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Walden Bello is a member of the International Council of Progressive International. He is an international adjunct professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. As a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines from 2009 to 2015, he authored two joint resolutions with the late nationalist Senator Miriam Santiago-Defensor seeking the abrogation of the US-Philippine Visiting Forces Agreement.

For issue #113 of The Internationalist, Bello explains why President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., nearing the midpoint of his term, has aligned the Philippines closely with Washington, granting more bases and outsourcing foreign policy, despite historical US tensions.

Nearly three years into his six-year term, President Ferdinand (“Bongbong”) Marcos Jr. has become one of Washington’s most reliable allies in the volatile Western Pacific region. Indeed, to many Filipinos, the son of the dictator Marcos Sr., who was ousted from power with the help of the United States in 1986, has all but outsourced his country’s foreign and defence policies to the United States.

This is most evident in Marcos' grant of four more bases to the existing five that the administration of the late President Benigno Aquino III gave the US. This convergence in fealty to Washington is ironic since the Aquinos and the Marcos’ have been bitter dynastic rivals. However, those who have followed the Marcos family’s relationship with the United States were hardly surprised, since Marcos Jr., has a strong personal stake in not alienating Washington.  

Members of the Marcos dynasty are said to have been apprehensive about visiting the United States ever since they left it in the early 1990s, after being exiled there following the uprising that ousted Marcos, Sr. in 1986. The reason is that there is a standing $353 million contempt order against Marcos, Jr., related to the judgement of a US court awarding financial compensation from the Marcos estate to victims of human rights violations under Marcos Sr’s dictatorship. Ever since a US district court issued it, Marcos has avoided complying with the contempt order. A new judge extended the contempt order to January 25, 2031, rendering Marcos vulnerable to an arrest order anytime he visits the United States [1]. 

Marcos also cannot be unaware of how the US has been able to freeze the assets of people linked to regimes considered undesirable by the US, the most recent example being the holdings of Russian oligarchs connected to President Vladimir Putin in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Marcos family has some $5 to $10 billion in landholdings and other assets distributed throughout the world, including California, Washington, New York, Rome, Vienna, Australia, Antilles, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Switzerland and Singapore [2]. Being on the wrong side of the United States, especially in a conflict as central as the China-US, could have devastating financial consequences for the Marcos dynasty.

Geography is Destiny

It is just the Philippines’ bad luck that Marcos is president at a time when Washington is intent on maximizing the country’s strategic value. If indeed geography is destiny, the Philippines is Exhibit A. Perhaps no one captured the enduring strategic value of the archipelago more than General Arthur MacArthur, father of Douglas MacArthur, who led the expedition that subjugated the country in 1899. The Philippines, General MacArthur wrote,

"Is the finest group of islands in the world. Its strategic location is unexcelled by any other position around the globe. The China Sea, which separates it by something like 750 miles from the continent, is nothing more nor less than a safety moat. It lies on the flank of what might be called several thousand miles of coastline; it is the center of that position. It is therefore relatively better placed than Japan, which is on a flank, and therefore from the other extremity; likewise, India, on another flank. It affords a means of protecting American interests, which with the very least output of physical power has the effect of a commanding position in itself to retard hostile action."[3]

Proliferating Bases

Both Manila and Washington maintain the fiction that the basing arrangement they have agreed upon does not create US bases but provides Washington with “access to Philippine bases.” This charade is necessary since Article XVIII, Section 25, of the Constitution, states that “foreign military bases, troops, or facilities shall not be allowed in the Philippines except under a treaty duly concurred in by the Senate.”[4]  Moreover, cloaking the bases as Philippine bases means the US does not have to pay for them, bringing the country back to the early 1970s when Washington maintained Subic Naval Base and the sprawling Clark Air Force Base, along with several smaller military facilities, without compensating the Philippines. 

