America and the Philippines Should Call China’s Bluff

After months of simmering tensions between China and the Philippines over conflicting territorial claims in the South China Sea, Manila and Beijing have engaged in a series of “candid” discussions on how to manage the disputes. The talks ramped up after a Chinese ship rammed a Philippine coast guard vessel off a contested shoal in August, and come amid a concerted diplomatic, military, and rhetorical push on the part of Philippine President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr., to counter Chinese aggression and to protect the Philippines’ sovereign territorial rights in the South China Sea. Despite his efforts, however, the risk of a crisis with Beijing—one that could pull the United States into a military standoff with China, should Washington be obliged to assist Manila under the terms of their mutual defense treaty—is only growing.

The tussle between the Philippines and China over rammed vessels is just the latest in a series of confrontations that many in both Manila and Washington fear could escalate into a full-blown war with China. Since Chinese President Xi Jinping came to power, in 2012, Beijing has laid claim to vast swaths of the South China Sea—claims that it has begun to assert more forcefully, leading to flare-ups not just with the Philippines but also with other countries in the region, including Malaysia and Vietnam. In June, the Chinese coast guard and the Philippine navy faced off directly for the first time when Chinese forces swarmed Philippine personnel in an attempt to block them from resupplying a key Philippine outpost in contested waters. The outpost, a World War II–era ship called the Sierra Madre, which Manila intentionally grounded a quarter-century ago on the shallow reef known as Second Thomas Shoal, has emerged as an unlikely but critical flash point. Wielding pickaxes, knives, and improvised spears, the Chinese forces ransacked the Philippine boats, looted firearms, and hammered the outboard motors, windshields, and communications equipment. In the melee, a Filipino sailor’s thumb got sliced off by a sharp piece of metal. The skirmish marked a significant escalation from China’s usual maneuvers of shadowing, blocking, and firing water cannons at Philippine ships.

In the wake of this clash, both Manila and Beijing sought a reprieve and reached a temporary arrangement to reduce volatility in the South China Sea, the details of which were not made public. In subsequent resupply missions, Chinese vessels kept their distance and did not intimidate or block the Philippine boats. The United States and other countries welcomed the provisional deal as an initial win for the Philippines. “It’s very important that that be the standard, not the exception,” said U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at a meeting with his counterpart in Manila. But later clashes over another reef, known as Sabina Shoal, have demonstrated the difficulty of sustaining peace.

Beijing’s provocations have not crossed the redline set by Marcos—the killing of a Filipino citizen by a “willful act”—but they have raised the specter of heightened danger that could trigger the Philippines to invoke its mutual defense treaty with the United States. Marcos must walk a fine line between lowering the temperature with Beijing and demonstrating that Manila will not stand down in the face of Chinese aggression. He has since called for de-escalation, telling Filipino troops “not to resort to the use of force or intimidation, or deliberately inflict injury or harm to anyone” but reminding Beijing, without mentioning it by name, that this “should not be mistaken for acquiescence.”

To prevent a disaster, Manila, with the support of the United States, must look beyond temporary negotiations with China and craft a longer-term approach for mitigating risks in the South China Sea. Marcos must calibrate his policy of transparency on Chinese provocations to spotlight Beijing’s bullying tactics while also maintaining the civility necessary for peaceful resolution with China. The Philippines must resolve maritime boundary disputes with other claimant countries and work with them to present a united front against Chinese territorial violations. And Manila must be clear on what it expects from Washington—namely, U.S. support in routine Philippine naval activities, such as resupply missions, in areas that fall within the country’s exclusive economic zone. The United States should use existing lines of communication, including high-level meetings or bilateral defense talks, to warn Beijing against provocative action against the Philippines in the South China Sea. If the United States fails to provide its ally with the necessary support, Washington and Manila may both be drawn into the kind of escalatory spiral with China that they desperately want to avoid.

