The United States has taken yet another step toward shaping the Southeast Asian archipelago nation of the Philippines into an Ukraine-style proxy with which to encircle and contain China, this time in the form of a $500 million military assistance package for Manila.
By exploiting the more emotional themes of superficial nationalism, the US is successfully clouding the Philippine population’s ability to focus on the more practical necessities of trade and development, shaping a national policy prioritizing the former at the expense of the latter, leaving the nation mired in poverty as it continues to fall behind the rest of the region.
Predicated on the supposed “threat” China poses to “freedom of navigation” in the South China Sea, the US has encouraged Manila to reverse previously growing cooperation with China in the realm of infrastructure and development, and instead, invest in the nation’s militarization against China.
Amid the military build up, no alternatives to the economic prosperity and development China offers is even being discussed, let alone implemented.
Just as was the case for Ukraine from 2014 onward, the Philippines faces a future where, at best, it suffers irreversible economic decline, and at worst, finds itself at the center of a losing proxy war with China.
US Belligerence Over Chinese Building
According to a July 26, 2024 Defense One article titled, “Austin heads to Asia with $500M for the Philippines,” the US is providing hundreds of millions of dollars in “foreign military financing” to “help the island nation bolster its defenses.”
The article would elaborate further, stating:
The $500 million in assistance is part of what a second official described as the “first-ever security sector assistance roadmap, which provides a framework for efficiently investing this $500 million in foreign military financing as well as Philippine national funds investments. Initially, we’ll focus those shared investments on maritime self defense and cybersecurity capabilities.”
The same article cites tensions in the South China Sea between China and the Philippines stemming from a territorial dispute over the Second Thomas Shoal as an example of why the Philippines needs to “bolster its defenses,” which includes allowing the US military to expand its footprint across the nation.
Even a cursory examination of history proves, however, that China does not pose a threat to the Philippines, and that the nation’s biggest and most enduring threat is the United States itself.
A Sordid History of US Use and Abuse
The current US military presence in the Philippines is a legacy of America’s colonization of the archipelago nation from 1898-1945 during which the US brutally suppressed a war of independence, killing over 20,000 Filipino fighters and over 200,000 Filipino civilians. US abuses at the time included the use of concentration camps and torture, according to the US State Department’s own Office of the Historian.
Since the Philippines gained independence from the US, Washington has sought to reassert itself over the nation and use it as a means of advancing its much wider regional agenda of encircling and containing China.
In a 1965 memo from then US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to then US President Lyndon B. Johnson, it was admitted that
“there are three fronts to a long-run effort to contain China (realizing that the USSR “contains” China on the north and northwest): (a) the Japan-Korea front; (b) the India-Pakistan front; and (c) the Southeast Asia front.”
A continuous US military presence in the Philippines clearly falls under “(c) the Southeast Asia front.” Today, it is not even a secret that US forces continue expanding their presence in the Philippines as a means of containing China.
Manila Regime Change Brings Growing Chinese-Philippine Tensions
Omitted from reports of growing Chinese-Philippine tensions is the relative calm regarding such disputes under the previous administration of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte (from 2016 to 2022), who not only worked with China bilaterally to resolve such disputes, but also moved forward Chinese-backed development projects while pressing to reduce the presence of US military forces in and around the Philippines.
The transition from growing ties between China and the Philippines and the pushing out of the Philippines’ former American colonial rulers to the now increasingly belligerent stance Manila is taking toward Beijing, coinciding with regime change in Manila, was noted in a recent US Department of Defense press conference preceding US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s trip to the Philippines.
He would boast:
When I started as secretary, our ties with the Philippines were at a low point. We were even on the brink of losing our decades-old Visiting Forces Agreement. But after three years of intensive engagement and partnership, we are in an entirely new chapter of our alliance. Last year, President Marcos agreed to include four new locations under our Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. We’ve expanded our rotational access thanks to the leadership of President Marcos and Secretary Teodoro, and we’re taking unprecedented steps to help modernize the Philippine military.
During the same press conference, Secretary Austin would allude to such policies as “positioning America to compete with China and win.”
While the US is “positioning” itself “to compete with China and win,” no mention is made of where this process will leave the Philippines.
Fabricated Threats, Real Consequences
US claims of Chinese aggression against the Philippines is a local variation of a larger fabricated threat the US claims China poses to the South China Sea regarding “freedom of navigation” and thus the flow of international commerce.
