and legislator Walden Bello. "This is where the real fear
begins for many smaller neighbors such as the Philippines and Vietnam."
Empty declaration
In 2002, ASEAN and China agreed
upon a non-binding, highly symbolic "Declaration on the Conduct of Parties
in the South China Sea". A decade later, there has been no concrete
movement in terms of building even guidelines for a binding agreement. In large
part that's because Beijing refuses to acknowledge that features of the Paracel
and Spratly island chains are contested, including by the Philippines and
Vietnam.
The recent fiasco in Phnom Penh,
where ASEAN members failed to issue a final communique for the first time in
the grouping's history, demonstrated its impotence vis-a-vis China's influence
over certain smaller member states - in this case Cambodia. It also highlighted
the grouping's well-established inability to contemplate and resolve regional
problems.
"The Phnom Penh summit
reflected the fundamental structural deficiencies within ASEAN, whereby you
have no dispute settlement mechanisms within the charter and mechanisms of the
organization," said Herman Kraft, former director of the Manila-based
Institute for Strategic and Developmental Studies. "The summit works on
the basis of consensus, so if there is no consensus there is no
resolution."
The lack of ASEAN cohesion and
integrity signals a trend towards China using its economic power to drive a
wedge within the grouping and in the multilateral vacuum pressure smaller
states through bilateral means. Aware of Manila's dependence on tourism and
commodity exports, Beijing has recently deployed a combination of travel bans,
non-tariff barriers and threats of economic sanctions to pressure the
Philippines. Its ban on Philippine banana exports, for example, has recently
deprived Manila of a US$250 million market.
With countries such as Cambodia,
which relies heavily on Chinese trade and investment, now openly opposing other
pro-US ASEAN members such as the Philippines, the organization is arguably
splintering on China versus US geo-strategic lines.
"There is a neo-Cold war in
the region ... the region is torn between the US and China," said Cabalza.
"This is very apparent in most official regional and multilateral
engagements that I have attended. Actually, all Indo-Chinese countries in ASEAN
are handcuffed by China."
The US and its strategic allies,
meanwhile, have recently bolstered aid to the Philippines. Japan recently
signed a new defense pact with the Philippines, which together with South
Korea, will help Manila to improve its deterrence and maritime surveillance
capacities. Australia, too, is set to step up its security cooperation with
Manila, thanks to the Philippine Senate's recent ratification of a long pending
Status of Forces Agreement.
As part of its declared
"pivot" to Asia, the US has offered a mixture of aid, military
hardware, increased joint-military exercises, and financial support to the
Philippines. Washington's call for "freedom of navigation" in the
South China Sea and "peaceful settlement of disputes" through a more
binding code of conduct under ASEAN and UNCLOS have fortified Philippine positions.
Nationalistic response
So how will China respond? A
tumultuous leadership transition, slowing economy and growing social discontent
have all recently pushed Beijing in a more nationalistic direction. By
projecting confidence and assertiveness on foreign fronts, including the South
China Sea, Chinese leaders apparently hope to distract attention from rising
domestic challenges.
Other actors, including the
People's Liberation Army's navy (PLAN), a major recipient of ballooning
military expenditures, are believed to be conducting their own independent
strategic policies.
"The situation is becoming
more complex, with China's armed forces becoming more influential within the
internal power equation in China and using the territorial issue as a
springboard to legitimize its rising influence within the establishment,"
said Philippine lawmaker Bello.
China's growing investments in
offshore drilling technology and brown and blue naval capabilities signal to
strategic analysts a medium-term drive to lock down and take ownership over the
South China Sea's potentially rich stores of energy resources. At the same
time, Beijing is believed to harbor a longer-term strategy of dominating the
South China Sea's international sea lanes to supplant the US's maritime
supremacy in the Asia-Pacific and establish its own.
Although China has been widely
criticized for stoking recent regional tensions, there are concomitant concerns
about the Philippines' responses. Analysts note that China-Philippine bilateral
ties were strong until 2009 but then suddenly deteriorated after a series of
diplomatic spats and maritime incidents.
"The main trigger, as I see
it, was the deadline of submission of claims under UNCLOS whereby the
Philippines and Vietnam somehow internationalized their territorial claims
against China," said Kraft. He says China sees "the Philippines as an
irrelevant player - amidst a frank assessment that the US is a declining power
- so how dare it threaten to take China to international arbitration over
claims in the [South China Sea]."
There are also concerns that the
Philippines has overestimated America's security commitment vis-a-vis China. As
a result, Manila has adopted an overly aggressive diplomatic strategy in its
dealings with fellow ASEAN countries, witnessed by the recent breakdown in
consensus in Phnom Penh. The Philippines' pitched rhetoric against China is
believed to have alienated ASEAN members, like Indonesia, who have pursued a
more moderate diplomacy on South China Sea issues.
"In terms of assertion of
Philippine sovereignty, the government has overall done a good job. It has used
all diplomatic means to impress its legitimate claims to features in the
Spratlys," said Bello. "My only reservation is the increasing
reliance on America to deter Chinese aggression ... Now what we have are
regional states locked into a superpower confrontation, sidelining legitimate
territorial disputes. Thus hawks have been empowered at the expense of those
who have emphasized the wisdom of creative diplomacy."
Unless Manila is able to arrive
at a "third way" - utilizing creative diplomacy and multilateral dispute
settlement mechanisms - strategic reliance on the US will likely grow in the
years ahead. Yet if an armed conflict erupts with China, it is not certain that
the US would come to the Philippines' rescue. (The US-Philippine mutual defense
treaty could be interpreted in a way that does not cover contested
territories.) The US's "pivot" towards Asia, meanwhile, has given
China added motivation to militarize its territorial claims in the region.
"The Americans are sweet
talkers. The Philippines should not rely on US military capability in case of a
conflict with China in the [South China Sea]," said Cabalza. "The US
will not save us and won't act as our knight in shining armor. The US will
protect its own economic and strategic interests with China."
Richard Javad Heydarian
Asia Times
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