Asia's Cauldron (21 page)

In fact, the Philippines' prickly nationalism in response to China's military rise is in other ways, too, an expression of its geographic vulnerability. The sea is the country's economic lifeline for everything from fishing to energy exploration. The Philippines imports all of its oil by sea, even as all of its natural gas supplies come from an offshore field near Manila Bay. Therefore, the potential loss of access to new hydrocarbon reserves in areas of the South China Sea like the Spratlys and Scarborough Shoal, as well as the loss of access to existing fisheries, due to a shift in the maritime balance of power, constitutes a national security nightmare for Manila.
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The vulnerability of a near-failed state under China's lowering gaze was at the time of my visit being exploited by Washington in order to resurrect in different form the strategic platform the Americans had here on the eastern edge of the South China Sea for almost a century from 1899 through the end of the Cold War.

My most recent visit to the Philippines in the summer of 2012 came during a period of naval tension in the South China Sea that in the world news was overshadowed only by the civil war in Syria and the European debt crisis. Indeed, the impasse between Philippine and Chinese ships beginning in the spring of 2012 at Scarborough Shoal, 120 miles west of Luzon, demonstrated the “small-stick” self-confidence of China in dealing with a weak and pathetic adversary in the Philippines.
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Rather than send actual warships, Beijing dispatched over several weeks more than twenty lightly and unarmed maritime enforcement vessels, equivalent to coast guard ships, to the scene. China had thus signaled that it viewed sea power as a “continuum” constituting a range of options, for even merchantmen and fishing boats can lay mines and monitor foreign warships. (In fact, China, as Naval War College professors James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara maintain, is turning out state-of-the-art coast guard cutters “like sausages,” and its nonmilitary maritime enforcement services are taking delivery of decommissioned naval vessels.) Using vessels at the soft end of the continuum reinforced Beijing's message that it was merely policing waters it already
owned, rather than claiming new ones in competition with other navies. And no one should be in any doubt that Beijing had the ability to quickly ramp up its sea power in the vicinity. Facing off against China's nonmilitary ships was the pride of the Philippine navy, a 1960s hand-me-down from the U.S. Coast Guard, renamed the
Gregorio del Pilar
.
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The very mismatch was poignant, the signature of China's growing might and the abject failure that was the modern Philippine state, whose lack of naval capacity was an outcome of its own social and economic failure. Certainly, what sparked the intense, emotional reaction among Filipinos against China was the knowledge that written into Chinese naval behavior at Scarborough Shoal was a large dose of condescension, something that was deeply humiliating.

The Scarborough Shoal affair made it obvious to the Filipinos—if it wasn't obvious by then—that they needed a substantial military alliance with the United States. This would be in keeping with over a century of recent history, but was new considering the estrangement of the two countries during the post-Cold War. Just as the U.S. Navy had left Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam under humiliating circumstances in the 1970s and was now being invited back, the U.S. Navy had left Subic Bay in Luzon in the early 1990s and was now being invited back. “The only leverage we have is the alliance with the United States, and that alliance itself is asymmetrical to the Americans' advantage,” remarked Professor Aileen Baviera of the University of the Philippines. Other countries in the region were coming to a similar conclusion.

From the Americans' point of view, the current Philippine president, Benigno Simeon Aquino III, constituted a window of opportunity. He was the son of Benigno Simeon Aquino Jr., the popular politician whose assassination in 1983 had sparked the revolt against Marcos. Unlike the other Filipino presidents since Marcos's ouster, the younger Aquino was seen as neither corrupt nor ineffectual. Aquino was a nationalist who wanted to root out corruption and alleviate
poverty through oil and gas revenues in the South China Sea.
Good luck with that
, you might say. Nevertheless, U.S. officials felt they had to exploit his tenure, for
who knew what kind of crook might replace him
. “Let's institutionalize a new relationship while he's still in power,” one American official told me.