In reality, the vast majority of commerce “navigating” through the South China Sea is coming from and going to China, with other South China Sea claimants counting China as their largest trade partner.
The US government and corporate-financier funded think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) as part of its “China Power” project, published a report titled, “How Much Trade Transits the South China Sea?” In it, CSIS describes the vast amount of Chinese commerce traveling through the South China Sea – more than the other top five exporters combined.
While territorial disputes exist, it was certainly not at the expense of good relations among the claimants (including with China) who not only have disputes with China, but also with one another. It was only when the US inserted itself into these disputes, did they transform into a much more serious confrontation, threatening to escalate toward conflict.
Does US involvement, then, actually protect the free flow of trade through the South China Sea from China if that trade is mostly Chinese? Or does a growing US presence in and around the South China Sea itself present a threat to freedom of navigation and the flow of commerce, all components of a long-standing policy of containing China? Additionally, do US efforts to interfere politically in nations like the Philippines, installing into power client regimes hostile toward China, present another means of disrupting trade and stable relations in the region?
While the US will almost certainly benefit from dividing nations against each other in the Asia-Pacific, those nations themselves will not benefit.
China is the Philippines’ largest trade partner. In 2021, China accounted for over 32% of all Philippine exports, more than twice the amount of exports to the US. The Philippines imported more goods from China alone than from North America and Europe combined.
Until the administration of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., China was also an important source of development across the Philippines, financing and building badly needed modern infrastructure to help the relatively impoverished nation catch up with the rest of the region.
The Philippines not only finds itself far behind the rest of the region in terms of development, but by prioritizing US-directed militarization against the Philippines’ largest trade partner, China, it is ensuring that it will remain so well into the future.
The South China Morning Post in a June 2024 article titled, “China-Philippines ties on ‘brink of total breakdown’: unpacking the collapse,” discusses the dismantling of a Chinese-backed rail project in exchange for expanding military bases for hosting US troops and for facilities hosting long-range cruise missiles meant to target Chinese naval forces.
It is no surprise then that of the 10 nations constituting the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Philippines’ GDP is ranked at number 6 despite having the second-largest population.
A more specific example of the harm the US has done to the Philippines was revealed by Reuters in its June 2024 investigation, “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic.” It exposes how Washington put its own geopolitical objectives over the safety, health, and well-being of the Philippine population, knowingly endangering the public so as to “drag China through the mud.”
A more recent July 26, 2024 Reuters article titled, “U.S. told Philippines it made ‘missteps’ in secret anti-vax propaganda effort,” confirms the Pentagon’s role in deliberately lying to the Philippine people to advance US foreign policy objectives against China. While the US Department of Defense admits what it did, it failed to formulate an apology and only promised to improve “oversight and accountability of information operations,” from 2022 onward.
It is only the latest example across a long history spanning over a century of Washington’s use and abuse of the Philippines to advance its own interests, always at the cost of the Philippines as a nation itself. It is a microcosm of the larger form US exploitation of the Philippines currently holds and a warning of the potential harm the US is causing and can still cause to the Filipino people.
Inevitable Self-Destruction
Ukraine provides an example of what awaits nations like the Philippines, eagerly providing themselves to Washington as proxies against US adversaries. The US knowingly imperiled Ukraine as a nation and its people to “extend” Russia in the hopes of precipitating a socio-political or economic collapse, with the full understanding Ukraine itself would lose any such conflict.
In the 2019 RAND Corporation paper titled, “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground,” the policy of militarizing Ukraine to provoke a Russian intervention was anticipated to “produce disproportionately large Ukrainian casualties, territorial losses, and refugee flows” as well as lead to “a disadvantageous peace,” all outcomes undeniably materializing amid the ongoing conflict in Ukraine today.
A similar proxy war wargamed by US policymakers, this time from CSIS, anticipated as a US-backed war against the rest of China over the island province of Taiwan unfolded, much of the island’s infrastructure and industry would be destroyed.
Does the Philippines imagine it will escape a similar fate, especially considering the demonstrated harm the US has already caused the Philippines, both past and present?
For the administration in Manila, such concerns are irrelevant. If and when the Philippines suffers such consequences, those responsible for conspiring with Washington will have the means to leave the mess they’ve created and enjoy retirement in the US or in Europe. It will be up to the people of the Philippines and their true allies to prevent such a catastrophe because it will be the Philippine people and their neighbors who will face the full brunt of the consequences if they fail to do so.
Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
