Biden is on a spree shoring up Asian alliances, China in crosshairs

United States President Joe Biden met with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. at the White House on Monday, a visit meant to send a message to China that the Filipino leader planned to deepen his country’s relationship with the US.

Marcos’ trip comes days after the US and Philippine militaries held joint exercises aimed at curbing China’s influence in the South China Sea and strengthening America’s ability to defend Taiwan if China invades. The exercises were part of a rapid and intensifying effort between the two countries: In February, the Pentagon announced that the US military would expand its presence in the Philippines, and this spring, four new military sites were announced.

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“We are facing new challenges, and I couldn’t think of a better partner to have than you,” Biden told Marcos in the Oval Office on Monday. Biden listed initiatives that the two countries would work together on, including climate change and clean energy. Biden also announced trade and investment missions to the Philippines to encourage private-sector investments in the country.

But Biden emphasized that the main point of the visit, as far as US officials were concerned, was to shore up Filipino security and military capabilities.

“The United States also remains ironclad in our commitment to the defence of the Philippines, including the South China Sea, and we will continue to support the Philippines’ military modernisation,” Biden said.

The trip is the Biden administration’s latest push to bolster its relationships with key Asian allies — who are also military treaty partners with the US — as tensions with China rise. Biden welcomed South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol for a State visit last week with discussions largely focused on deterring the missile programme in North Korea, whose leader has grown more emboldened by a supportive China.

In January, Biden hosted Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the White House. He will travel to Japan and Australia this month to shore up relationships with allies in the Indo-Pacific.

The strategic importance of the Philippines is a matter of proximity. Its northernmost island of Itbayat is less than 100 miles from Taiwan. An increased US military presence could allow for a quick troop response in a war with China. For the US, Marcos is an eager but untested partner.

Biden and his advisers have been focusing on cultivating Marcos — who goes by Bongbong and is the son and namesake of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos — as a regional ally since his inauguration last year. Marcos is eager to repair the ties between his government and the US, which frayed under former President Rodrigo Duterte’s leadership, particularly amid his brutal anti-drug campaign. Marcos won election last year by forging an alliance with Duterte’s daughter Sara.

Unlike Duterte, who was friendly toward China and at times confrontational or dismissive of US leadership, Marcos has tried to turn back to the US to restore a decades-old but complicated alliance.

In the Spanish-American War of 1898, the US won control of the Philippines from Spain, which had ruled the archipelago for centuries. US forces then brutally suppressed a Filipino independence movement, in a war that is largely forgotten in the US, but not in the Philippines.

Japan invaded the islands during World War II, and Americans and Filipinos fought together to end that occupation. The Philippines gained its independence in 1946 and in 1951 entered into a mutual defence treaty with the US.

US officials say that Marcos has little desire to wade directly into the middle of the conflict between the two countries, but he is also under domestic pressure to defend his country: 84% of Filipinos believe that Marcos’ government should work with the US to protect its sovereignty in the disputed waters, according to polling published last year.

“All of the gains the US makes in the region has been far less about US successes and about China not being able to stop kicking around its smaller neighbours,” said Gregory Poling, director of the Southeast Asia Programme and Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. He added that polling among Filipinos showed frustration with Beijing and broad support of the US. The Biden administration, he said, has “walked through an open door.”

China has claimed historic rights to much of the South China Sea, and the Philippines has claimed that Chinese ships have harassed and intimidated Filipino fishing vessels. In recent days, the US has accused China of intimidating Filipino vessels in the sea.

The US State Department called on China to “desist from its provocative and unsafe conduct.” An armed attack on Philippine vessels or forces, the department warned, “would invoke US mutual defence commitments.”

US officials are hopeful that the fragile Marcos-Duterte accord is strong enough to withstand pressure domestically but also from China, which has warned the Filipino government to “properly handle issues” related to Taiwan and the South China Sea. The response, last week, was the largest joint drill between the US and the Philippines.

“It is only natural,” Marcos said in the Oval Office, that the Philippines “look to its sole treaty partner in the world to strengthen, to redefine, the relationship that we have and the roles that we play in the face of those rising tensions that we see now around the South China Sea and Asia Pacific.”

The New York Times