From the Lecture delivered by Charles Avila on May 1, 2021 to select members of Defense and Foreign Policy groups, with notes from studies/writings of Kurt M. Campbell and Rush Doshi (Foreign Affairs Quarterly), Benjamin Zawacki (Asia Pacific Research) and Galileo Guzman Castillo (Focus on the Global South).
- Amid the foul and low language that often came out of President Duterte’s mouth against America, the latter simply plugged its ears and never quit pouring-in millions of dollars for use by the Philippine defense establishment.
- One writer summed it up succinctly[1].
“From 2016 to 2019, the US has provided more than $550 million in military assistance to the Duterte regime—consisting of aircrafts, naval ships, armoured vehicles, small arms and munitions, and other military equipment—by far the largest US military aid in the region.
“The latest was the delivery of $18 million worth of missiles and weapons systems ‘to help the [Philippine] government in its anti-terror fight’ against ISIS-inspired groups in Mindanao, and the donation of $33 million worth of ScanEagle Unmanned Aerial System to the Philippine Navy to augment its intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations around the hotly contested areas in the South China Sea/West Philippine Sea.”
Could this American “generosity” be the secret of the DND Secretary’s “independence,” survival and impunity in the cabinet of an extremely pro-China President?
- The China side, however, was hardly sleeping on its job.
A “Regional Comprehensive and Economic Partnership (RCEP) Agreement” was signed late last year (Nov.2020) under the aegis of China, and excluding the USA from this free trade pact, while including three of the four largest economies in Asia, namely China itself, Japan and South Korea.
Much earlier, China’s diplomatic and economic clout may be said to have been rising sharply in Southeast Asia because of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and alongside its growing military assertiveness and territorial expansion ambitions.
So, last year China was the Philippines’ top trading partner, with a total trade amounting to $35.31 billion or 19.3% of the country’s total trade with exports of $9.81 billion.
- Nonetheless, and on the other hand, the US and the Philippines continued to have a strong trade and investment relationship, with over $19.64 billion in total goods and services traded and $11.57 billion in exports.
But while the Philippines recorded a trade deficit of $15.68 billion with China, it registered a trade surplus of $3.5 billion with the US, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority.
In the new Biden presidency, the Asia region in general and the Philippines along with it can expect a trade and investment policy environment that imposes even more unhampered liberalization amid selfish intellectual property restrictions and deepened economic inequalities.
- In his first address before Congress last 29th April 2022, US President Joe Biden said that America is “in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century.”
Accordingly, Biden pointed out that the United States will maintain a strong presence in the Indo-Pacific region. “Not to start a conflict, but to prevent one,” he said. [Famous last words by a party that has always started wars.]
- In a recent development, Washington welcomed the Philippines’ decision to continue patrolling the South China Sea, which China claims almost as a whole. Despite President Duterte’s extreme closeness to China, the Government of the Philippines has not rescinded any treaties and agreements with the USA. Many times, of course, it almost did so but it didn’t. It takes more than a President to do this.
The US-Philippines military alliance dating almost 70 years back with the signing of the post-World War II Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) of 1951, has endured. The Philippine security establishment and foreign policy technocrats, led by top generals and career diplomats, have consistently maneuvered for the preservation and enhancement of this century-long alliance.
- Specifically, Beijing recently refused to withdraw its fishing vessels and other ships from the Philippines’ Exclusive Economic Zone. This forced the Philippine Secretaries of Defense and Foreign Affairs to take a tough stance against Beijing – moves welcomed, if not originally egged on, by Washington.
But it did seem at times that, incredibly, President Duterte, no less, agreed with his cabinet secretaries, even though he considers China an indispensable political partner. He could have reined them in but he hasn’t. All he did was tell the DFA Secretary not to imitate him in his cursing habits.
- On the part of China, responding to the Biden speech, Professor Wang Yong, the director of the Center for International Political Economy at Peking University, said that China considers the US an important country and an inseparable partner for China.
“China is not interested in displacing the role of the US in the world,” he said. In fact, “Chinese leaders simply want to develop their country, improve the material life of its people, and boost China’s international standing for domestic reasons.”
Wang hopes the US and China will “work to improve the understanding of each other’s intention and capability,” especially since their different values and government systems have led to “misperception” between the two sides.
