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The Philippines and the Contest for the South China Sea · Global Insights

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: We spend far too much time thinking about Taiwan.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: If a fight's coming over Taiwan, we're gonna see it at least six months in advance.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: If a fight's coming over the South Tennessee, we're gonna wake up and find out about it tomorrow.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: A few weeks ago, Chinese Coast Guard officers pulled up to a Philippine Navy ship in Philippine waters and told the crew to leave.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: That ship ran aground decades ago and had eight men living on it.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: And for more than a decade, that kind of pressure from China worked.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: China pushed, its neighbors backed off, fishing grounds, abandoned energy projects, looked the other way.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not really working anymore.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, they've given up a lot already.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of what's left is what they won't let go.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: And Beijing is running out of ways to take it without starting a war.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: If the cops showed up and I was having a fist fight with somebody in my lawn, the presumption is that he shouldn't be in my lawn.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: Not that he gets to turn around and say I started the fight.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's what happened here.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: So what happens when the bluff gets called?
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the United States has a treaty that says it has to answer.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: This is not based on history.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: This is based on a mythology that the party has built up.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is Global Insights by Network 2020.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Today, the Philippines and the fight for the South China Sea.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Joining us today is Gregory Poling, who directs the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at CSIS and has attracted the South China Sea disputes for over a decade.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Our conversation is moderated by Courtney Doggard, the president of Network 2020.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: And what is it really about the region that interests you?
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Courtney, for all your work and all of you for tuning in.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's lovely to virtually meet everybody.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: So as Courtney said in the in the introduction, I'm at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: I got into this largely by accident, which is the way that most people in DC get into their careers, whether they'll admit it or not.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: I was a China hand in undergrad.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: I studied at Fudan University in Shanghai.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: I taught English for a while in China and I came back to D.C.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a Baltimore native for grad school shortly after the 2008 presidential campaign because I decided I wanted to get into public service.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: And when I went to American University, they had an Asia specialization, but you couldn't specialize just on China.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: So one of my first intro to Asian foreign policy courses was taught by Professor Pekun Heng, who's now emeritus American, who's Chinese Malaysian.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: And she put a lot more ASEAN, Southeast Asia, into the course than other professors in a different semester probably would have, which was fortunate for me because I found it to be the most interesting of my courses that semester because it's the only one I didn't know anything about.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: And my whole career since then has been working on U.S.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: China competition in Southeast Asia.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: As for the South China Sea, that was largely a result of my interest in governance and international law.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't get into it because I like counting Navy boats.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not uh a navalist.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: I don't uh read Mahan in my free time.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: I came to this from the international institutions and governance perspective.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so I did, I was uh in the Southeast Asia program at CSIS for about four years.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then when AMTI, the Asian Maritime Transparency Initiative's first director, Mira Rap Hooper, who would eventually go on to be the um senior director for Asia uh on the NSC under the Biden administration, when she left after nine months, I threw in my hat and I became the second director.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I have been the director for the last uh almost 11 years.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: And in 2020, during the pandemic, CSIS had a large number of um unwilling departures, as did a lot of organizations.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so I ended up double-hated back in the Southeast Asia program.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I've been running both of those uh for the last five years, and where they intersect is the Philippines.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: So while I spend about seven or eight weeks a year out in Asia, at least three of that is in the Philippines.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh certainly the plurality of my time these days.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: And even when I'm in Japan or Taiwan or Australia, uh, or even half the time in Vietnam, I'm talking about the Philippines.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I get invited to talk about.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_02: Which is why we invited you here tonight.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: So we're we're very grateful.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_02: So let's just kind of jump right into the latest news.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_02: I mentioned the incident on July 20th between the Chinese ships and the Philippine personnel at the Second Thomas Shoal.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_02: So what is it about this reef?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: Is it militarily or economically important, or is the confrontation about something larger?
