MANILA – The Philippines is leveraging a widening network of alliances to assert its stance in the South China Sea, a strategy that threatens to put it on a steeper collision course with China over contested features in the disputed waters.
Rising tensions over the Second Thomas Shoal have only reinforced the Philippines’ resolve to fortify its position vis-à-vis China.
This week, the Philippine Navy (PN) pressed ahead with another resupply mission to BRP Sierra Madre, a grounded ship that has served as a de facto military base for a detachment of Philippine troops since 1999.
General Romeo Brawner Jr, the newly-promoted chief of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, said that the resupply mission was unarmed to underscore Manila’s determination to avoid direct clashes with Chinese forces lurking in the area.
Earlier this month, a Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) fired water cannons to disrupt Philippine resupply missions on the Second Thomas Shoal, which the Philippines also refers to as the Ayungin Shoal.
The provocative blast followed on a February 6 incident near the same shoal where the CCG aimed a military-grade laser at a Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) ship that temporarily blinded its crew. The PCG claimed China also made “dangerous maneuvers” by passing within 150 meters of its vessel.
“Yes, they are still unarmed. We are not going there to make war. We’re just going there to simply bring supplies to our troops and to rotate,” the Philippine military chief told reporters while denying speculation that Manila is now bent on building new structures in the area before the rusty, grounded ship gives way to the elements.
Last week, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin spoke by phone with his Philippine counterpart Gilberto Teodoro to affirm that the two sides’ Mutual Defense Treaty “extends to Philippine public vessels, aircraft and armed forces – to include those of its Coast Guard – in the Pacific including in the South China Sea.”
Following their historic meeting in Camp David, the leaders of the United States, Japan and South Korea trilateral alliance also made it clear that “[W]e strongly oppose any unilateral attempts to change the status quo in the waters of the Indo-Pacific.”
The three allies also jointly reaffirmed the 2016 South China Sea arbitral tribunal award ruling at The Hague, which “sets out the legal basis for the peaceful resolution of maritime conflicts between the parties to that proceeding,” it added.
“Together, we’re going to stand up for international law, freedom of navigation and the peaceful resolution of disputes in the South China Sea,” US President Joe Biden told his Japanese and South Korean counterparts amid growing alignment over the need for more coordinated action in the disputed maritime areas.
A hallmark of the Ferdinand Marcos Jr administration, however, is also reaching out to so-called “non-traditional partners”, most notably India and Vietnam, which also have their own territorial disputes with China.
The Philippine president is now pursuing a new maritime agreement with Vietnam, likely based on the 2016 arbitral tribunal ruling, as well as expanded defense cooperation with India, which is set to deliver the much-vaunted BrahMos missile defense systems to the Philippines this year.
The Philippines and Vietnam have the most similar threat perception vis-à-vis China among the sea’s various rival claimants, with both embroiled in decades-long maritime disputes with the Asian power.
Both have employed a combination of strategic and diplomatic means to counter China’s expanding footprint in overlapping areas of claim.
Philippine-Vietnam bilateral relations, however, reached new heights in the early 2010s when Manila filed an unprecedented arbitration case against Beijing under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
Across Southeast Asia, only one country openly backed the Philippines and even suggested a potential joint legal case against China at some point in the future.
Vietnam’s most important legal intervention came in 2014, when it submitted a highly sympathetic position paper on the Philippines’ efforts to leverage international law to resolve the disputes.
“It is Vietnam’s consistent position to fully reject China’s claim over [Paracels] and [Spratlys] archipelagoes and the adjacent waters, as well as China’s claiming of ‘historic rights’ to the waters, sea-bed and subsoil within the ‘dotted line’ unilaterally stated by China,” the Vietnamese foreign ministry said.
Crucially, then-Vietnamese prime minister Nguyen Tan Dung openly threatened to file a parallel legal case following China’s deployment of a giant oil rig to an area near the disputed Paracel Islands, which sparked massive protests and a temporary diplomatic breakdown between the two communist neighbors.
During this period, the Philippines and Vietnam also expanded maritime security cooperation, including Vietnamese warship goodwill visits to Manila and friendly games among their troops stationed in the Spratly group of islands.
But the burgeoning ties came to an abrupt halt when then-president Rodrigo Duterte largely ignored Vietnam in favor of warmer ties with China.
On multiple occasions, his top officials, including his former foreign affairs secretary, even tried to portray Vietnam as a hostile rival in the South China Sea, partly in an effort to downplay China’s massive reclamation activities in the area.
Since coming to power, however, Marcos Jr has placed Vietnam at the heart of his regional strategy of balancing China. In his first year in office alone, Marcos Jr has held at least three meetings with high-level Vietnamese officials.
The bilateral talks ostensibly covered food security, since Vietnam alone is responsible for 90% of the Philippines’ total rice imports. As acting agriculture secretary, Marcos Jr is intent on expanding cooperation with Vietnam to new heights.
Crucially, however, the Filipino president also sees Hanoi as a key maritime security partner. Recently, the Filipino president admitted that the two sides have been negotiating a new maritime cooperation agreement, which likely aims to enhance defense cooperation but also delineate overlapping claims in the Spratlys based on the UNCLOS.
Last December, Vietnam and Indonesia successfully finalized decade-long negotiations over maritime border delimitation. The Philippines is likely seeking a similar deal with Vietnam based on the 2016 arbitral tribunal ruling at The Hague.
“Now that we are going to start discussions on the agreement that we have between the Philippines and Vietnam, I think it is a very, very important part of our relationship and it will bring an element of stability to the problems that we are seeing now in the South China Sea,” Marcos was quoted as saying following a recent meeting with Vietnamese officials.
Marcos Jr hailed the impending maritime cooperation agreement as “a very big step” toward building a united front to confront “common challenges”, namely China’s expanding footprint in the South China Sea.
Meanwhile, India is emerging as another major “non-traditional” partner. The two sides held their 5th meeting of their Joint Commission on Bilateral Cooperation (JCBC) in New Delhi earlier this year, where Philippine Secretary for Foreign Affairs Enrique Manalo and Indian Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar discussed ways to accelerate comprehensive strategic cooperation including on maritime security.
In their joint statement, India and the Philippines stressed “the need for peaceful settlement of disputes, and for adherence to international law,” with New Delhi reaffirming the finality and binding nature of the 2016 arbitral tribunal award.
Just a week earlier, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Biden agreed to address “challenges to the maritime rules-based order, including in the East and South China Seas” amid expanding maritime defense cooperation under the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue framework.
Under its “Look East” policy, India is rapidly expanding its economic and strategic footprint in Southeast Asia, with the Philippines emerging as a promising partner. In fact, Manila is India’s first major defense customer following the finalization of the US$375 million BrahMos missile defense deal last year.
The Philippine military is expected to deploy the new missile defense system, which has a top speed of around Mach 2.8 and is capable of carrying warheads weighing 200 to 300 kilograms from aircraft, warships or land to its frontier provinces facing the South China Sea.
The Philippine Marine Corps’ Shore Based Anti-Ship Missile battalion will be operating the Indian anti-ship missile system. To boost bilateral cooperation, India is also set to place a permanent defense attaché in Manila for the first time in recent history.
“We are natural and traditional partners. India and the Philippines have much to offer each other,” Manalo said during his visit to India earlier this year.
“We think this is perhaps only the beginning of further defense cooperation, not only in terms of weapons, but also in training and best practices. This is an important event in our defense cooperation,” he added, referring to the BrahMos missile system.
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