- In any case, the global verdict is in: President Joe Biden has successfully (that is, psychologically) achieved a historic turn-around. He has stopped the United States’ wave of declinism that began with the global financial crisis in 2008 and accelerated through Trump’s norm-breaking presidency.
Biden seems to have convinced all sectors in record time that he is the personification and re-incarnation of a long tradition of social democratic presidents that started with Roosevelt through Kennedy and Johnson (including the still living Carter, Clinton and Obama). How? Why?
Well, he has been able to persuade all and sundry that he is serious and capable of tackling the real and formidable declinist forces of inequality, polarization, disinformation, and deindustrialization.
- In embracing this challenge Biden has not overlooked the U.S. advantages over China. The latter has a fast-aging population, and a currency still far from rivaling the dollar. Throughout most of China’s four-decade rise (that equally benefited the American ruling class to the disadvantage of the American and Chinese peoples), the United States has consistently held a quarter of the world’s GDP.
Old man Biden knows with the wisdom of the aforementioned tradition that the power of the U.S. essentially rests in the American openness that attracts the allies sustaining the global liberal order, the immigrants who fuel American growth, and the capital that sustains dollar dominance.
U.S. soft power flows from its open society and civic creed, not from the state. The protests that followed the killing of George Floyd reflected a public struggle to realize the founding values—values whose appeal was so universal that the struggle for them captivated global audiences and inspired marches abroad. But so, too, was the converse – namely the condemnation of its racism and senseless violence.
Here is the greatest irony – that while the U.S. attracts more criticism than other great powers it is “precisely because it holds itself to a higher standard,” argues the South Africa–based journalist Dele Olojode. “Nobody holds China to that kind of standard.”
- Thus, the more assertive and repressive China becomes, the more likely the American public and Congress are to unite behind concerns about Beijing’s long-term intentions and the impact on American workers and businesses of its state-backed mercantilism.
But this also includes, more urgently now, whatever China is doing in the West Philippine Sea against Philippine sovereignty, and in its project to establish a China- friendly dictatorship as a means of a real possibility to abrogate the Philippines-U.S. strategic agreements.
- One then begins to understand now more clearly why Biden has framed an American agenda for renewal not purely in domestic terms but as part of a broader effort to sustain U.S. competitiveness relative to China. It is a move that has now garnered for him broad support.
One may remember, too, how 60 years ago, when Americans were still reeling from the Sputnik shock, candidate John F. Kennedy addressed a small town audience, a municipal auditorium in Canton, Ohio.
His country faced serious crises, and Kennedy enumerated them: low wages, high housing costs, a growing risk of conflict, the gradual shrinkage of industry, and the rise of a new rival that appeared to be on the march while the United States stood still.
“What we have to overcome,” Kennedy said then, is “that psychological feeling in the world that the United States has reached maturity, that maybe our high noon has passed, maybe our brightest days were earlier, and that now we are going into the long, slow afternoon… I don’t hold that view at all…” and, now it seems neither does his successor, President Biden.
- Biden’s Secretary of State is quite explicit. In his first major speech, Sec. Blinken characterized US-China relations as the “biggest geopolitical test of the 21st century.” China was the only country-specific foreign policy issue among a few he explicitly addressed, and perhaps not since the start of the War on Terror 20 years ago was there an issue with such broad bipartisan support.
Secretary Blinken’s calls to the foreign ministers of Thailand and the Philippines the day after his confirmation demonstrate that bilateral relations will retain their place in Biden’s diplomacy toolbox, even as multilateralism will likely prove the more widely and publicly used tactic.
Diplomatically, Biden will seek to make up for influence lost to China.
Militarily, he will prepare for – although not precipitate (he will always say) – a regional security crisis involving China on some level.
This is not to predict that such a crisis will in fact occur, but rather that Biden will take into account the 2018 assessment of the US Indo-Pacific Commander that “China is now capable of controlling the South China Sea in all scenarios short of war with the United States.”
Thus, the danger of miscalculations from either or both sides remain. And the task of knowing exactly what to do for our own interest and benefit remains with us alone and with no one else.
In the past developments in Indonesia did not only have a determining influence on Southeast Asia but on China itself where their miscalculation with Aidit and Sukarno brought down the most powerful at that time, namely Defense “supremo and sure-successor” LinPiao. ***
[1] Galileo de Guzman Castillo, “What the Global South Can Expect from Biden” (Published December 2020 Copyright 2020 by Focus on the Global South)