The reestablishment of foreign bases on Philippine soil has puzzled many, who still have vivid images of the hasty exit of the US from Subic and Clark in 1991. While that departure has been largely attributed to the Philippine Senate’s rejection of the basing agreement, negotiated between Washington and the administration of President Corazon Aquino, three other factors played a role. One was the eruption of the volcano Pinatubo in 1991, which Washington saw as severely disrupting operations at Subic and Clark, which were located quite close to the volcano.[5] Another was the collapse of the Soviet Union that same year, which led to the removal of the Soviet Pacific fleet as a major competitor to American naval power in the area. A third was the de facto alliance between Beijing and Washington, a key element of which was Deng Xiao Ping’s policy of adopting a low military profile and focusing on economic development, with the help of American capital. These considerations contributed to Washington’s decision to put a cap on the rent it was willing to pay to retain the bases, leading many senators to reject the deal out of national pride.[6]

The South China Sea Chessboard

It was during the early 1990s, which were marked by Washington’s complacency with its military relationship with the Philippines, that China began to make its moves in the South China Sea.[7] The most significant step was the creeping occupation of Mischief Reef, which lay within the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the Philippines, under the pretext of building “wind shelters” for Chinese fishermen.[8]  It was most likely the increased Chinese activity in the area, along with the sharpening of the China-Taiwan conflict in 1995 and 1996, that motivated the US to reestablish an active military presence in the Philippines.  

The Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) completed in 1998 provided for the periodic deployment of thousands of US troops to participate in military exercises with their Filipino counterparts.  This was followed by what eventually became a permanent deployment of US Special Forces on the island of Basilan in the Southern Philippines as part of President George W Bush’s War on Terror.[9]  Like foreign bases, foreign troops were constitutionally banned from being stationed in the Philippines, so to get around the ban, the Special Forces and other US troops were portrayed as being in the country on a “rotational basis,” to engage in exercises with Filipino troops and provide them with “technical advice,” and without authority to use firearms except in self-defence.

China’s territorial incursions became bolder and more frequent in the 2000s and, in 2009, it submitted to the United Nations its controversial Nine-Dash-Line map that claimed as Chinese territory some 90 percent of the South China Sea, including significant sections of the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ’s) of five Southeast Asian states:  Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, and the Philippines. Things came to a head during the administration of President Benigno Aquino III, from 2010 to 2016. Chinese Coast Guard vessels began aggressively driving off Filipino fishermen from their traditional fishing grounds, one of the richest of which was Scarborough Shoal, some 138 miles from the Philippines, which lay within the 200-mile EEZ of the country. After a one-and-a-half-month-long confrontation between Chinese and Philippine vessels, the Chinese ended up seizing the shoal.

The response of Aquino III was twofold. The first was to elevate the issue to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague, which eventually declared China’s claims invalid. Not surprisingly, China did not recognize the PCA’s ruling, but the court’s ruling did amount to a moral victory for the Philippines. But the administration’s more consequential move was to enter into the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) with the Obama administration, which placed no limits on the number of bases, weaponry, and troops that the US could have or could bring into the Philippines. Presented as an executive agreement and not as a treaty, the deal drew anger from nationalists who demanded Senate concurrence. The Supreme Court ruled, however, that not being a treaty, the deal did not need the approval of the Senate.

The Duterte Interlude

People heralded Rodrigo Duterte's rise to power in 2016 as a sign of a major shift in US-Philippine relations. Dismissive of concerns about the mounting extrajudicial executions in his blood war on drugs, Duterte successfully harnessed that undercurrent of resentment at colonial subjugation that has always coexisted with the admiration of things American in the Filipino psyche to promote a populist anti-Americanism. He also aligned with China, with his administration downplaying the significance of the Hague ruling and refusing to take up the cudgels for Filipino fishermen shooed away from their traditional fishing grounds by Chinese Coast Guard vessels.