RIGHT DOES NOT MAKE MIGHT

Since coming to office, in 2022, Marcos, the son of the former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, has sought to push back against Beijing. His pivot away from China—which marks a reversal from the obsequiousness toward Beijing shown by his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte—has won Marcos favor both domestically and in the West. Marcos’s pro-Western stance may well have been influenced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which began months before he was sworn into office. Notably, in his inauguration speech, Marcos made no mention of China or of the contentious South China Sea; it was Ukraine that was on his mind. “If the great powers draw the wrong lessons from the ongoing tragedy in Ukraine,” he said, “the same dark prospect of conflict will spread to our part of the world.”

In practice, Marcos has returned the country to its strategic moorings by granting the United States access to four more military bases, building on measures to strengthen the alliance in the 2014 U.S.-Philippine Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. He has overseen the largest-ever joint military exercises between the two countries, which have included new maritime drills and the participation of the Philippine coast guard. Marcos has visited the United States four times in two years and, in 2023, became the first Philippine president to set foot in the Indo-Pacific Command headquarters in Hawaii. Washington, for its part, has welcomed Marcos’s foreign policy shift and his upholding of international law, particularly the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, to settle maritime disputes. And U.S. officials have consistently expressed support for the Philippines and criticism of Beijing each time China harasses Philippine vessels.

A key pillar of Marcos’s strategy has been a policy of transparency regarding clashes with China—instead of the silence or selective disclosure that prevailed during the Duterte administration, Manila now calls out Beijing’s violent and bullying behavior as a means of both pushing back and rallying support at home and abroad. The Philippine coast guard has taken up the practice of embedding local and international media in its patrols. In other cases, the Philippine coast guard itself has released photographs and videos of Chinese harassment, including of one notable incident in which a Chinese vessel directed a military-grade laser beam at a Philippine ship, temporarily blinding the crew.

Since coming to office, in 2022, Marcos has sought to push back against Beijing.

Marcos does need to take care not to push his transparency policy too far. It risks adding fuel to the fire should disclosures prove too inflammatory in Beijing. To avoid such an outcome in a period of high tensions, Manila could have opted to conduct its resupply missions to Second Thomas Shoal in a discreet rather than an overtly public manner. Going forward, to keep the situation from getting out of control, Marcos must continue calibrating his government’s rhetoric to be clear about the threat posed by China’s incursions while leaving room for de-escalation. More measured language would allow Beijing to avoid embarrassment before its domestic audience, which largely backs the government’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. It would also give Washington more room to maneuver, lessening the pressure on U.S. officials to back Manila up in ways that could hinder de-escalatory dialogue with Beijing.

For now, however, Marcos’s approach has been successful in reaching domestic and international audiences. The public is behind him. Filipinos are more aware than ever of China’s illegal presence and dangerous maneuvers in the West Philippine Sea (the parts of the South China Sea that fall within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone), which deprive Filipino fishermen of their livelihood and violate the country’s sovereign rights. In a June survey conducted by Pulse Asia, 76 percent of respondents agreed that the Marcos administration should continue asserting the country’s rights in the West Philippine Sea, and 51 percent believed that it can be done by strengthening alliances and conducting joint patrols and military exercises. The majority of those surveyed—74 percent—wanted the Philippines to work with the United States. Only five percent of Filipinos favored working with China.

Marcos has also galvanized support for the Philippines overseas. Countries including Canada, France, and New Zealand have expressed a desire to negotiate visiting forces agreements similar to existing arrangements between the Philippines and Australia, Japan, and the United States. On the multilateral front, two formations have emerged: a high-level trilateral cooperation among Japan, the Philippines, and the United States focused on military and economic cooperation, and a quadrilateral forum of defense ministers, including Australia’s, aimed at deepening security cooperation through joint military exercises. India and South Korea belatedly threw their support behind the Philippines’ 2016 legal victory against China, in which an arbitral tribunal in The Hague ruled that Beijing’s legal claim to areas within the “nine-dash line” in the South China Sea were invalid. Witnessing this tide of support for Manila’s pushback against Beijing, however, has not changed China’s behavior. Perhaps recognizing this, foreign ministers from about 20 countries will meet on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September to seek ways to persuade China to de-escalate tension in the South China Sea. One bloc of countries that has yet to add its voice is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Should ASEAN join the meeting and take a position, it could sway China’s decision-making as the country’s largest trading partner.

