Abstract

The Philippines is a prominent player in the South China Sea territorial dispute between ASEAN and China and a close ally of the US, and thus, has become increasingly caught in the crossfire of US–China geopolitical competition. This essay will briefly analyse the country’s overall geopolitical stance as being more aligned with the US and has shown a considerable trend towards even closer alignment with the US, despite facing economic and diplomatic pressures from China to do otherwise.

Introduction

As a treaty ally of the US and a country with conflicting claims of the South China Sea (SCS) against China, the Philippines has been unavoidably drawn into the increasing geopolitical competition between the US and China. Traditionally, it has been more assertive in pushing back against China’s claims, from establishing a base on the Second Thomas Shoal in the disputed Spratly Islands using a beached ship in 1999 to contesting China’s claims in the Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2013 (Graham, 2016). This has been against the backdrop of consistent bilateral military exercises and cooperation with the US for decades. However, this stance has been complicated by China’s increasing economic influence and thus its trade and investment links with the Philippines. During the period of Rodrigo Duterte’s administration from 2016, the Philippines sought to advance these interests by seeking closer cooperation and ties with China, eventually culminating in the cancellation of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) with the US in 2020 which allowed the US forces to visit the nation (De Castro, 2017). More recently however, later stages of the Duterte administration and now the Marcos administration have presided over a return towards US alignment, and in the past few months, this trend seems to have only accelerated (Popioco, 2023). A combination of factors, including greater geopolitical cooperation between the US and its allies and increasingly aggressive and assertive ‘grey zone’ competition between China and the Philippines in the SCS have contributed to this. This shift has reached a point where commentators have even begun to speak of the solidification of Philippine alignment with the US (Lawson, 2024). This essay will analyse these recent trends while highlighting some of the possible risks the Philippines might face against the backdrop of the wider geopolitical struggle between the US and China. It will zoom in on the SCS competition aspect as it is Manila’s largest concern in the competition between the superpowers, and it considers the issue one of significant importance to its national security.

The Philippines’ Traditional Geopolitical Strategy

One can argue that the Philippines has always been more geopolitically aligned with the US due to its longstanding Mutual Defence Treaty (MDT) with the US since 1951. This treaty provides the Philippines with a formal security guarantee from the US, a privilege shared by only a few countries in the Asia-Pacific region, highlighting the strong bond between the two nations. However, as mentioned earlier, this came under threat when President Rodrigo Duterte started a policy shift towards closer alignment and cooperation with China in 2016. This involved seeking Chinese assistance to fund railways in Mindanao under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure funding program, remaining silent when Chinese vessels made provocative moves against Philippine ones in the SCS in exchange for enhancing trade relations, and even purchasing Chinese weapons (Cruz, 2017). However, since 2021, it has become increasingly clear that the Philippines has sought to realign itself with the US. In the latter stages of the Duterte administration, it became common to think of China as, at the very least, an unreliable partner to the Philippines, as it consistently continued to test the limits of Philippine sovereignty by harassing its vessels in the SCS even while Duterte continued to seek greater cooperation with China, and publicly warned China against continued provocations (Popioco, 2023). Moreover, attempts to develop China’s investment and trade relations with the Philippines largely failed to materialise, with few substantive infrastructure funding agreements being signed between the two countries (Lee, 2020). This was against the backdrop of public sentiment turning sour against China as Filipinos increasingly felt that Duterte’s pivot towards China failed to yield any dividends (Lee, 2020). Duterte eventually restored the VFA with the US in 2021 (Garamone, 2021). 

