Chester B. Cabalza, Joshua Bernard B. Espeña and Don McLain Gill: The Rise of Philippinedization: Philippinedization Is Not Finlandization. Manila: International Development Security Cooporation, 2021.
The authors [1] define “Philippinedization” as “the process whereby a weaker state” (in this case, the Philippines), “backed by a powerful country” (the United States), “goes to great lengths in temporarily refraining from opposing a neighboring great power” (China) “by resorting to economic and diplomatic rapprochements at the strategic level but strengthening its national security infrastructure on the operational level with an eye for potential conflict in the foreseeable future” (such as attempts by China to dominate the seas of Southeast Asia). This can be accomplished, if the weaker state strengthens and diversifies both its domestic economic and military capacity and its international alliances, especially with other states in the region which are also threatened by China. This resembles but is not identical to ‘Finlandization,’ a policy whereby a weaker state retains self-government, its own regime, while agreeing not to oppose a stronger, neighboring state’s foreign policy. The senior co-author conceived of the idea of Philippinedization while visiting Finland in 2019, having become impressed by Finland’s “success story” in resisting Russian expansion while recognizing that the term ‘Finlandization” bears a pejorative connotation among the Western republics. As the book’s cautionary subtitle announces, he and his co-authors do not intend either the connotation or the substance of Finlandization to take hold in the Philippines.
As an archipelago (hence the Philippines) separated from China by more than a thousand nautical miles of ocean, with a commercial republican regime near strategic chokepoints within that ocean, the country will always find itself in contention with stronger Asian powers—China today, Japan yesterday. Its relations with China have become especially vexed in this generation. Geography dictates that the Philippines, if it is to maintain its territorial integrity and political sovereignty, must protect itself with naval and air forces.
This it did. After U.S. military forces under the command of General Douglas MacArthur liberated the Philippines from Japan in World War II, the two countries signed a Military Bases Agreement, which established a major American naval base at Subic Bay and the Clark Air Base in Luzon Province. These bases put teeth into the Mutual Defense Treaty signed by the two countries in 1951. For many years, the local strongman, Ferdinand Marcos, maintained a strong alliance with the United States. So long as Communist China remained largely self-isolated, preoccupied by Mao Zedong’s genocidal machinations and then by post-Maoist economic development, these arrangements sufficed to defend the Philippines against any encroachments from the naval forces of the Soviet Union. Marcos felt sufficiently confident to normalize bilateral relations with the Chinese regime in 1975, as the United States had done in the waning years of the Nixon Administration.
With the end of the Marcos regime, the 1987 Constitution stipulated that the Philippines would “pursue an independent foreign policy”; with the end of the Cold War a few years later, the United States became amenable to lessening its military presence in the country. This arrangement might have worked well over time, had China not begun to loom larger. As long as Communist China had remained preoccupied with domestic roils (Mao’s genocidal policies of the 1950s and 1960s) and toils (the post-Mao efforts at economic development), neither the Philippines nor the United States had any cause for alarm. At the end of the Cold War, the United States closed Clark Air Base and reduced its military presence in the Philippines generally, at the behest of the Philippine Senate. China wasn’t slow to react, however. As early as 1992, China passed its Law on Territorial Sea and Contiguous Zone and enforcing it by occupying the Mischief Reef in 1995. The Philippines responded quickly, moving to modernize its “neglected navy and air force.” It also negotiated a new Visiting Forces Agreement with the United States in 1998. This failed to deter Chinese advances, as the ruling Communist Party announced the Nine-Dash line in 2009. With this, China effectively claimed sovereignty over approximately ninety percent of the South China Sea in an area encompassing the Paracel Islands in the northwest, the Spratly Islands in the southwest, and a few miles off the west coast of the Philippines in the east. (Indeed, some of what China calls the South China Sea the Philippines calls the West Philippine Sea.) “China cleverly seeks anti-access / area denial through the grey zone where Beijing operates between the war an peace spectrum, enabling China to achieve its objectives without resorting to a regional strategic war with the US and regional states. This endeavor would make it difficult and costly for the US and its allies to deploy their militaries” in the South China Sea.
