How Philippines president ‘Bongbong’ Marcos is taking on China, and why India is an important part of that strategy

A little-noticed diplomatic endeavour took place last week when Enrique A Manalo, the secretary of foreign affairs of the Philippines, who was on a three-day visit to India from 27-30 June, met external affairs minister S Jaishankar to co-chair the 5th Joint Commission on Bilateral Cooperation (JCBC) in New Delhi on Thursday. Quite often, significant policy shifts are hidden behind little nudges, boring diplomatese and quiet asides. What emerged from the joint statement issued by India and the Philippines, and other engagements by the Filipino foreign secretary during his stay, was a series of important signals that underline the challenge posed by China as an expansionist military power, and how the countries around it are grappling with and countering Beijing’s malevolent attempts to carve out a unipolar Asia. Hidden in the joint statement that focused on drawing India and the Philippines closer over a range of domains including maritime, defence and development cooperation, tourism, civil aviation, agriculture, financial technology, cooperation in the areas of space, science, technology and other sectors, was an innocuous paragraph under ‘regional and multilateral issues’ that stated: “EAM (Jaishankar) and SFA (Manalo)… underlined that both countries have a shared interest in a free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific region. They underlined the need for peaceful settlement of disputes and for adherence to international law, especially the UNCLOS and the 2016 Arbitral Award on the South China Sea in this regard.” This is the first time India has explicitly called for China’s adherence to the 2016 Arbitral Award by an international court under UNCLOS that had dismissed China’s so-called ‘nine-dash line’ — a figment of CCP’s imagination through which Beijing claims the resource-rich South China Sea almost in entirety — and supported the Philippines’s position on the territorial dispute. Beijing had refused to accept the ruling and termed it “null and void”. The ruling has had no effect as China continues to badger smaller neighbours into acquiescing to its revanchist demands. In 2016, India had merely ‘ noted’ the arbitration ruling in a cautious statement. In subsequent years, through several statements, India has remained committed to a free, open and rules-based order, and promoted the inviolability of UNCLOS. This time, however, India has deviated from generic statements to take a principled position on the 2016 Arbitral Award that had found China’s acts and claims on South China Sea “unlawful”. This is India directly telling China to ‘back off’. For a country that religiously adheres to strategic ambiguity, this perceptible reversal of position and unequivocal statement in favour of the Philippines is worth noting. More interestingly, as reported by some media outlets, this “ evolution” of India’s stance came at the Philippines’s insistence. Therein hangs a tale. India’s shift in position is linked to the Sino-Indian border dispute and its incremental hardening of stance against China, whom New Delhi accuses of trying to unilaterally change the status quo at the LAC. India is sending a signal to China that unless it honours the agreements signed between both sides and status quo is restored, bilateral relationship will get increasingly jeopardised. The evolution of the Philippines’ stance against China, however, is sharper, starker, and demands greater attention. To begin, we must note the steady strengthening of security ties between India and the Philippines that found expression in the joint statement on maritime and defence cooperation. It talks about “expansion of training and joint exercises on maritime security”, “consideration of India’s offer for concessional Line of Credit to meet Philippines’ defense requirements,” “enhanced maritime cooperation” between the respective coast guards as well as “acquisition of naval assets”. If the hint is that the Philippines is tying its mast to China’s greatest rival in Asia, it was confirmed by foreign secretary Manalo during a lecture on ‘The Journey of Philippines-India Cooperation’ at the ICWA where he said that the Philippines wants “a very robust” defence partnership with India, and it is “one of the brighter aspects of our mutual relationship”. The South-East Asian nation, of course, has entered into a deal with India to purchase three batteries of BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles at a cost of $375 million in a government-to-government deal and Filipino personnel have completed ‘operator training’ for deploying the system. Yet, more than defence hardware acquisitions, it is the changed attitude of the Philippines — a country that once sought to woo China at the cost of its treaty alliance with the United States — that is worth noting. At the programme, Manalo called aggressive manoeuvring by China’s maritime militias and attempted ‘reclamation’ of territories within the Philippines’s exclusive economic zones (EEZs) on South China Sea as a “major challenge” and said his country has “repeatedly” challenged Chinese presence in Filipino EEZs and “will continue to do so.” Manalo did insist that differences are not the “sum total” of the bilateral relationship with China with whom the Philippines enjoys deep economic and cultural links, similar to any ASEAN nation that tries to thread this needle, but Philippines’s growing hardline approach towards China under president Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr and firm pivot towards the US, its allies and partners is evident. What caused the Philippines, that under former president Rodrigo Duterte had been embracing China, appeared ready to give up sovereign rights in territorial disputes and bandwagon with Beijing in lieu of investment, to suddenly turn a leaf, repair ties with Washington, give the US more access to Filipino military bases and play hardball with Beijing? To seek an answer to this question, we need to go back several years to 2016 when Duterte took office shortly after the Philippines won the landmark ruling in an international arbitration court in The Hague. Duterte’s foreign policy legacy