By: Phillip Orchard
There’s an old joke in the Philippines – “Yankee go home … and take me with you” – that’s embodied the ambivalence inherent to the U.S.-Philippine alliance since the colonial era. With the election of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, a general unease swung turned into open antipathy.
He has nursed a personal disdain for the meddlesome and moralizing Americans but hasn’t had the institutional support to make good on his pledge to break off the relationship – until now. In late January, Duterte gave Washington a month to make amends for some seemingly minor political slights or else he’d terminate the Visiting Forces Agreement, an important bilateral military deal.
Two weeks later, he pulled the plug, giving the Americans six months to pack their things and go. President Donald Trump responded with a shrug, claiming that the withdrawal would save the U.S. some cash.
This may just be yet another case of a weaker state seeking to play the competition between its more powerful rivals to its benefit. But if the unhappy couple can’t patch things up before Aug. 9, the alliance – the United States’ oldest in Asia – would effectively be neutered.
Without the VFA, most of the more than 300 annual bilateral exercises would be scrapped, to say nothing of a landmark 2014 basing agreement that would have had the potential to become Washington’s biggest check on China’s expansion into the South China Sea. A divorce makes little strategic sense for either side. So could this really be the end?
Sovereignty and Strategy
Tension between sovereignty and strategic necessity is inevitable when any country hosts another’s military. But in the Philippines, a former U.S. colony where U.S. troops once waged a ruthless campaign against pro-independence guerrillas, tensions have ebbed and flowed since the country became nominally independent in 1946. (It had little choice but to sign the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty and let U.S. troops stick around.) Various Philippine governments have stoked anti-imperialist sentiment in search of leverage with the U.S., leading to periodic ruptures in the alliance.
The most prominent example of which came in 1991, when the Philippine Senate narrowly rejected an extension of a 1947 agreement allowing the U.S. military to lease its two largest overseas facilities, Subic Bay Naval Base and Clark Air Base. Awash in post-Cold War optimism and anticipating cuts to the Pentagon’s budget, the George H.W. Bush administration put up only a half-hearted fight to stay. (Clark Air Base had also just been buried by a volcanic eruption, which was seen by some as a celestial nudge to the U.S. Air Force to move on.) U.S. troops were gone by the end of 1992, and shortly thereafter, so too was some $200 million in annual U.S. military aid, enough to cover about two-thirds of the Philippine military’s acquisition and maintenance outlays.
The power vacuum didn’t last long. China quickly began asserting its claims to South China Sea atolls like Scarborough Shoal, less than 200 kilometers (125 miles) from Subic Bay, and Mischief Reef, which the People’s Liberation Army seized in 1995 and promptly turned into a military outpost.
The Philippines also quickly proved ill-equipped to manage the growth of al-Qaida-linked groups in the restive southern island of Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago. So, under West Point-educated President Fidel Ramos, Manila cozied back up to its old frenemy, who had become aware of its own interest in curbing jihadism and Chinese expansion. The new VFA was ratified in 1999 and U.S. military aid surged after 9/11. And in 2014, two years after China seized Scarborough Shoal following a brief standoff with overmatched Philippine maritime forces, Manila and Washington inked the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, a landmark deal giving the U.S. rotational access to at least five Philippine bases.
What’s strange about this latest rupture is that, on the surface at least, the alliance has remained on solid political and strategic footing. There’s still a robust strain of anti-Americanism in the Philippines embodied by Duterte, and there’s still plenty of disenchantment among the president’s vast support base about Washington’s condemnation of his drug war.
And Chinese money has coopted enough Philippine elites to give Duterte some room to maneuver.
But the U.S. is still broadly popular among both the politically influential military and, particularly following the U.S.’ response to a catastrophic typhoon in 2013, the public. (Polls consistently show the population’s trust in the U.S. alliance exceeding 75 percent – generally the highest in the world.)