Under the Benigno Aquino administration, the Philippines answered these claims by publishing a new national security policy, a strategy intended to back up its intention to defend its coastline against Chinese claims, keeping it free for its maritime commerce and fishing interests, as well as maintaining its territorial integrity. “Convinced” that “China has relentless ambitions to revise the status quo regional order,” the Philippines “used every available option to stand up” to China’s “heavy-handed behavior.” Meanwhile, although U.S. President Barack Obama announced a foreign-policy ‘pivot to Asia’ in 2011, China went ahead and took de facto control over the Scarborough Shoal. President Aquino called upon what the authors (perhaps with some irony) call “the international community” to resist such “Chinese assertiveness,” comparing the seizure to Hitler’s occupation of the Sudetenland in 1938. He was gravely disappointed by the Obama Administration’s declaration of neutrality in that conflict. However, he did win a major juridical victory in 2016, when the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague ruled that China’s maritime claims were illegal under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. This provided small comfort, however, as the Chinese regime simply declared the ruling “null and void,” continuing its policy of constructing artificial islands for its military operations in the South China Sea, a policy it had begun in 2013.
The election of Roderigo Duterte to the presidency brought a new strategy into play. Distrusting American reliability, Duterte imagined that “befriending Beijing and not rocking the boat would save Manila from the hegemonic rivalry of the two superpowers in the region and protect some features in the West Philippine Sea.” He downplayed the Court’s ruling and moved to strengthen bilateral ties with China, hoping to begin a joint exploration in the Sea’s seabed and to attract Chinese investments in Philippine infrastructure—a “defeatist” stance “that is tantamount to complete surrender of Manila’s claims” to its territorial waters, as recognized internationally. He understood this policy as a concession to geopolitical reality. As is so often the case, Chinese action hasn’t matched Chinese verbiage and, as anyone who takes a look knows, when the Chinese Communist Party actually does get around to ‘investing’ in a foreign country, it bakes political infiltration and self-interest into the cake.
Accordingly, the authors propose a new strategy. They base it on a comprehensive view, combining considerations of “the geopolitical setting of the nation-state,” its military and political history, current military technologies and, above all, its regime: the rulers, ruling institutions, way of life, and its purposes. China fields an increasingly powerful array of naval, ground, and air forces, aiming at control of “the busiest sea lanes of communications in the South China Sea.” It also deploys “finesse wolf diplomacy” (as Mr. Cabalza well phrases it) along with economic influence. That is, like the Germans and the Russians before them, modern Chinese rulers have read their Clausewitz. Given President Duterte’s previous overtures, the Chinese were surprised in Spring 2021 when he revived military relations with the United States. This makes the authors’ proposals timely.
To defend itself against China, the Philippines needs more than a strengthened alliance with America, however. It needs additional allies, some beyond the borders of the South China Sea, the “Asia-Pacific” region. Philippine strategists should think rather of the “Indo-Pacific,” considering an alliance (most notably) with India itself. And given “the interdependence of sea power and land power,” “the emerging strategic architecture in the Indo-Pacific cannot ignore the developments on the Asian landmass.” Chinese rulers assume “that promoting the Indo-Pacific region will serve as a platform used to contain its rise.” They are not wrong. Given the unbenevolent intentions of China’s regime, that is exactly what such republics as Taiwan, Japan, India, Australia, and the Philippines need to do.
Four factors affect the Philippines’ strategic posture in the Indo-Pacific. First, the strategic partnership with the United States will continue, regardless of what President Duterte may say in his speeches. Reality is reality. Second, some sort of economic relations with China, a huge market, should be undertaken, if cautiously and without high expectation that the Chinese will necessarily follow through on their contractual commitments. Third, China’s expansive claims regarding the South China Sea should be resisted, as China “continues to maintain artificial islands in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone,” as determined by the 2019 Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative. Finally, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) cannot be relied on to back the Philippines, given China’s economic influence over so many of its member states.
How can the Philippines strengthen these somewhat weak reeds? The authors suggest that the solution may be found in geography. Their country is “a natural gateway to the East Asian economies,” located at “the crossroads of eastern and western businesses.” “Maintaining robust relations with Manila is thereby crucial for major states that seek to maximize their economic gains.” Further, the same goes for military operations, as “the strategic location of the Philippines serves as a tipping point in the great power rivalry between the US and China.” The Philippines “can play a critical role in forwarding US strategic objectives in the Indo-Pacific vis-à-vis China,” especially in view of American “economic and military decline,” which has forced it to rely more on such allied states as Japan, South Korea, Australia, and India in the region.