rested on two pillars. One was distancing itself from Washington, a treaty ally, towards whom Duterte’s hatred was subjective, ideological and shaped by anti-colonial framework. Duterte resented America’s colonial legacy, begrudged Washington’s criticism of his infamous ‘drug war’ and penchant for sermonizing and early on in his tenure declared “separation” from the US and took the South-East Asian nation almost to the point of a formal divorce. In one infamous rant in 2016 during a visit to Beijing, Duterte had called Americans a “discourteous people” and said, “Duterte of the Philippines is veering towards China because China has the character of an Oriental. It does not go around insulting people.” As a report in Lowy Institute’s The Interpreter points out, “under Duterte’s predecessor – the late president Benigno Aquino III, who took China to court over the South China Sea claims – Chinese funding was largely inaccessible. So, to woo China, Duterte needed to stage a loud, scandalous divorce drama with the United States. He pursued this by cursing former US president Barack Obama over his comments on Duterte’s harsh anti-drugs campaign, and repeatedly threatening to terminate and eventually abrogate the Visiting Forces Agreement.” The second pillar of Duterte’s foreign policy was a conciliatory stance towards China, downplaying China’s all-encompassing sovereignty claims over almost the entire South China Sea in pursuit of investment funds for his ‘Build, Build, Build’ programme. The trouble is that despite his all-out wooing of Beijing, all Duterte had to show towards the end of his tenure were more promises than projects. His pivot to China failed to deliver the huge infrastructure investments he had bargained for. Only a fraction of its pledged $24 billion in investments came to fruition. Meanwhile, there was no let up on China’s intimidatory tactics in the South China Sea. Beijing rapidly expanded its maritime militia and deployed hundreds of these so-called ‘fishing’ trawlers to dominate the Philippines-claimed Spratly Islands, regularly harassing Filipino fishermen and anchoring at  Whitsun Reef — bang within the Philippines’s EEZ. When Bongbong Marcos came to power in 2022, he was faced with a barrage of these coercive tactics by the People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia (PAFMM) that targeted local fishermen in and around Filipino-occupied shoals such as Second Thomas Shoal that lies within the Philippines’s EEZs, harried the Filipino Navy and completed an unprecedented military buildup by fully militarizing three artificial islands on the South China Sea. Marcos adopted a more assertive approach towards Beijing’s strong-arm tactics. The Filipino president was helped by the fact that the US had taken a lenient view of Philippines’s compulsions, and while Duterte had felt betrayed by Beijing, Washington kept cool and poured resources when Marcos came to power. The Marcos strategy wasn’t a mere reversal of Duterte’s moves, though that was undoubtedly one aspect. He cozied up to Washington, reaffirmed “ironclad” alliance with the US, and gave US military four more access points to Filipino military bases close to Taiwan and South China Sea — allowing Washington staging of troops near critical chokepoints and revived joint military exercises such as Balikatan (shoulder-to-shoulder) that was suspended by the Duterte regime. The Balikatan drill, watched publicly by president Marcos, involved an estimated 17,600 troops conducting live-fire drills and fighter jets targeting a mock enemy warship on South China Sea — a decommissioned Filipino warship off the island of Luzon — only 280 miles from Taiwan, infuriating Beijing. The US and Philippines air forces also resurrected the Cope Thunder Exercise after 33 years where US fifth-generation fighter jets took part, and Marcos vowed not to abandon “even one square inch” of Philippine territory to any foreign power. Yet there are more aspects to Marcos’s strategy of countering Beijing’s aggression on South China Sea, and it involves greater documentation and publicization of its atrocities and ‘gray zone tactics’. For instance, a Filipino coast guard ship took a group of journalists to patrolling activities in the disputed areas of South China Sea in April this year where the media witnessed, first hand, the dangerous manoeuvres by much larger Chinese coast guard ships that blocked the Filipino vessels from conducting their missions and almost forced a collision. The incident drew international opprobrium. A similar incident took place in February this year when Chinese maritime militia aimed a military-grade laser at a Filipino vessel, temporarily causing blindness among two crew members of one of Manila’s vessels, causing the Filipino president to summon the Chinese envoy. Another incident was reported by Manila this Friday when the Chinese coast guard reportedly harassed, obstructed and subjected Filipino vessels to “dangerous manoeuvres” on June 30 during a “naval operation.” The crux of Marcos’s strategy, faced with a far more powerful military, is to meticulously document and publicize China’s bullying behaviour on the South China Sea (by releasing unedited videos of face-offs on high seas) and create a deterrence strategy, shaping public opinion, putting China under global pressure, forcing it to either lie or deny and countering its propaganda. As a Filipino coast guard commander was quoted, as saying by Associated Press on this strategy, “the best way to address Chinese ‘gray zone’ activities in the West Philippine Sea (South China Sea) is to expose it… (it) allows like-minded states to express condemnation and reproach which puts Beijing in a spotlight… Chinese actions in the shadows are now checked, which also forced them to come out in the open or to publicly lie.” It becomes clear why the Philippines insisted on India upgrading its stance on the Arbitral Award that builds a chorus of support in favour of the beleaguered South East Asian nation and uncovers the forked tongue strategy of Beijing. One of the CCP’s core adversarial strategies in achieving its objectives is to ‘win without fighting’. That seems to be getting increasingly harder for Beijing. Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.