EDCA: Making our country a US-China battlefield

“ARE you sure you want to get into a fight where you will be the battleground?”

Those trenchant words to our beloved Philippines from Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong highlight the paramount sovereignty and security issues regarding the decade-old Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) between our President and the United States’, due to expire or be renewed by April 27.

Declared constitutional as an executive agreement needing no Senate ratification, which disappointed 15 then-senators, including our current President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., EDCA allows the US to use nine facilities of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), with possibly more coming under the Agile Combat Employment (ACE) strategy of having many, many island bases to make adversaries use more bombs and missiles against American forces.

America does what it wants

On Prime Minister Lee’s question, in fact, President Marcos does not want EDCA bases used for US-China conflicts unless we are attacked. He stressed during his Washington visit last May that “we have also made it clear from our end that this (Taiwan conflict) is not the purpose of those sites and this is not the way that they will be used.”

It affronts our sovereignty, however, that America has ignored this clear policy enunciated by our duly elected leader. Nowhere is it in two statements issued by the US during Marcos’ state visit: his joint communique with President Joseph Biden from the White House and the bilateral defense guidelines governing our alliance from the Defense Department at the Pentagon. And American leaders, military brass, think tanks and media expect EDCA bases to be used in Taiwan hostilities.

Certain EDCA provisions further empower US forces to operate even in contravention of Marcos’ policy not to use the provided AFP sites for offensive operations against other countries and in Taiwan conflicts.

The first provision in Article 3, titled “Agreed Locations,” sets no limitation on US activities at EDCA sites, including transit, refueling, maintenance, and other support services for aircraft and vessels, “prepositioning of military equipment, supplies and materiel, and deployment of forces and materiel.” If those operations are undertaken to support US military action for Taiwan, EDCA would not prohibit it.

Moreover, Article 6, titled “Security,” states: “United States forces are authorized to exercise all rights and authorities within Agreed Locations that are necessary for their operation control or defense, including taking appropriate measures to protect United States forces and United States contractors.”

If there are perceived threats to the facilities from foreign entities, US forces can act as they wish, including launching attacks against those adversaries. The Americans need not get permission from us, but just “coordinate such measures with appropriate authorities in the Philippines.” Who decides with which authorities to coordinate? EDCA doesn’t say.

Just as he did with his past neutrality stance, President Marcos may now be veering away from his insistence in using the bases only for Philippine defense. He personally congratulated Taiwan’s incoming leader Lai Ching-te in January, which no other leaders of countries with diplomatic ties with China has done.

Beijing promptly summoned Philippine Ambassador to China Jaime Florcruz and warned Manila “not to play with fire.” The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said the Philippines maintained its one-China policy. But the Asia Times journal concluded: “For Marcos Jr., as a

nearby neighbor of Taiwan and US mutual defense treaty ally, the Philippines must participate in any collective effort to deter a Chinese invasion of the self-ruling island.”

‘On the front line’ again

Of late, President Marcos may indeed be seeing the Philippines as the US-China battleground that Lee referred to. Addressing the Australian parliament on March 14, he declared that, as in the Second World War, our country “now finds itself on the front line against actions that undermine regional peace, erode regional stability and threaten regional success.”

If the Philippines does become a front-line battlefield, we did not just find ourselves there as we did in 1940, being an American colony. Rather, President Marcos put us there by implementing EDCA. Now, he even wants to forge a stronger defense cooperation structure with America and Japan when he meets with visiting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on March 19 and ahead of a planned summit with Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio, who visited Marcos last December.

He clearly has not learned from Cuba when it nearly hosted Russian nuclear missiles and Ukraine when it sought to join the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Any country agreeing to host forces hostile to its neighbor will provoke hostility, if not attack.

It gets worse. If Marcos agrees, the US will put ground-based intermediate range missiles in the country. In 2020 the US Air Force, under current military chief Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown, commissioned RAND Corp. to assess if any of Washington’s treaty allies would host those projectiles. None would, the study found: not even Japan, South Korea or Australia (https:// www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA393-3.html). And not us under Rodrigo Duterte. But now Marcos is president.

As any general and defense expert knows, such rockets would be targeted by enemy forces.

But if they would be deployed here, our leaders, government and military officials, security analysts and national media may keep mum about such danger, as they have with EDCA bases. And those facilities may multiply, under America’s ACE strategy.

As US Air Force Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, commander of America’s Pacific air assets, explained a month after Washington got access to AFP bases, the strategy is “to have jets spread out over many, many islands [so as] to make the targeting problem for the adversary more difficult — it makes them use more munitions” (https://tinyurl.com/yr72hr6x).

That is, more munitions hitting not just US warplanes and vessels, but also our bases, with collateral damage on surrounding communities. Or worse: with many dozens of rocket batteries and bases to target, adversaries may go nuclear, knocking out many threats for good without sending countless sorties of aircraft and projectiles.

But our leaders, officials, analysts and media won’t admit that.