The American military, despite the closings of the Cold War legacy bases at Clark and Subic, had in fact already intensified its relationship with the armed forces of the Philippines following 9/11. Because the Sulu archipelago in the southern Philippines was a lair of Islamic terror networks loosely affiliated with al Qaeda, several hundred American Special Operations Forces deployed there and in southern Mindanao in 2002, executing a counterinsurgency strategy that over a few years reduced Jemaah Islamiyah and Abu Sayyaf to low-end criminal irritants. The challenge then became getting a weak and corrupt Roman Catholic government to the north in Manila (that is, in Luzon) to channel development assistance to its often forgotten Muslim extremities close to Borneo. This lack of Philippine government will and capacity was also behind the longtime, chronic insurgencies of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in southern Mindanao and the Communist New People's Army in other parts of the mountainous archipelago. But with the Sulu island chain still politically and militarily fragile, even as the number of American special operators was being reduced from six hundred to 350 and the number of transnational terrorists classified as high-value targets diminished to a handful, Washington now had to convince the Philippine government to reposition its military from being an inward-looking land force to one focusing on external “maritime domain awareness,” in order to counter China. “The insurgencies took up 90 percent of our defense efforts for many years, and they are still not over,” said Raymund Jose Quilop, the assistant secretary for strategic assessment in Manila.

With so much focus on land forces, in terms of air and sea forces there was now very little to work with. For example, again, given that air power cannot be disaggregated from sea power, the Philippines had one or two C-130 transport planes that could actually fly, and
maybe seven OV-10s, a close air support platform that was truly ancient. Maybe the Filipinos had four fighter jets that were operational. The Philippines was at a “starter-kit” level in American military eyes. Moreover, the Americans could not transfer reasonably up-to-date defense technology to Manila because there was no cyber or operational security to speak of here. Thus, the buzzword among American military experts for the Philippines had become “minimum-credible-defense.” As one American officer put it to me: “They don't need to go toe-to-toe with China. The Filipinos merely need a dog and a fence in their front yard so the Chinese will hesitate before trespassing on them.” When the Americans rushed the decommissioned 1960s U.S. Coast Guard cutter to be converted to the pride of the Philippine navy, much of the world laughed. But the Americans were dead serious. As one told me: “We just raised the Filipinos from a World War II navy to a 1960s one. That's progress.” The Americans had thought of selling the Filipinos a late-1980s frigate, but with a turbine engine it was judged to be too complex for them to maintain. Thus, Washington was encouraging Manila to invest in less sophisticated frigates from Italy, and in small patrol boats from Japan (which the Filipinos have received). Modern navies and air forces, because of the technological mastery, security precautions, and sheer expense required, are litmus tests for the level of development of national cultures, and the level reached by the Philippines was low. And yet the government in Manila was serious about changing that record, as witnessed by an additional $1.8 billion it recently targeted for defense: a significant amount in a country that size.

And so the Americans were augmenting the modest improvements in Philippine naval capacity with the visit to Subic and other Filipino ports of one hundred U.S. warships and naval supply ships per year, including submarines. The Philippines, for its part, was upgrading harbor repair facilities so as to encourage even more American naval visits. Moreover, the chairman of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, the American Pacific Fleet commander, the commander of Pacific Command, and of the Marine Forces/Pacific were all traveling out from Washington and Honolulu to Manila on official visits. On the
civilian side, a slew of deputy cabinet secretaries were also passing through Manila from Washington. The idea was to give the Philippines enough political and military cover so as, in the words of one American official, to prevent the Philippines from becoming to China what Ethiopia was to Italy in 1936: ripe for violation. Subic Bay, like Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam, was not about to become a full-fledged American base again; rather, the Americans envisioned a regular “rotational” presence of their naval forces through Philippine (and Vietnamese) ports. Meanwhile, there was talk of dredging Ulugan Bay on the western Philippine island of Palawan—fronting the South China Sea and close to the Spratlys—as a future naval base.

Nevertheless, China showed few signs of backing down. During one of my visits the Chinese actually announced plans to build a one-mile runway on Subi Reef, only a few miles from Philippine-controlled features in the vicinity of the Spratlys, even though Subi was underwater during high tide. The truth was, that pushing the Philippines around served a purpose in nationalistic circles in Beijing that pushing Vietnam around just didn't. Hating Vietnam was a default emotion inside China and therefore did not advance any Chinese official's or military officer's nationalistic bona fides; whereas, because the Philippines was a formal treaty ally of the United States, bullying the Philippines telegraphed that China was pushing back at the United States. And this was easy to do because of the Philippine military's own lack of capacity. By fortifying the bilateral military relationship with Manila, Washington was upping the ante—that is, intensifying the struggle with China.

