The United States is doing
everything it can to ensure its economic and military presence in the region,
using the “threat” posed by China as an excuse. As a result, smaller
countries such as the Philippines would be dragged into a possible confrontation
between the US and China.
By EDMUNDO SANTUARIO III
The Philippines is being led into a future war situation not of its own choosing – a war between the United States and China. And that’s because, based on a new American security strategy in Asia-Pacific, current security arrangements between the US and the Philippines will be upgraded to strengthen the superpower’s military presence in the region.
This possibility has loomed with the publication of a recent policy proposal by Rand Corporation and, before that, of similar reports from the US defense department and its Pacific Command.
These developments should alarm patriotic Filipinos. These might as well give the nation a compelling reason to reassess the country’s security arrangements with the US, more particularly the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA).
Released last May 15, the Rand study, “The United States and Asia: Towards a New US Strategy and Force Posture,” calls for beefing up US forces in the region and the shifting of security strategy from north to south. It calls for bringing the Philippines into a new “comprehensive security partnership” along with Japan, South Korea, Australia, Singapore and Thailand.
The Rand study was sponsored by the US Air Force and directed by lead author Zalmay Khalilzad, Rand’s corporate chairman on international security. On the same day the study was released, Khalilzad joined the Bush administration as special assistant to the president and senior director at the National Security Council.
Claiming to be a research and policy think tank, Rand has been closely identified with the US government over the past decades, especially in the areas of national security strategy, interventionism and anti-communist programs.
The study perceives a host of current critical challenges in Asia “from the rising power of China and India and the regional proliferation of missiles and nuclear weapons to the continuing threat from North Korea and the shaky status of Indonesia and Pakistan.” Given this situation, Rand proposes a new and integrated Asia strategy “based on strengthening our existing bilateral security alliances, pursuing a balance-of-power among China, India and Russia and promoting an inclusive security dialogue among all Asian states.”
It is with China, however, that Rand pays particular concern and the focus of the new American strategy in Asia. It sees the overall US objective for the region as the prevention of “rivalries and insecurities that could lead to war.” This, it says, “requires precluding the rise of a regional hegemon that could undermine the American role in the region and subsequently – given Asia’s enormous resources – pose a global challenge.” The hegemon could as well be India or Russia, however.
America’s China policy, Rand adds, should show a “well-hedged mix of engagement and containment tactics, clear opposition to a unilateral Taiwanese declaration of independence, but an equally clear US determination to come to Taipei’s defense if China attacks.” In a subtle reference to the current Spratlys territorial dispute pitting China and the Philippines – as well as five other claimant-countries – the study emphasizes the assertion of freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. This is to remind China that its historical claim over South China Sea, including the Spratly islands, just won’t hold.
In furtherance of its overall security objectives, Rand advocates revamping US military posture in the Pacific: “Beefing up forces, shifting their focus southwards from the current concentration in northeast Asia and recasting security arrangements with Japan. Other important steps include expanding access to bases in Southeast Asia and perhaps in South Asia and Oman as well, forging military-to-military ties with India, Pakistan and Indonesia as a means of mitigating bilateral conflicts and internal unrest, and encouraging security coordination among such core US partners as Japan, Australia and South Korea.”
The Rand proposals pick up from where the previous Clinton administration left off. They conform as well to the strategic thrusts of the US defense department and, in particular, the US Pacific Command.
Chinese Economy
In his last annual report to then President Bill Clinton, then Defense Secretary William S. Cohen pointed to China as, over the long term, a regional or even global peer competitor. China’s economy, he said, has grown rapidly, its People’s Liberation Army continues to modernize and has a strategic nuclear arsenal that can reach the continental United States.
While he saw similar threats from Russia, Cohen dismissed that traditional competitor’s capability to pose an immediate threat considering its weak economy, among other domestic problems.
But it was during the Clinton presidency that the US forward-presence policy in the region – and in other parts of the world as well – was increased. In 1995, the US defense department announced the “US Security Strategy for the East Asia-Pacific Region.” The strategy saw the region as “the most economically dynamic region in the world, and on that basis alone its security would be critical to America’s future.”
The defense department put it very clearly that American security strategy would be strongly founded on a close security alliance between the US and Japan. In the Rand proposal, such alliance will be strengthened by a US support for efforts in Japan to revise its constitution to transform its Self-Defense Force into a regional or global force. Similar efforts would be done with South Korea and Japan and, more comprehensively, with the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.
The Philippine-US Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), which was ratified by the Senate in May 1999, actually set in motion once again the deepening involvement of the Philippines in American military operations in the region. Since the VFA was signed, several war exercises between the two countries have been conducted, some of these in Palawan or just a few kilometers away from the disputed Spratly islands. (Beijing protested the military exercises as an indirect offense to China.) A new airport in General Santos City in Mindanao has been built by USAid funds reportedly as a staging base for future US military operations in the region.
Last year, a special counter-terrorism agreement was forged between the two countries. The military deal was signed in the midst of escalated fighting between government forces, on the one hand, and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and Abu Sayyaf extremists, on the other. A few days after Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo assumed the presidency, US officials announced renewed defense commitments to the Philippines, including the turnover of military equipment.
One regional organization the US envisions as another possible security bloc is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional Forum (ARF). Visiting Manila in September last year, Admiral Dennis Blair, US commander-in-chief of the Pacific Command, proposed the increase of military cooperation among members of the ARF. In relation to this, Blair suggested that the US and its allies in the region should knit together their bilateral relations to form a “comprehensive multinational security framework.”
The stage for the formation of such a broad security framework has been set. Over the past few years, the US has initiated joint bilateral as well as multinational war exercises in the region. In the Philippines, plans are up to include Singapore, Thailand, Australia and other foreign contingents in war exercises. #