Given the fact of China’s rise, simultaneous with American decline, the Philippines will need to balance the two powers more skillfully than Duterte has done. Fortunately, Filipino military and media elites have criticized Duterte’s tilt toward China. Indeed, military officers consider it their duty under the Constitution to “secure the state’s sovereign rights” against hostile foreign forces. Given the recent election of Ferdinand Marcos’s son to the presidency, these groups may stand ready to implement a tougher policy in conjunction with the United States, India, Japan, and Australia, all governed by commercial-republican regimes, as is the Philippines. Although this is true, the authors do not want such an alliance to go so far as to “upset the balance between Manila and Beijing.” They prefer bilateral relations with those countries, whereby Filipino statesmen could determine the mixture of economic, military, and diplomatic ties with each, severally. For example, “forging closer cooperation with Japan and India can serve as a formidable middle ground between balancing China and not risking any backlash or pressure on its behalf, since the multidimensional Indo-Japanese partnership is a significantly softer and more indirect version of a confrontational and exclusive China-containment strategy between the US and its traditional allies.” That is, if the Philippines established the same ‘hard’ military relationship with Japan and India that it has had with the United States, China might indeed complain of ‘encirclement.’ By calibrating its relations with those countries (which in any event are not militarily impressive powers) toward primarily economic and diplomatic actions, the Philippines might walk a safer path. And also a more lucrative one, as Japan and India might serve to enhance the Philippines’ other links in the region, particularly in light of the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor, a venture intended to serve “as an inclusive counterweight to the notorious Belt and Road Initiative” undertaken by China. The presidents of Japan and India have both pointed to the regime similarities between their two countries as the political basis for this project; China may call itself the “People’s Republic” of China, but it isn’t a republic and the Chinese people don’t rule it. [2]
The challenge posed by the Chinese regime remains formidable, and it will intensify in the decades to come. The People’s Liberation Army (as it is called) is on the path for a thorough modernization by 2035. It’s estimated that “by 2049, the PLA together with the People’s Armed Police, coast Guard, and Maritime Militia [will] become a ‘world class’ armed force,” giving China the capacity “to compete with the US military in a future scenario.” This will mean a ‘blue water’ navy—one capable of projecting power on the high seas, as the British imperial navy once did and as the United States now does—along with the ability to seize Taiwan, the one remaining Chinese republic and therefore an enemy of the Communist regime in Beijing. Finally, as noted, the Chinese intend to control the South China Sea, as they have been visibly moving to do since the mid-1990s. China’s grand strategy is “to reassert China’s international status in the principle of tianxia or ‘everything under the heavens'”—surely a grand thing, if not necessarily a good one.
Will the average Filipina consent to the authors’ proposed counter-strategy? Possibly so. President Duterte thought he had worked out some 24 billion U.S dollars’ worth of deals with Beijing. “Only a trickle of those deals has been seen to take shape on the ground.” Before the outbreak of COVID-19 in Manila, opinion polls showed that more than half of Filipinos regarded China as “a good ally,” but that has changed since a Chinese tourist brought the virus to their country in February 2020. This, along with environmental damage caused by Chinese activities in fishing grounds worked by Filipinos, “certainly has helped galvanize tough anti-Chinese sentiments among Filipinos.” Another source of legitimate vexation is the proliferation of Chinese-controlled offshore gambling operations (gambling is illegal on mainland China); the foreign workers engage in criminal and espionage activities—a “Trojan horse” or more accurately a Chinese dragon in the Philippines. As in the United States, Beijing has also set up a number of its “Confucius Institutes” on university campuses in the Philippines. These too serve as cells of espionage and of influence throughout the country. “To be sure, Beijing intends to fill the vacuum that America” left during the COVID crisis.
