MANILA – Soon after Lai Ching-te won Taiwan’s January 13 presidential election, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr made an unprecedented congratulatory call to the independence-leaning new leader who’s firmly in Beijing’s crosshairs.
According to official reports of the conversation, Marcos Jr congratulated Lai as “Taiwan’s next president” while looking forward to “close collaboration, strengthening mutual interests and fostering peace and ensuring prosperity for our peoples.”
The Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs was quick to clarify that Manila still abides by the “One China” policy. The Malacanang Palace followed suit by playing down Marcos Jr’s felicitations.
Beijing fired back nonetheless by summoning the Philippines’ top envoy in Beijing while warning Manila “not to play with fire” amid festering maritime disputes in the nearby South China Sea and China’s calls to “reunify” Taiwan with the mainland, by force if necessary.
Far from a diplomatic faux pas, however, the Filipino president’s statement was a well-calculated move. For Marcos Jr, as a nearby neighbor of Taiwan and US mutual defense treaty ally, the Philippines must participate in any collective effort to deter a Chinese invasion of the self-ruling island.
How the Philippine leader calibrates its cooperation with the US and its like-minded allies vis-à-vis Taiwan could make the difference between war and peace in the months and years ahead.
That includes regarding the amount and terms of access Manila allows the US to its northernmost military bases that abut on Taiwan’s southern shores.
It’s still unclear how China will respond to Lai’s democratic victory. Beijing clearly favored the Kuomintang’s Hou Yu-in, who finished second in the vote ahead of third-placing Ko Wen-je (26.5%) of the upstart Taiwan People’s Party (TPP).
After the polls, China’s Foreign Ministry said that “Taiwan is China’s Taiwan” and thus nothing can “change the basic pattern and the development of cross-Strait relations, nor can it change the common desire of compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Strait to draw closer.”
With China facing deepening economic troubles at home and possible instability inside the ruling Communist Party amid recent top-level purges, including at the foreign and defense ministries, there is arguably growing pressure on Xi Jinping’s regime to project strength and resolve overseas.
Authoritative studies show that the influential and sizeable Chinese urban elite and middle classes tend to favor a more muscular approach to intractable issues such as cross-strait relations and eventual “reunification” with Taiwan.
There is little indication so far that Beijing is either willing to restore cross-straits communications channels or roll back its increasingly regularized and often large military drills around Taiwan.
For his part, Lai has promised to avoid any escalatory move in favor of a “balanced” approach that “maintains the cross-strait status quo.”
Yet, he has also vowed “to safeguard Taiwan from continuing threats and intimidation from China” and continue his predecessor’s (Tsai Ing-wen’s) proactive diplomacy by building a wide network of alliances with like-minded democracies, including the US, Japan and increasingly the Philippines.
With the vast majority of the Taiwanese population self-identifying as primarily “Taiwanese”, even a discussion of “reunification” with Beijing has increasingly become a political taboo on the island.
Thus even if both Beijing and Taipei have no interest in direct conflict, they could sleepwalk into one as an increasingly fragile status quo withers and shakes.
The upshot is a growing sense of urgency among immediate neighbors like the Philippines to prepare for conflict contingencies in the near future.
Indeed, the Taiwan question is more urgent than ever for the Philippines. For starters, there are as 200,000 overseas Filipino workers residing on the self-ruling island.
Any conflict would be a humanitarian and likely economic catastrophe for the Philippine government – far worse than when the Arab uprisings that rocked Middle East nations with large Filipino diasporas.
Geography is key to Manila’s strategic calculation. Marcos Jr. himself hails from the northwestern province of Ilocos Norte, which is around 45 minutes away by flight from Taiwan’s major southern cities. Several Philippine islands are less than 100 kilometers away from Taiwanese territories.
The Marcos Jr administration has already granted the US access to several military facilities in the northern provinces of Cagayan and Isabela under the expanded Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA).
There are suspicions Washington aims to directly incorporate the Philippines into its Taiwan defense strategy. Indeed, the Pentagon is reportedly contemplating making the Philippines into a massive weapon depot for a potential war with China over Taiwan.
Some have even suggested the possibility of Taiwanese assets, including fighter jets, relocating to the northern Philippines in the event of total war.
So far, Manila has hedged its bets. On one hand, the Philippine military indicated that it will allow the new EDCA bases in the north to be “made available during emergency situations for combined use of the US and the AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines).”
Marcos Jr has also indicated that those facilities “will also prove to be useful for us should that terrible occurrence (China’s full-scale invasion of Taiwan) come about.”
After all, as the Filipino president admitted, it is “hard to imagine’’ the Philippines could remain neutral in the event of a war for Taiwan, which is far closer to Manila than any major Southeast Asian capital.
At the same time, Marcos Jr has also maintained that an expanded US military presence in northern Philippine provinces will not be directed at China per se, but rather aims to enhance the Southeast Asian nation’s capacity to deal with a range of threats, including non-traditional security issues such as disaster-relief and humanitarian operations.
Indications suggest Marcos Jr is still hedging his bets in pursuit of a “goldilocks” approach to both superpowers, one that enhances the Philippines’ strategic position with American help while avoiding escalation with China that could tilt toward conflict.
By expanding communication channels with Taipei, the Philippines may actually enhance its ability to quietly and more effectively mediate between China and Taiwan – or, at the very least, seek reassurance of statesmanship from both sides as a concerned neighbor.
The Philippines will need to tread very carefully in calibrating its Taiwan policy, particularly on the defense front. Under EDCA, the Pentagon is barred from building permanent and autonomously-governed bases on Philippine soil as during the Cold War era and thus must move troops and equipment on a rotational basis.
This means that the Marcos Jr administration has the prerogative to determine the size of the American troop presence and nature of their weapons systems in EDCA-designated facilities.
Most EDCA facilities in the northern Philippines are relatively skeletal structures, unlike the massive American-controlled bases in Subic and Clark in the 20th century.
The Philippines will also need to carefully assess Pentagon requests for access to even more military facilities. The most crucial ones regarding Taiwan are in the northernmost Batanes islands, most notably on Mavulis Island, which hosts a naval facility.
In exchange for a potentially limited American presence in the north, the Marcos Jr administration could press China to rein in its aggression around Philippine-controlled areas in the South China Sea, most notably at the Second Thomas Shoal where the two sides have clashed in recent months.
Taiwan has presented neighboring countries such as the Philippines a major geopolitical challenge, one that requires delicate balancing between the US and China, but also an opportunity to reset the regional balance of power more in its favor.
Follow Richard Javad Heydarian on X at @Richeydarian