US sends a strong message to China
Philippines agrees to expansion of military ties
US President Joe Biden and his aides have tried to reassure Chinese leaders that they do not seek to contain China in the same way the Americans did with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
But the announcement that the US military is expanding its presence in the Philippines leaves little doubt that the United States is positioning itself to constrain China’s armed forces and bolstering its ability to defend Taiwan.
The announcement, made in Manila, Philippines, by Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin was only the latest in a series of moves by the Biden administration to strengthen military alliances and partnerships across the Asia-Pacific region with an eye toward countering China, especially as tensions over Taiwan rise.
“This is a really big outcome,” said Jacob Stokes, a senior fellow in the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Society and an adviser to Biden when he was vice president. “You can better mass forces and project power if you can rotate into those locations in the Philippines.”
He added that the greater military presence “sends a deterrent message to China”.
Under Biden, the United States is working to strengthen military ties with Australia, Japan and India, and it has got NATO to speak out on potential threats from China.
Austin’s announcement signals that the United States could use its own armed forces to push back harder against the Chinese military’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea, where China and several Southeast Asian nations, including the Philippines, have territorial disputes.
More important, they could aid Taiwan if the People’s Liberation Army were to attack or invade the democratic, self-governing island, which China considers part of its territory.
Biden has said that the US military would defend Taiwan in the event of conflict, but his aides insist that US policy has not changed. Since the United States ended formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1979, it has avoided declaring whether it would deploy military forces to defend Taiwan, a position commonly known as “strategic ambiguity”.
A congressional mandate requires every presidential administration to give weapons of a defensive nature to Taiwan, and Biden’s team is intent on accelerating that and shaping the sales packages so that Taiwan becomes a “porcupine” that China would fear attacking.
A greater US military presence in the Philippines would go beyond that — it would make rapid US troop movement to the Taiwan Strait much easier.
The archipelago of the Philippines lies in an arc south of Taiwan, and the bases there would be critical launch and resupply points in a war with China. The Philippines’ northernmost island of Itbayat is less than 160km from Taiwan.
The United States is relying on Japan, which, like the Philippines, is a military treaty ally, to be the bulwark on the northern flank of Taiwan. Biden promised Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan last month that the Americans would help build up the Japanese military.
Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, spoke by telephone with Eduardo Ao, his counterpart in Manila, on January 17 to discuss the military cooperation agreement between the two nations and sites in the Philippines for US equipment and troops, a senior Biden administration official said. Sullivan reached out just days after Ao took up his post.
That conversation built on a meeting that Biden had with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of the Philippines on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York in September.
Marcos took office in June, and he has said that he plans to push back against China’s claims in the South China Sea.
‘‘It was a valuable conversation for them to take stock of the alliance and plan for how we strengthen it,” Sullivan said. The announcement in Manila by Austin took place right before Secretary of State Antony Blinken was scheduled to fly to China in the first visit there by a US State Department head since 2018. That timing could be interpreted by Chinese leaders as a signal that the main US policy priority in the region is working with allies and partners to rein in China, rather than stabilising relations with Beijing.
“The US side, out of selfish interests, holds on to the zero-sum mentality and keeps strengthening military deployment in the Asia-Pacific,” Mao Ning, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said at a news conference in Beijing yesterday.
“This would escalate tensions and endanger peace and stability in the region. Regional countries need to remain vigilant and avoid being coerced or used by the US.”
The new agreement allows the United States to put military equipment and build facilities in as many as nine locations across the Philippines, which would lead to the biggest US military presence in that country in 30 years.
“This is an opportunity to increase our effectiveness, increase interoperability. It is not about permanent basing,” Austin said in Manila. “It is a big deal. It’s a really big deal, in that, you know, it provides us the opportunity, again, to interact a bit more in an effective way.”
The last US soldiers left the Philippines in 1990s, and the country’s constitution now bars foreign troops from being permanently based there.
In November, a Philippine general identified five possible sites for the agreement. The announcement mentioned nine, although Austin and his aides did not publicly say where the additional four sites would be located. Randall Schriver, a former assistant secretary of defence for the Asia-Pacific region, said that he thinks the four sites are on the northern island of Luzon, in the southwest province of Palawan and part of the old US military facility at Subic Bay.
Schriver added that the Pentagon’s aim is to get at least one site that each of the US. armed services — the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force — could use as a point for surging forces, if necessary. They would not just be air bases, and a big question is how much construction would be needed to get each one ready.
The sites would likely be incorporated as soon as possible into the US military’s regional exercise schedule, and the Pentagon could leave equipment behind rather than bring it back to home bases, Schriver said.
The agreement extends the Pentagon’s forward presence in the Indo-Pacific region — in addition to forces in Australia, South Korea, Japan and Guam, military officials said.
“Sites could potentially be used for a wide range of missions such as joint military training, disaster relief and humanitarian efforts, and combined exercises,” said Lt. Col. Martin J. Meiners, a Defence Department spokesperson.
In the early 1990s, the United States had nearly 6000 troops permanently based in the Philippines. Officials said under the new basing plan, that figure would be dramatically lower, with a combination of uniformed US service members, American civilian contractors, and local Filipino contractors and security personnel.
“Our actual presence will be very limited and temporary,” said Joseph H. Felter, a former top Pentagon official on Southeast Asia who now directs Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation.
In other parts of the world where US forces are temporarily based, such as in Iraq, Syria and Somalia, military deployments of six months to one year are common, but the length of tour duties varies, officials said.
In any war, operational and supply bases would be among the first targets an enemy would try to strike.
Maxwell said a key to the bases’ success will be what kind of air and missile defence systems are deployed to protect them against possible Chinese ballistic or cruise missile attacks, or warplanes dropping precisionguided bombs.
“If China is going to try to take steps with its missile arsenal to take out locations where the US projects forces, it now has more targets it would have to deal with,” Stokes said.
“China has a big missile arsenal and many aircraft, but this still presents it with a bigger problem.”