In light of all this, the Philippines faces the imperative of strengthening its own military defenses. Military cooperation with the United States remains “important,” but “there are concerns about whether [America’s] commitments are hollow because of the geographical constraints and the capacity to rapidly deploy the needed number of forces” during a crisis. Although 80% of Filipinos view the U.S. favorably, especially since America was the main supplier of COVID vaccines in the past two years, President Trump’s neo-isolationism and President Biden’s withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan quite understandably make them nervous. “The Philippines must continue to prioritize its own capacity building in order to lessen its dependence on the alliance,” undertaking a vigorous campaign to arm its sailors and soldiers in order “to achieve a respectable territorial defense strategy to save the archipelagic nation’s undefended features in the west Philippine Sea and maritime domains from the Philippine Rise to the Sulu Sea.” The Philippines has already put in place the Philippine Air Force Flight Plan 2028, which aims at establishing air bases at key geographic points in the country. None of these tasks will be easy. “The Philippine [military] capability notably lacks air capability, sea and air transport, and command and control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.” The authors cite as a precedent South Korea’s successful military buildup after the Nixon Administration reduce U.S. troop presence in that country in the 1970s. This has “inspired the Philippines to come up with the same plan of self-reliance.”
Thanks to the United States, “an unprecedented era of wealth and peace has been created by free and open access to the world’s oceans. Unfortunately, the system is now in danger. The US Maritime Strategy targets the two major threats to maintain[ing] global peace and prosperity: China and Russia.” The US “needs to be aggressive to compete with China,” which is “rapidly expanding militarily and poised to alter the global order.” It can no longer “be assumed that the US has control of the unrestricted access operations [in] the world’s oceans during times of conflict” requires. For this reason, the Philippines should foster a “long-term vision and nationalistic mindset in developing its [own] self-reliant navy,” a force indispensable “for an archipelagic country.” Accordingly, the Philippines should diversify its arms suppliers, purchasing high-tech equipment from India and France as well as the U.S. This will require “massive investments.” They will be worth it. ASEAN has diplomatic utility but “the international system is anarchic,” with “no global government to protect weaker states from the more powerful ones.” Member states have different regimes and different interests as a consequence, including different policies regarding China. No solid unity is likely. “Self-help” is “the name of the game.”
The authors foresee three likely scenarios in world politics during the decades to come. There might be a “dichotomy of power and influence between the US. and its allies and China, where other states will have to pick a side.” There might also be a world in which China and Russia collaborate to dominate the Eurasian land mass (including Africa)—what Halford Mackinder called the World Island—with the United States isolated or ‘contained’ within the Americas, and eventually within North America. Or the United States might ally with Russia and Europe in opposition to China. Whichever scenario prevails, “the Philippines can be taken to account as a rising middle power if given the right direction for statecraft.” The Philippines must strengthen its military without abandoning its republican regime; this will give needed heft to its regional diplomatic efforts in countering the Chinese threat. For this to happen, weapons purchases from foreign countries, however friendly those countries may be, cannot serve as a long-term substitute for a domestic defense industry. In the meantime, junior and mid-level officers of the Philippines’ military “should become familiar with the strategic value of the alliance with the US.” Finally, the Philippines must also enhance its strategic intelligence operations “to provide real-time and effective information on adversaries.” Too many of China’s hostile activities of recent decades to Filipino officials by surprise. That needs to stop.
Mssrs. Cabalza, Espeña, and Gill have provided a valuable, realistic analysis of the strategic circumstances faced by the Philippines today. It must be said that their book would have benefited from better editing, especially with a view toward organization (there is considerable repetition) and English grammar. If they continue their collaboration in subsequent books, as I hope they do, they should avail themselves of one of the many expatriates now living in the Philippines for whom English is the native language. Their insights are too important to be obscured by their prose.
The people of the Philippines emerged from Spanish and American colonial rule, then from Japanese occupation, and finally from an overbearing domestic regime as a proud and independent people who have earned the respect of all those acquainted with them. They continue to struggle with infrastructure development, political factions, and with yet another imperialist presence avid to control their strategic location in the South Pacific. With prudent strategic thinkers to advise them, they may yet prevail in their intention to govern themselves.
Note
- Chester B. Cabalza is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Philippines, Diliman Campus; he also teaches at the National Defense College of the Philippines. Joshua Bernard B. Espeña is a defense analyst at the Office of Strategic Studies and Strategy Management for the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Don McLain Gills is Resident Fellow at International Development and Security Cooperation in Manila and Director for South and Southeast Studies at the Philippine-Middle East Studies Association (PMESA) in Quezon City.
- Regarding India, a cautionary note: While it can surely maintain a strong naval presence in the Indian Ocean, it is perennially constrained from substantial further power projection by the presence of Pakistan on its western border. It is unlikely to be capable of very substantial naval assistance to any South China Sea country.
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