All of these hard, difficult-to-admit truths constituted the background to my conversations at the Foreign Ministry in Manila, where, amid loud and uncertain air-conditioning, grim fluorescent lighting, and mellow accents of Filipino officials wearing pressed white barongs, I heard arguments that were realistic and defiant, even as they demonstrated weakness. The law protects the weak by being impartial, but the international system was Hobbesian in the sense that there was
no Leviathan to punish the Unjust; and thus international law was at the moment secondary to geopolitical realities. The Filipino officials I interviewed understood all this.

“The real issue here is the creeping expansion of Chinese naval power,” began Henry P. Bensurto Jr., secretary-general of the commission on maritime affairs, as he outlined for me all the activities of the Chinese on the various reefs and atolls in the greater Spratlys close to the Philippine mainland. The Chinese, he said, were probing, placing buoys, and planning to garrison any speck of dry land they could find in what he called the “West Philippine Sea.” Names such as Woody Island, Reed Bank, Douglas Bank, Sabina Shoal, and Bajo de Masinloc (Scarborough Shoal) peppered his speech. “China,” he went on, “will continue to raise tension, then reduce it through diplomacy, then raise it again, so that at the end of the day they will have eaten all of your arm: they want joint development in places where their claims are absolutely baseless.” Near the end of his PowerPoint presentation, he said, “The more militarily capable China becomes, the less flexible it will be.” Whereas the Philippines was strategic in the eyes of both America and China, from the vantage point of his own country, geography was a nightmare. The Philippines had 7,100 islands to protect within its archipelago, where 70 percent of the towns were close to the coast. The sea was everything, and the South China Sea was coveted by China the way “the Black Sea is coveted by Russia.” Technology was not going to help: because of the cost of air transport, tens of thousands of ships were going to continue to pass into the “West Philippine Sea [South China Sea]” in decades to come, making this body of water nervous with warships and war gaming. He concluded with an appeal to international law—the ultimate demonstration of weakness.

Gilberto G. B. Asuque, assistant secretary for ocean concerns, was more blunt: “It's our continental shelf, and they want our oil and gas, it's that simple. We have to show the world that China cannot put everything in its pocket.” Behind this emotional talk, uncharacteristic for diplomats, lay a severe vulnerability. The Philippines had little oil and gas of its own. It had dug 263 wells over the past thirty years,
while Malaysia and Indonesia had dug four hundred wells each every year. Exxon had given up its rights in the Sulu Sea because there was insufficient hydrocarbons there. The gas field near Manila Bay was relatively small. In 2011 the Philippines launched fifteen energy exploration blocks forty miles west of Palawan—that is, 575 miles southeast of China and 450 miles east of Vietnam. Yet all these blocks fell within China's nine-dashed line, and China was claiming two of the fifteen blocks as its own already. “We're almost 100 million people and our energy reserves are under-explored and contested,” one official complained.

Undersecretary Edilberto P. Adan, the executive director of the presidential commission on visiting forces agreements, spoke softly and sadly about the deterioration of American-Philippine military relations during recent decades, and what it had cost the Philippines. In the days when Clark and Subic were permanent American bases, he said, the Philippines received $200 million annually in military assistance from Washington. After the bases were closed, the figure went down to “zero.” In the mid-1990s, when China began its “creeping incursions” into the South China Sea, the result by 1999 was a new status of forces agreement that awarded the Philippine military $35 million in annual aid from Washington. “We wish for a deeper defense relationship with the United States, and have put $1.5 billion towards our own military budget, though that is much less than the cost of just one of your submarines.” He mentioned that during my visit the Philippines approved a status of forces agreement with Australia: a major development, as it showed Manila was now willing to allow forces from another Pacific country to regularly rotate through its territory. Again, it was all about China. “Since 1995 when the Chinese occupied Mischief Reef, their intentions have not changed: only now they have the muscle to back it up.
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We need,” he went on, “U.S. naval assets here to replenish, refuel, and to loiter in our waters. The model is Singapore [and Vietnam]: if you build facilities for the Americans, they will come.” He noted that despite the country's dysfunction, nationalism ran deep here: the Filipinos had fought the United States in a bitter irregular war
at the turn of the twentieth century, and then fought equally as hard alongside the United States against Japanese occupiers in World War II.