A FRIENDLIER NEIGHBORHOOD

In Southeast Asia, support for Marcos’s efforts to counter Chinese aggression has been lukewarm, tempered in part by competing incentives regarding Beijing, the region’s hegemon. ASEAN, the region’s most important economic and security organization, was quiet after China’s June attack on Philippine soldiers near Second Thomas Shoal. The group is fundamentally divided: some member countries, such as Cambodia and Laos, are dependent on China for investments and aid and are therefore uninterested in speaking out against Beijing. Indonesia, the largest ASEAN country, is not a claimant country and has borrowed heavily from China for major infrastructure projects. Some in ASEAN see the Philippines as an outlier because it is the only country in the region that has a bilateral defense treaty with the United States. Overall, ASEAN has pinned its hopes on negotiations with China regarding a code of conduct to mitigate the risk of conflict in the South China Sea, even though these talks have dragged on for years. Manila’s transparency policy is also at odds with the approaches of other South China Sea claimant countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia, which do not publicize their maritime disputes with China and rarely criticize Beijing publicly.

Although it may be wishful thinking to expect ASEAN to demonstrate effusive support for the Philippines’ pushback against China, the Marcos government can and should work with the three other claimant countries in the region—Brunei, Malaysia, and Vietnam—to resolve maritime boundaries. In the 1970s, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia began to claim islands in the South China Sea, followed by Brunei in the 1980s. Despite some overlapping claims, these countries have not encroached into each other’s waters the way China has, and they generally use diplomatic channels to air protests. China prefers to deal with claimant countries bilaterally rather than as a group, making it easier for Beijing to violate each country’s sovereign rights. Presenting a united front between the Philippines and its neighbors against China will be essential to deterring Beijing from further provocations.

Vietnam seems to recognize the urgency of solidarity. Over the past year, it has quietly shored up its cooperation with the Philippines. In January, Hanoi and Manila sealed two agreements: one to prevent and manage incidents in the South China Sea, and another for the two countries’ coast guards to set up a joint committee to address common maritime issues. (Copies of these agreements have not been made public because Vietnam does not want to rile up China.) Recently, the Philippine and Vietnamese navies gathered on Southwest Cay in the Spratly Islands, the seventh time this exercise has taken place. Officials from both forces discussed regional maritime security and cooperation—and, during their downtime, sang, played football and tug-of-war, and held sack races. The location was highly symbolic; Southwest Cay used to be occupied by the Philippines but was seized by Vietnam in 1975. Decades later, in 2015, Vietnam became a strategic partner of the Philippines, the only one in Southeast Asia. It was a move that the two countries took to be on the same side against China.

The Philippines and Brunei took the first step toward similar cooperation when Marcos and Brunei Prime Minister Hassanal Bolkiah signed a maritime cooperation agreement in May. Although the details have not been made public, it is said to be similar to the Hanoi-Manila agreement in that it addresses preventing and managing incidents in the South China Sea. This kind of agreement can be a template for fortifying cooperation with Malaysia. Manila and Kuala Lumpur, however, have been locked in a territorial dispute for over six decades; Manila has a pending claim to Sabah, Malaysia’s second-largest state, filed with the United Nations, which no Philippine president has attempted to drop. Nonetheless, the Philippines should work to engage Malaysia, with the support of the United States. In April, for instance, a Department of Defense institute organized a bilateral workshop in Japan between academics and other civilians from the Philippines and Vietnam, where participants exchanged views and policy recommendations to deal with maritime coercion from China. Washington and Manila should work to facilitate these kinds of open discussions in order to deepen collaboration among the Philippines and a growing circle of its neighbors.