When it came to the US, however, Duterte was more bark than bite. He did not interfere with the close relationship between the US and Philippine military, which came into play when US Special Forces assisted Philippine troops in the bloody retaking of the southern city of Marawi from Muslim fundamentalists in 2017.[10] Neither did he follow through on his vow in 2020 to abrogate the Visiting Forces Agreement. Indeed, by the end of his term, Duterte was extolling the VFA, voicing approval of the AUKUS security pact joining Australia, Britain, and the United States, reestablishing the Philippines-United States Bilateral Strategic Dialogue, and launching expanded joint military exercises with the US.[11] While not repudiating his close relationship with China, Duterte ended his presidency in June 2022 on a cordial note with Washington that contrasted sharply with the bitter row with Barack Obama that launched his term.

China’s Lesson from the 1995-96 Taiwan Straits Crisis

Even as the territorial disputes of the Spratly Islands rattled the region, the unresolved status of Taiwan, at the northern edge of the South China Sea, would come to the forefront as a source of tension. While the United States recognized Beijing as the sole government of China in 1979, it nevertheless committed itself to continue arms sales to Taiwan and left ambiguous what the United States would do if China were to forcibly assert its sovereignty over the island.  

While Beijing considers its sovereignty over Taiwan non-negotiable, its strategy has been to promote cross-strait economic integration as the main mechanism that would eventually lead to reunification. In Taiwan, however, being tough on Beijing plays well with voters, and nothing plays better than the threat to declare independence or assume the trappings of a sovereign power. When Taiwanese leaders display such behavior, Beijing feels constrained to put them in their place. In certain circumstances, Beijing has felt compelled to go beyond words and resort to sending missiles to the waters around Taiwan. Taiwan President Lee Teng Hui’s visit to the United States in 1995 was one such occasion, as was, more recently, the hosting of former US House of Representative Nancy Pelosi in August 2022 by Tsai Ing-wen, the current head of state. While both events created diplomatic crises, the first had momentous strategic consequences.

When China launched missile drills to teach Taiwan a lesson in 1995 and 1996, the Clinton administration sent two supercarriers, the USS Independence and the USS Nimitz, to the Taiwan Straits in March 1996. This was the biggest display of US power since the Vietnam War and it was intended to underline Washington’s determination to defend Taiwan by force.  Washington’s intervention was cold water splashed on Beijing’s face, for it showed just how vulnerable the coastal region of east and southeast China, the industrial heart of the country, was to US naval firepower.  

It was from this realization that China’s strategy in East and South China unfolded over the next two decades.  As analyst Gregory Poling notes, “One can draw a straight line from the PLAN’s [People’s Liberation Army Navy] humiliation in 1996 to its near-peer status with the US Navy today.”[12] 

Overall, China’s strategic posture is defensive, but in the East and South China Seas, it is engaged in the “tactical offensive” aimed at enlarging its defence perimeter against US naval and air power.  As defence analyst Samir Tata writes, “As a land power, the Middle Kingdom does not have to worry about the unlikely possibility of a conventional American assault on the mainland via amphibious landing by sea, parachuting troops by aid, or an expeditionary force marching through a land invasion route.  What it is vulnerable to is US control of the seas outside China’s 12-nautical mile maritime boundaries.  From such an over-the-horizon maritime vantage point, the US Navy has the capability to cripple Chinese infrastructure along the eastern seaboard by long-range shelling, missiles, and unmanned aerial bombing.”[13]

In response to this dilemma, the Chinese have evolved a strategy of “forward edge” defence consisting of expanding its maritime defence perimeter and fortifying islands and other formations in the South China Sea that it now occupies or has seized from the Philippines with anti-aircraft and anti-ship missile systems (A2/AD, or “anti-access/area denial” in military parlance) designed to shoot down hostile incoming missiles and aircraft in the few seconds before they hit the mainland.  Though defensive in its strategic intent, what has enraged Beijing’s neighbors is the unilateral way Beijing has gone about implementing A2/AD, with little consultation and in clear violation of such landmark agreements as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas that accords them EEZ’s.