The jihadist uprising in Mindanao in 2017 heightened the sense in Philippine defense circles that only the U.S. and its allies – not China – are prepared to provide critical security assistance in a crisis. And China has become only more aggressive in the South China Sea such that Philippine fishermen and energy firms are effectively blocked from extracting resources within the country’s exclusive economic zone without Beijing’s permission.
As a result, while Duterte’s opposition to the U.S. initially had some tangible effects, the alliance appeared to be back on track. For example, the annual Balikatan exercises, the allies’ largest, were scaled down and reoriented away from maritime defense to appease China in 2017-18, but they returned to form last year.
And while Duterte delayed implementation of the EDCA for several years and narrowed it somewhat in scope, the first EDCA project was finally completed last year, and another dozen projects were subsequently approved. There are now around 500-600 U.S. troops in the country at any given time.
Yet, here we are. The grievances cited by Duterte as rationale for his move – the U.S.’ cancellation of the visa of a former police chief who led Duterte’s violent drug war, and the U.S. Senate resolution condemning Duterte’s drug war – are the sort you’d expect to be easily managed, given the stakes.
And Duterte's pitch to the AFP – that this will force the country to get serious about modernizing the military to allow it to stand on its own – isn’t being taken seriously, given Manila’s lack of resources and the yawning balance of power with China.
But the apparent nonchalance from both sides to save the VFA suggests the Philippines’ frustration with the U.S. had become more severe than realized – weakening the alliance to the point where the personal and political motives of the two countries’ leaders could truly threaten to bring about its undoing.
Sources of Discontent
While the U.S. and the Philippines are united on the common threat posed by China, they have starkly divergent views on how to manage it. The U.S. is basically content with the status quo in the South China Sea. To contain China on other fronts, it doesn’t really need to escalate matters there – by, say, attempting to forcefully evict Chinese forces from Philippine-claimed reefs in the Spratlys.
So long as the Chinese navy can’t challenge the U.S. Navy directly, the U.S. is content to be able to cripple China by choking its maritime traffic along the first island chain and around the Strait of Malacca. Keeping the Philippines on its side is critical to this effort. Ultimately, to blow a hole in the U.S. containment line, China needs one of the countries along the first island chain to flip fully into its camp – and given the Philippines’ weakness, it may be China’s best bet.
But the U.S. also doesn’t want to get dragged into a war with China, at least not one that wasn’t started on its terms, and so it doesn’t want to give the Philippines reason to think the U.S. will automatically have its back if it picks a fight it can’t win on its own. It has therefore kept the commitments outlined in the Mutual Defense Treaty vague. And it’s done very little to ensure the Philippines’ material interests by, say, intervening in spats among fishermen (even if Chinese fishing fleets are working hand in glove with the Chinese navy).
One problem for the U.S. is that this strategy gives the Philippines little choice but to do whatever it deems necessary to remain friendly with China. It’s a core reason that Duterte imposed limits on cooperation with the U.S. while allowing China to gradually expand its commercial and political influence in the country in ways that could come back to haunt the U.S. Another problem is that perceptions of U.S. indifference allow Duterte’s arguments to gain traction with the public. In other words, it limits the potential for resistance when the president can credibly argue this: If the U.S. is unwilling to protect Philippine resources and territory, what good is the alliance?
It evidently has also made some factions more wary that had long buffeted the alliance from political currents. Among Philippine military leaders, for example, the U.S. interest in avoiding moves that may trigger a conflict with China is reasonable. But less so is U.S. reluctance to do more to help the AFP look out for itself. Manila has received around $1.3 billion in military aid since 1998 – or 52 percent of U.S. aid to the Asia-Pacific region. This year’s Pentagon budget earmarks around $250 million for the Philippines.
This isn’t nothing, especially when combined with myriad benefits – mainly, ISR and the fact that China can’t really be sure that the U.S. will always remain on the sideline if it pushes too far – provided cost-free by the U.S. military's regional presence. But it betrays a level of U.S. aloofness that’s at odds with the Philippines’ strategic importance.
