The United States has strengthened its defenses in East Asia by gaining year-around, permanent access to nine bases in the Philippines. These aren’t American bases, but U.S. troops can move freely in and out for exercises or, for that matter, in a real war.
This month, the bases are supporting more than 17,000 U.S. and Philippine troops in the biggest war games in the Philippines in years. The Philippines’ President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. has reversed the policies of his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, who undermined the U.S.-Philippine alliance by courting China. Duterte saw a warm relationship with China’s President Xi Jinping as necessary to head off armed conflict in the South China Sea, which Beijing claims belongs to China.
Bongbong — whose father, Ferdinand Marcos, ruled as a dictator for 18 years before his overthrow in the People Power Revolution in 1986 — has decided the future lies in renewing close ties with Washington. The Americans had to evacuate their huge air and naval bases more than 30 years ago, after the Philippine Senate refused to renew the lease. They will not be returning in the same huge numbers, but Bongbong has decided they’re needed while China harasses Philippine boats, chasing them out of customary fishing grounds and threatening to take over small Philippine islets.
The shift in Philippine policy parallels that in South Korea, where President Yoon Suk-yeol has endorsed joint South Korea-U.S. exercises on the ground, in the air and at sea for the first time since Donald Trump foolishly canceled them after his summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in Singapore in 2018.
Yoon’s predecessor, Moon Jae-in, who met Kim on the line at Panmunjom before the Singapore summit and saw him again in Pyongyang, discouraged joint exercises for the rest of his presidency. Until this year, Americans and South Koreans had to content themselves with elaborate war games on computers — not quite the same as live troops simulating real-world action.
The decisions of President Marcos and President Yoon to bolster defenses from Northeast to Southeast Asia carry inherent risks.
In the Philippines, the idea of American and Philippine troops strengthening mutual defenses presents a challenge to Chinese forces who’ve been expanding air and naval bases in the Spratly Islands for years. The Chinese protest whenever American naval vessels show the flag— and defy China’s claim to control over one of the world’s crucial international waterways.
Most recently, China charged that an American destroyer, the Milius, violated its “indisputable sovereignty” by cruising within 12 miles of a landing strip the Chinese have built on Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands.
The reef was once partially submerged, depending on the weather and the tides, but Chinese engineers have made it into a permanent facility that’s central to defending their claim to the surrounding sea. Just because the Chinese have turned the reef into a base doesn’t fortify their “excessive claim,” said a statement issued by the U.S. Seventh Fleet.
One of the Philippine bases to which the Americans have access is on the long southwestern Philippine Island of Palawan, facing the South China Sea. The U.S. and China have refrained from opening fire, but their planes on occasion have flown perilously close to one another.
The standoff in those waters parallels what’s happening around the Korean peninsula, where North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has been ordering tests of sophisticated missiles. The North Koreans and Americans are not likely to begin firing at one another, but the risks are rising while the Chinese keep the North on life support with oil and food.
Intrinsic in the rising confrontation are the dangers in the waters surrounding Taiwan, the breakaway Chinese province off the China coast between South Korea and the Philippines.
Almost routinely, Chinese planes are flying into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone while Chinese warships approach the island’s territorial waters. It’s a game of intimidation to punish Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen for consorting with the Americans, on whom she’s counting for arms and much else, even though the U.S. recognizes Beijing as the capital of “one China.”
Meetings between Tsai and two speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives, first the Democratic Party’s Nancy Pelosi, who stopped off in August, and then Republican Kevin McCarthy, whom Tsai saw this month at the Ronald Reagan Library outside Los Angeles, have outraged Beijing.
To the Chinese, the revival of tight relations between the U.S. and the Philippines is equally worrisome. Three of the nine Philippine bases to which the Americans have access are within easy range of Taiwan, and President Biden has promised the U.S. would live up to its “commitment” to defend Taiwan.
In the event of a war for Taiwan, South Korea would be reluctant to join in the fray. The Koreans don’t want to upset China in a conflict for the island. South Korea, like most other countries, including its American ally, recognizes Taiwan only as a province of China, which is by far the South’s biggest trading partner.
The proximity of those Philippine bases to Taiwan is just as important as their relationship to the South China Sea. American warships periodically enter the Taiwan Strait, as they do the South China Sea. It’s as though the battle lines are being drawn for a showdown, though a real war remains a distant cloud on the horizon.
Donald Kirk has been a journalist for more than 60 years, focusing much of his career on conflict in Asia and the Middle East, including as a correspondent for the Washington Star and Chicago Tribune. He currently is a freelance correspondent covering North and South Korea. He is the author of several books about Asian affairs