Shortly after the latest near-collision between Philippine and Chinese maritime forces in the South China Sea last month, Manila conducted joint drills with Australia, Canada and the United States. The seamlessly coordinated response by the four nations was no accident. While the United States is its treaty ally with mutual defence obligations, both Canberra and Ottawa have been doubling down on their maritime security and overall strategic partnership with the Philippines.
While Australia just concluded its largest-ever bilateral military exercises with the Philippines, Canada is pursuing a Visiting Forces Agreement with the Southeast Asian nation akin to those enjoyed by both Washington and Canberra. This coincided with Japan’s ratification of a new Reciprocal Access Agreement with the Philippines, paving the way for regularised joint military exercises and more robust bilateral defence deals. New Zealand is also pursuing a similar pact as part of its own burgeoning Indo-Pacific strategy.
Nations from well beyond the Indo-Pacific are also joining in. The United Kingdom has also signalled its commitment to finalising a status of visiting forces agreement pact with the Philippines, while France, Spain and Germany are offering big-ticket weapons systems, including submarines. Frontline Eastern European nations such as Poland and Lithuania are also forging closer ties with the Philippines amid shared concerns over increasingly coordinated threats posed by authoritarian superpowers of Russia and China.
Earlier this year, more than half-a-dozen European nations attended as observers the annual Balikatan exercises, which saw large-scale naval and amphibious drills among Filipino and American troops across strategic waters of the South China Sea and near the Bashi Channel. While the United States remains as the Philippines’ sole treaty ally, the Southeast Asian nation is rapidly expanding its network of defence partnerships, thus giving birth to all sorts of new “Squads”.
What it has lacked in hard military power, the Philippines has compensated for by emerging as a pillar of resistance and a fulcrum of minilateral security cooperation aimed at constraining China’s naval assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific.
Both admirers and detractors tend to describe the Ferdinand Marcos Jr administration as “pro-American”, underscoring his dramatic foreign policy departure from the Beijing-aligned Rodrigo Duterte presidency. But while the Filipino president has significantly improved strained relations with Washington in recent years – and even expanded American access to Philippine military facilities under the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) – his actual foreign policy is far more multi-aligned.
In many ways, the Filipino leader is taking a page from his father’s playbook, namely how Marcos Sr deftly danced with the United States, China and the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War in order to extract maximum concessions from multiple US administrations.
But the Philippines is also acknowledging the inherent uncertainties in its alliance with America. Despite repeated reassurances of its mutual defence obligations and big talk of a new golden era of bilateral relations, the Philippine-US alliance is far from optimised. The United States is yet to commit major investments in critical industries, while bilateral trade remains modest amid a failure to finalise a free trade agreement after decades of negotiations.
Frontline regional states are fast developing a new network of “middle power cooperation” in the Indo-Pacific.
On the defence front, the Philippines tends to enjoy a relatively healthy share of America’s regional foreign military financing (FMF), but still minimal compared to billions of annual aid enjoyed by US partners in other regions such as the Middle East. Nothing better captures this than the recently-suspended F-16 deal after Manila complained of lack of financial support from the Pentagon.
In fact, the bulk of the Philippines’ modern weapons systems are purchased from other regional partners. South Korea alone accounts for a third of the country’s total defence imports, ranging from fighter jets to warships, while India has been the main source of strategic platforms such as the Brahmos missile system. Japan has been the top source of defence aid for the Philippine Coast Guard, while Europeans are now angling to fill in the gap by offering multi-role fighters, submarines, and warships. Most of the Philippines’ modern Black Hawk helicopters are from Poland.
Aside from regular joint training and the annual FMF aid, America’s most meaningful defence assistance to the Philippines in recent years was stationing the Typhon missile system in the Southeast Asian nation. But it remains to be seen if the Pentagon is open to permanently stationing or transferring the much-vaunted platform to Filipino troops. The alliance with the United States is meaningful, but nowhere near sufficient to cover the Philippines’ expanding defence needs in the face of rapidly rising China.
Ultimately, however, the Marcos Jr administration has also embraced a more multipolar vision of the world that goes beyond the dictates of any superpower. As the Filipino president told his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi during a recent visit to New Delhi: “The Indian vision for multipolarity, which resonates with the Philippine emphasis on strategic agency is no longer an aspiration, it is an exigency [because of] the responsibility of all stakeholders … to play a more active role in upholding, defending, and preserving our rules-based order.”
This echoes sentiments shared by leaders of other key Indo-Pacific middle powers such as French President Emmanuel Macron, who, during his keynote address in the Shangri-La Dialogue in May, emphasised the need for “coalitions of action” to resist “spheres of coercion” under superpowers, and Japan’s Prime Minister Ishiba, who, ahead of his resignation, underscored the urgency of US allies becoming more “self-sufficient” amid America’s more isolationist turn.
Instead of fatalism, or succumbing to China’s hegemonic ambitions, frontline regional states such as the Philippines are fast developing a new network of “middle power cooperation” in the Indo-Pacific.
