The newly reinvigorated U.S. – Philippines alliance has assumed a central role in the developing regional strategic competition with China. Less than 25 years ago, the U.S. – Philippine alliance was moribund, with both sides paying no more than lip service to the notion of mutual defense. That era gave way to “the counter-terrorism decade,” when post 9/11 urgency compelled the United States and the Philippines to deepen military cooperation in order to prevent al Qaeda from gaining a regional toehold in Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago.
It is only over the last six or seven years, thanks in part to China’s increased assertiveness in the disputed South China Sea, that the U.S. – Philippine alliance has come to be defined by China. Today, there is no doubt that the central purpose of the alliance, from a U.S. perspective, is to provide access for U.S. forces and the legitimacy that stems from fulfilling treaty obligations. This provides a physical and political positon from which the United States can act to oppose China’s territorial expansion and coercive behavior in the South China Sea.
For much of its life, the 65-year-old Mutual Defense Treaty had been regarded with deep ambivalence in Washington and suspicion in Manila. The alliance’s nadir was, of course, the 1991 decision by the Philippine Senate to not ratify an extension for U.S. bases, prompting the rapid U.S. withdraw from Clark Airbase and Subic Bay Naval Complex. After the withdrawal, when U.S. strategists and military planners occasionally turned their attention to the Philippines, it was mainly to assess the strategic vulnerability and potential regional instability posed by the chronically underperforming Philippine economy, persistent political instability, and woefully weak security institutions. In other words, the United States viewed the alliance primarily as a liability, not an asset.
The problem of weak security institutions was exacerbated by the almost complete cutoff of U.S. military aid to the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) after the base withdrawal. The AFP, indeed the entire Philippine defense establishment, had been almost entirely subsidized by massive U.S. security assistance programs that abruptly stopped after 1993. The results were predictable: the readiness of ships, planes, vehicles, and weapons systems collapsed alongside morale and discipline. The Philippines was utterly defenseless against external aggression and focused what capabilities it could muster against the lingering communist insurgency led by the Luzon-based New People’s Army.
Political and military efforts to address separatist sentiment and growing extremism in the predominantly Muslim south were not adequately prioritized or resourced by Manila. U.S. strategists and military planners looked on with increasing concern as they saw the emergence of an ungoverned space in Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago that could be exploited by al Qaeda-aligned extremist groups, including the homegrown Abu Sayaaf and the pan-regional Jemaah Islamiyah.
After the al Qaeda attacks against the United States in September of 2001, the threat posed by extremist groups in the Philippines became a matter of great urgency in Washington and at the Pacific Command headquarters in Honolulu. It became obvious that a weak Philippine ally posed strategic risks to the United States. In response, Washington launched a robust foreign internal defense mission in 2002 with rotational Special Forces providing training, advice, and assistance backed by nearly $200 million in security assistance from 2002 – 2004 alone. This mission, named Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines, and simultaneous efforts to re-build basic capacity in the AFP, defined the alliance until early in the Obama administration.
In 2009 and 2010, there was growing concern in Washington and Honolulu about increasing Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea. U.S. policy regarding the territorial disputes had remained consistently neutral for years, but there was growing consensus that the United States needed a fresh articulation of its policy to reassure jittery Southeast Asians and serve notice to China that the United States would not quietly acquiesce to its more muscular approach in the South China Sea. Thus, at the ASEAN Regional Forum in Hanoi in July 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made her famous intervention, which called for a collaborative (read multilateral) and coercion-free approach to resolving the disputes.
From that point on, there was a new raison d’etre for the U.S. – Philippine alliance: providing the critical linchpin for the emerging U.S. strategy designed to check China’s efforts to impose de facto sovereignty over the vast bulk of the South China Sea. At first glance, that seems to be a tall order for an alliance that had spent most of its existence mired in ambivalence in both Washington and Manila. In fact, the alliance proved ably tailored to provide exactly what the United States needed most: expanded access to bases in the vicinity of the South China Sea, and international legitimacy for a more robust U.S. presence in the region that could be couched in terms of fulfilling treaty obligations.
The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) negotiated in 2014 not only grants U.S. forces access to a range of bases, it also states in the first paragraph that building maritime security and maritime domain awareness capabilities are top priorities for the alliance. Thus, the United States gains enhanced operational agility through its expanded access to AFP bases, as well as the EDCA-mandated responsibility to conduct a wide range of naval and air activities in and around the South China Sea.
Apart from the internationally-sanctioned rights outlined in the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the United States now enjoys an added layer of legitimacy as it operates in the South China Sea. The re-invigorated U.S. – Philippine alliance effectively checks China’s attempts to characterize U.S. operations in the South China Sea as the unilateral meddling of a distant superpower by giving the United States a perfectly legitimate purpose for its presence and activities.
Going forward, the United States will continue to channel significant resources to building AFP capacity, particularly in the areas of maritime surface patrol, airborne maritime surveillance, and the supporting systems that will enable information and imagery to be efficiently analyzed and shared. There are still obvious challenges ahead, not least of which is chronically low Philippine defense spending. At an estimated $3 billion for 2016, the Philippine defense budget is less than half of fellow ASEAN members Thailand and Malaysia. The United States simply does not have the will or adequate resources to fill the gap between Philippine defense requirements and its currently under-funded budget
But establishing a minimum credible defense is a worthy and realistic objective, particularly if the focus remains on the maritime domain. Through partnership with the United States (and increasingly Japan), the AFP will increase its presence in that portion of the South China Sea that falls within the Philippines 200 nautical mile EEZ. China may view increased Philippine military capabilities as a mere nuisance, but the AFP’s ability to monitor and draw international attention to Chinese activity within the Philippine EEZ will at minimum increase the reputational costs that China incurs. And there is little doubt which side world opinion would be on in the event of a clash between the AFP and Chinese military or para-military forces. In fact, due in part to the newly reinvigorated U.S. – Philippine alliance, it is difficult to imagine China ever prevailing in the battle for legitimacy and world opinion in the contest over the South China Sea. Even more importantly, the alliance has sent Chinese dreams of a marginalized U.S. military presence in the South China Sea up in smoke. Not a bad performance for a Mutual Defense Treaty that was on the ash heap not 25 years ago.