For example, in the State Department’s newly released fiscal year 2021 request for foreign military financing funds (which are invaluable given the relatively high cost of U.S. arms), the entire Asia-Pacific region would get just 1.5 percent, compared to 93 percent for the Middle East. Ukraine alone would get 2 percent; Jordan would get 9 percent.
This undermines U.S. claims that it’s serious about finally, for real this time, “pivoting” from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific. It also fosters doubt about the U.S.’ long-term commitments to regional partners. And given China's growth in anti-access/area-denial capabilities, which substantially raise the potential costs of coming to the Philippines’ defense, such doubts are set to grow.
Most problematic, it’s forcing Manila to look elsewhere for arms help – including suppliers (like China and Russia, both of which began selling arms to Manila under Duterte) that would pose interoperability problems for U.S.-Philippine cooperation and that the U.S. would rather not see gain sway with the AFP. (Washington's response to Manila’s dissatisfaction with U.S. aid is basically: Then help us help you with things like EDCA.)
Ceding the South China Sea
Both sides have valid points. Yet those points hardly seem to justify the strategic costs of hollowing out the alliance. The U.S. may be an imperfect ally, but it is Manila’s most powerful and least coercive option. This suggests the latest feud is merely another iteration of the historical push and pull over the terms of the relationship that both sides are working furiously behind the scenes to resolve.
And there’s reason to believe that that is the case. The day before Duterte ordered the termination, a State Department official said Washington plans to discuss the VFA and discounts on U.S. arms at a previously scheduled meeting with Philippine officials in March. And Washington has been hinting that the U.S. Coast Guard will begin playing a bigger role in the region – something that would position the U.S. to do more than occasionally sailing warships by Chinese bases off Philippine shores.
If not, and if the VFA gets scrapped, the potential consequences aren’t trivial. Sure, if the historical pattern holds, Duterte’s successor may soon be cozying back up to the U.S. (Duterte is scheduled to leave office in 2022.) But this shouldn't be assumed. The politics of matters of national sovereignty can be fickle and fierce, and a new VFA would once again require ratification by the Philippine Senate.
It took the shock of China's Mischief Reef seizure to get a sufficient number of stakeholders in Manila on board with welcoming back U.S. troops last time. Despite everything that China has done since, the U.S. has given Manila reason to wonder if it’s really worth the trouble. It’s not clear what more China could realistically do that would shake Manila out of its ambivalence once again, except perhaps building on Scarborough Shoal, reportedly a red line set by the Obama administration.
Even if a new VFA were eventually inked, it would be tough to overcome the momentum lost on things such as the implementation of the EDCA. Indeed, the loss of Subic Bay in 1992 is still hurting the U.S. position in the region. The closest U.S. Navy “base" is in Singapore, and U.S. deployments there are limited to a single littoral combat ship at a time. The closest air base is in Okinawa.
The closest U.S. ground-based missile deployments are more than a thousand nautical miles away in Guam. The U.S. just scrapped the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, in part to be able to hold China at bay with ground-launched anti-ship missiles. As it stands, it has nowhere to put them. Without them, in a conflict scenario with China, the overstretched U.S. Navy would likely need to preserve its ammo for bigger priorities farther to the north, effectively ceding the South China Sea to Beijing.
Just how much the U.S. would benefit from a greater ability to project power inside the first island chain, particularly around the Spratlys, is a hot topic of debate. So long as Manila doesn’t allow the PLA to establish its own bases in the Philippines (which it insists it won’t), the U.S. threat of a blockade will remain credible enough to discourage China from attempting to expel the U.S. Navy.
Australia and Japan (which has held talks with Manila on its own VFA) would also do more to keep the Philippines from getting pulled firmly into the Chinese orbit. But the more China can dictate terms to regional states like the Philippines on what they can and cannot do in their littoral waters, the more likely they are to conclude that their best bet over the long term is to throw in with Beijing.
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