SPEAKING WITH ONE VOICE

Marcos needs to build a united front against China in his own government, too. In particular, he must muster more decisive leadership and run a tight security team in his cabinet, where there is an alphabet soup of interagency bodies that deal with the West Philippine Sea. In March, as China was stepping up its harassment of Philippine ships and fishermen, Marcos decided that the country needed a more centralized government response. He created a high-level interagency body, the National Maritime Council (NMC), to unify policy and strategy on the country’s maritime security.

But this new setup is riven by bureaucratic fragmentation, as demonstrated by the country’s failed Sierra Madre resupply mission in June. The defense department, along with the military, deployed the mission and eschewed the usual civilian coast guard escorts. China, as a result, regarded the mission as a military rather than a civilian operation and responded with a correspondingly ferocious attack. In the aftermath, members of the NMC gave conflicting remarks. The council’s chief downplayed China’s brazen assault as a “misunderstanding or accident,” only to have the defense secretary later correct this statement, arguing that the attack was a “deliberate act” and an “aggressive and illegal use of force.” At a critical moment, the government did not speak with one voice.

Clearly, rejiggering the organizational response to Chinese attacks alone is not sufficient; ultimately, Marcos himself has to be clear and decisive about policy directives. But all members of the NMC have to be on the same page to make this amalgam of agencies work seamlessly. The last thing the Philippines needs is division among its top officials.

WHERE SHOULD WASHINGTON STAND?

Looming over the question of how the Philippines should respond to Chinese aggression is the ambiguity of the United States’ role. In 1951, in the early years of the Cold War, the Philippines and the United States signed the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT), which can be invoked in case of an external armed attack on either party. For the Philippines, this covers the armed forces, public vessels, and aircraft in the “metropolitan territory” and in the “island territories in its jurisdiction in the Pacific.” When China ramped up its incursions in the West Philippine Sea after Xi took office, Philippine officials publicly raised questions about this provision, specifically whether the West Philippine Sea was included as a protected area. As tensions mounted, the defense secretary repeatedly called for a review of the treaty to update it to present-day circumstances. Although the review did not take place, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo assured Manila in 2019 that “as the South China Sea is part of the Pacific, any armed attack on any Philippine forces, aircraft, or public vessels in the South China Sea will trigger mutual defense obligations under Article 4 of our Mutual Defense Treaty.”

Building on this dialogue, in 2023 the Marcos and Biden administrations agreed on bilateral defense guidelines, the first in the decades since the MDT was forged. The official document included an assurance that attacks on either nation’s armed forces would invoke mutual defense commitments; it also included a commitment to the modernization of the Philippine military and greater interoperability with U.S. forces. The two countries agreed to share real-time information about security threats and build cooperation in countering “asymmetric, hybrid, and irregular warfare and gray-zone tactics.” U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made Marcos a promise during their meeting at the Pentagon in 2023: “We will always have your back in the South China Sea or elsewhere in the region.”

Fearing that U.S. participation in Philippine activities in the South China Sea could escalate things further with China, in practice Marcos has preferred to conduct missions without Washington’s aid. He has said that the MDT will be invoked only if a Filipino service member is killed in the West Philippine Sea. The summer’s skirmishes have not changed Marcos’s calculus. But the Philippine military and coast guard should engage Washington in intensive planning that mirrors actual operations in the West Philippine Sea—for instance, in resupplying or keeping watch over flash points including Second Thomas Shoal and Sabina Shoal.

The Marcos government has thus far succeeded in mitigating the risks in the South China Sea by reaching short-term deals with China. But the August clash with Beijing near Sabina Shoal has made it clear that China is not backing down. Manila must start working now to build a longer-term South China Sea strategy that can guide it through troubled waters. It must adjust its transparency policy, work with other claimant countries in Southeast Asia to resolve maritime boundaries, and make clear what it expects from the United States. These measures alone may not prove enough to deter China—but if Manila does not take these steps, tensions with Beijing will surely boil over.