Policy Changes from the Marcos Administration

Since the Marcos administration took over in 2022, and an isolationist Trump administration antagonistic towards its allies was replaced by a Biden administration focused on rebuilding them, the Philippines has been moving consistently back into the US fold. 2023 saw the Philippine president not only visiting China but also the US after more than a decade. Building on the above observations on Chinese–Filipino economic cooperation, in November 2023, the Philippines officially pulled out from three BRI railway infrastructure projects with China due to slow progress, marking the end of a period marked by hopes for more Chinese economic assistance, instead turning to Japan or the US for financing (Mccartney, 2023). For example, while Japan invested billions in Filipino rail infrastructure, three major railway projects that Duterte initially arranged for Chinese financing progressed at a snail’s pace. Furthermore, since 2023, the Marcos administration has shifted its approach by sending media crews to broadcast confrontations with Chinese ships in the South China Sea, departing from the quieter strategy maintained since 2016 to avoid provoking China. (Wingfield-Hayes, 2023). As a consequence, China did not back down, instead, it appeared to escalate tensions when a large Chinese coast guard vessel collided with a small Filipino resupply boat while attempting to block access to the Second Thomas Shoal base, and a Chinese military-grade laser was aimed at a Philippine vessel. Throughout 2024, this game of confrontation has only continued to escalate, with more violent confrontations recorded, including a fistfight between Chinese and Filipino sailors in June where a Filipino sailor lost a finger (Al Jazeera Staff, 2024). Ostensibly, China has been trying to respond to the Philippines’ increasing alignment towards the US and its accompanying assertive media strategy on the SCS with more grey-zone coercion. However, there is a third, and more importantly, largely unexplored factor, which is the change in Filipino defence and military strategy towards greater US cooperation and integration.

Defence Policy Shifts

The degree of defence cooperation and integration with the US has been dramatic. Major efforts seem to be underway in the Marcos administration to shift towards a defence posture that is more clearly arrayed against the threat of Chinese aggression escalating in the SCS. In April 2024, the country introduced the Comprehensive Archipelagic Defensive Concept (CADC), a defence policy document that some have described as a ‘paradigm shift’ in Filipino strategic thinking (Torrecampo, 2024). Essentially, the CADC calls for the military to focus on prioritising external defence, along with emphasising ‘jointness’ in military operations with its allies, such as the US. This is a plain signal of the Philippines’ intention to align with US geopolitical interests against China particularly in the domain of defence, as the US sees China as an aggressor state in East Asia that could militarily threaten Taiwan and by extension, its other allies such as the Philippines. This has been accompanied by a flurry of defence cooperation announcements, the most prominent of which is the expansion of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) in 2023, which allows the US to develop and rotate troops to four more military bases in the Philippines as well as the deployment of Typhon missile launches during joint US–Philippine naval drills in May. As the four bases are closer to China’s reclaimed island bases in the SCS and to Taiwan and the Typhoon missile launcher has the capability to attack Chinese bases in the mainland with ballistic missiles, they combined to serve as a strong deterrence against China’s military and send a strong signal that the Philippines is increasingly having the capacity and will to work together with the US to militarily compete against China. The degree of military cooperation between two states is often the clearest indicator of their geopolitical alignment, and recent signs suggest a strengthening of the Philippines’ alignment with the US.

Conclusion

An analysis of the geopolitical dynamics among the US, China, and the Philippines from 2021 to the present reveals that the Philippines is currently aligned relatively firmly with the US in the US–China competition, particularly in military matters and, to a lesser extent, in economic aspects. Indeed, this trend has been accompanied by Chinese criticisms of increasing US–Philippines military cooperation, as well as an increase in serious confrontations between Chinese and Philippine sailors in the SCS throughout 2024. Despite some efforts between the Philippines and China to manage their dispute after the incident in June mentioned earlier, confrontations have continued to occur since then (Al Jazeera Staff, 2024). There is also the looming possibility that these Filipino moves to have a more aggressive strategy on the SCS and towards defence actions oriented against China with the US could make China more aggressive due to heightened mistrust and posturing. Therefore, in the near future, the Philippines will need to simultaneously manage the risks of further grey-zone confrontations in the South China Sea while also addressing the broader risks of antagonizing China due to its shifting defense and diplomatic policies toward US alignment.