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: So let me lay the kind of geographic ground here, and then we'll talk specifically about Second Thomas Shoal.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: So when we talk about the South China Sea disputes, we're talking about two very different kinds of disputes.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: We have a dispute over sovereignty, and we have a dispute over the rules, over maritime, seabed, and airspace.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: The sovereignty dispute is over the island groups, and we can use the term island very loosely here.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: And you've got two numerous, let's say not large, but numerous groups, the Parasol Islands up in the north that are uh contested by China and Vietnam, but are entirely occupied by China, and then you have the Spratly Islands down in the south, the closest country to those being the Philippines, and that's more than 200 reefs.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: They're claimed by China, Taiwan, Vietnam in their entirety, and then big chunks of them are claimed by the Philippines, Malaysia, a little bit by Brunei.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: They're occupied.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: There are, let's see, today more than 50 separate reefs or islands in the Spratleys are occupied, and they are occupied by a mishmash.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: Vietnam has 23 bases, depending on what you count as a reef.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: Philippines comes in second at nine, then China at seven, then Malaysia at five, and then Taiwan at one.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: And all of that, all of those bases are spread across what in their natural state was less than two square miles of land.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: So, in a sense, the most militarized two square miles of land on Earth.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: You also have a couple other features, Scarborough Shoal, which gets talked about a lot as a point of contestation between the Philippines and China.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's off by itself off the coast of Luzon in the northern Philippines.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Second Thomas Shoal is theoretically one of the Spratleys.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: In Chinese, it's called Renayansha, but it actually implicates that second dispute more, the dispute about rules, because the other problem in the South China Sea, and the one that matters more to the US, is not who owns which rock and reef and who might make historic fairy tales about when they first discovered these rocks and reefs, and most of them are fairy tales.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: The problem for the US is that all of the claimant countries base their claims to waters off of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, or the customer international law that that undergirds that, except China.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: China claims what it calls historic rights across almost the entirety of the South China Sea.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that's most often shown via what's called the nine-dash line.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: This little looks like a child's drawing of dashes around the whole perimeter of the sea, and China says we get everything inside of that.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: The reason Second Thomas Shoal is more about that than about the island dispute is because Second Thomas Shoal is not an island.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Second Thomas Shoal is underwater at high tide and at low tide.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: It is an entirely underwater coral reef, which means it's not subject to sovereignty claims.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: You can't drive out in the middle of the ocean and plant a flag underwater and say this is my new territory.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: It is saying it's Second Thomas, is governed by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: And because Second Thomas Shoal is within two 200 miles of the Philippine coast, it is Philippine waters and Philippine seabed.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so the Philippines has had since 1999, I'm sorry, 1998, a single ship that's been intentionally grounded on that reef.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's called the BRP Sierra Madre.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually a World War II era tank landing ship from the US, which we donated to the Arvin Navy in South Vietnam, and it fled across the South China Sea in 75 when Saigon fell and was inducted into the Philippine Navy.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's at this point now a nearly 80-year-old vessel that the Filipinos ran aground on the reef more than a quarter century ago in order to keep an eye on nearby Chinese activity.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: China might not like that, but at the end of the day, international law says the Philippines can do whatever it wants in its own waters.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: And if what it wants is to put eight guys on a rusting 80-year-old ship, then that's the Philippines' right.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: That was a long walk to say that the problem with this incident on Monday that China claims the Philippines started is that when you watch the videos of it, the Chinese Coast Guard personnel on their rigid hold inflatable boats came within about 10 feet of the ship, which means they drove inside the lagoon, approached a Philippine ship in Philippine waters, wielding boat hooks and blaring trumpets and telling the Filipinos to go away, and the Filipinos got in their boat to drive it away.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if if the cops showed up and I was having a fist fight with somebody in my lawn, the presumption is that he shouldn't be in my lawn.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: Not that he gets to turn around and say I started the fight.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what happened here.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so with that in mind, how does this idea of historic rights play into China's overall strategy in the South China Sea and what they're hoping to get from these kinds of actions?
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and this gets back to your question of is there any strategic or economic or military value to Second Thomas Scholl?
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: And the answer is not particularly.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: There is to the overall South China Sea, certainly.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of the wasted ink on the South China Sea disputes for more than a decade now is just people arguing about why China cares so much.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it ends up being a Rorschach test, right?
