Philippines on frontline of
US-China rivalry By Richard Javad Heydarian
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:
The loss of strategic
flexibility and national sovereignty to an
overreliance on the US;
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";
The sincerity and
effectiveness of Manila's diplomatic efforts,
especially on its calls for a regional code of
conduct and ASEAN-led conflict resolution;
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
is a Manila-based foreign affairs analyst. He has
reported for or been quoted in The Diplomat, UPI,
Foreign Policy, Tehran Times, Russia Today,
Foreign Policy in Focus, among other publications.
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