Washington on the Offensive

Beijing’s unilateral acts in the South China Sea have provided Washington with ammunition in its containment strategy towards China, which has been operative since the Obama years.  But Washington’s rhetoric now elicits worries among some ASEAN governments that they are being drawn into a regional confrontation that is not in their interest. Particularly alarming has been a recent leaked memo from General Mike Minihan, who heads up the US Air Mobility Command, that asserts, "My gut tells me [we] will fight in 2025."[14] Minihan, it bears noting, is not the first to predict conflict with China in the immediate future. Adm. Michael M. Gilday, Chief of Naval Operations, said in October 2021 that the US should prepare to fight in 2022 or 2023.[15] Even earlier, the head of the US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, said that the Chinese threat to Taiwan would “manifest” in the next six years, by 2027.

Even without such statements, the level of hostile activity in the South China Sea has been alarming. During a visit to Vietnam I made as a congressman in 2014, top Vietnamese officials expressed concern at how, owing to a lack of rules of engagement, a ship collision by an American and Chinese ship “playing chicken”—according to them a common occurrence—could immediately escalate to a more intense level of conflict.  

Like the Philippines, Vietnam has criticized Beijing’s moves and its vessels have engaged Chinese Coast Guard ships in water-hosing jousts in the South China Sea.  The aggressive posture of the Biden administration, however, has led Hanoi to affirm a posture of neutrality in the brewing superpower confrontation. In a recent visit to Beijing, the Secretary General of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Nguyen Phu Truong, assured Chinese President Xi Jin Ping that his government would continue to hew to its “Four Noes” foreign policy approach in the region, that is, that Vietnam would not join military alliances, not side with one country against another, not give other countries permission to set up military bases or use its territory to carry out military activities against other countries, and not use force—or threaten to use force— in international relations.[16]

Blackmail as Diplomacy

But the Philippines is not Vietnam and Marcos, Jr, has no record of discerning the national interest in his years as a politician, much less advocating or standing up for it.  In fact, he’s not even a Duterte, who claimed he became a nationalist while in college in the 1960s.  As noted at the beginning of this essay, what he is very conscious of is that he has a standing contempt order from a US court that can be invoked anytime and his family has billions of assets scattered in so many locations globally that the long financial arm of the United States can freeze should he make the wrong decision in the intensifying conflict between Washington and Beijing.

With a veritable sword of Damocles hanging over him, Marcos, Jr, is not someone who would dare cross Washington. Indeed, when it comes to negotiating an independent path between two superpowers, he is the wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time—which is another way of saying that from Washington’s point of view, he’s the right person at the right place at the right time.

Notes:

[1] https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/explainers/explainer-can-marcos-jr-as-president-travel-united-states/; also, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/philippines-election-marcos-fortune/

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/07/10bn-dollar-question-marcos-millions-nick-davies  

[3] Quoted in William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur [New York: Dell, 19780, pp. 48-49

[4] https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/434443/in-the-know-ph-constitution-on-foreign-military-bases#ixzz7sJASgeS8

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/16/world/us-will-abandon-volcano-ravaged-air-base-manila-is-told.html.

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/16/world/philippine-senate-votes-to-reject-us-base-renewal.html

[7] See Gregory Poling, On Dangerous Ground: America’s Century in the South China Sea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 166-67.

[8] Marites Vitug, Rock Solid: How the Philippine Won its Maritime Claim against China [Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2018, pp. 30-310. 

[9] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/second-front-philippines/  

[10] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-militants-usa-idUSKBN191068

[11] https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/11/02/duterte-china-philippines-united-states-defense-military-geopolitics/

[12] Poling,p. 166.

[13] https://thediplomat.com/2017/01/china's-maritime-great-wall-in-the-south-and-east-china-seas/

[14] https://www.reuters.com/world/us-four-star-general-warns-war-with-china-2025-2023-01-28/

[15] https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2022/11/04/2003788234

[16] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3198034/china-vietnam-ties-beijing-reassured-hanois-vow-reject-all-military-alliances-say-analysts

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