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're a navalist, you say that the reason the South China Sea matters, the reason China does everything it does, is because the PLA Navy wants to use it as a submarine bastion.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: If you are an energy economist, you say the only reason that China cares is because of oil and gas resources under the South China Sea.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: If you are a fisheries expert, you say what matters is that it's probably the most productive fishing ground on the planet.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: And all of those things are true, and yet none of them explain why Xi Jinping comes up with historic fairy tales about Zheng He's sails through the South China Sea and why these Chinese names mean that they've been Chinese since time immemorial.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: The fact is that China cares about these rocks and reefs for the same reason that societies have been fighting over unimportant pieces of land for as long as we organize ourselves into societies.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's nationalism, fairy tales, in-and-out group dynamics.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: The Chinese Communist Party has created a fiction that these islands and rocks and reefs were historically Chinese, which they were not, that they were stolen from China by its ungrateful smaller neighbors during the century and a half of humiliation, which they were not, and that they now must be reclaimed.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that narrative has existed in some form or another since at least 1951 or so.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's become so much more noxious under Xi Jinping's rule because she has embedded it deeply into his political program, what's often called the China Dream.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, in the very first China Dream speech when she was elevated to the presidency, I'm sorry, the one he gave in the summer of 2013 when he was made um C chair, he talked about the need to for China to step out as a maritime great power and to reclaim lost territory.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so it is now risen in political salience for the CPC.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: It is often talked about as a core interest, and traditionally the Chinese core interests are Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and religious separatism.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's some debate about whether or not it's in group one there or in group one B, but it is at least a near core interest for Xi Jinping.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: And that makes the Chinese side much more risk-tolerant than it was before, much more aggressive in pursuit of these revanchist claims, and much, much more unlikely to compromise, at least as long as he's in power.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: This is we often get sidetracked.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: I just got back from Hainan.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: I was at a workshop, uh track two workshop with Chinese maritime experts in Sanya on the South China Sea just a couple weeks ago.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I often tell, kind of like halfway in, I lose my patience.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: Guys, can we stop talking about the historical record?
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: Because it it doesn't matter, right?
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: I can present all the documents I want proving that the Qing dynasty considered Hainan to be the southern limit of its territory.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: I can present all documents in the world proving that Vietnam was the first country to annex the Paris under Emperor Zha Long in, I think, 1816, right?
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: I can prove that Republic China forces under uh governments under Chang Kai-shek rejected efforts to claim the Spratly Islands because they couldn't find any evidence that any Chinese official would ever step foot on them in the 2,000 years of recorded Chinese history.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: But none of that matters because it's irrelevant, right?
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: This is not based on history, this is based on a mythology that the party has built up.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so we all people often kind of go down these rabbit holes arguing about it.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: And in theory, if you could convince China and Vietnam to go to the International Court of Justice on the Paris, Vietnam would win.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: In theory, if you could convince China and the Philippines to go on Scarborough, the Philippines would win.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: But China's never going to agree to do that.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: So it doesn't really matter who had administration.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: All that matters is what China has been able to convince itself, or at least convince its people.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: And the mythology's taken on a life of its own.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: I find it interesting, and I'm curious to get your take on this because a lot of what I've heard about China and conversations over recent years is that they're very interested in, and you see this positioning even when it comes to, let's say, AI and what they're trying to do with AI governance, the idea of global governance and rule of law.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: And yet it seems like in this case, they're very willing to put aside the UN, the law of the sea.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so I'm just be curious with your understanding of China, how do you reconcile that behavior?
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: So I, on my way home today on the train, I was editing a piece by our research associate, Monica Sato, on the environmental legacy in the South China Sea, because part of this massive arbitration case that the Philippines won, included several points about China failing its legal obligations in in the maritime environment of the South China Sea.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: And yet, China advocates that the new secretariat for the UN Treaty on Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction, which is this giant landmark treaty that entered into force this year that for the first time seeks to protect marine life in the high seas, that secretariat should be placed in Xiamen in China, so that China can be the great rule setter in international marine governments.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: And her argument, which is you can't empower China on the 10th anniversary of the Arbitrol Award, proving that China engages in gross hypocrisy when it comes to maritime law.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: This speaks to a, I think, a more important point about the way China views international law and rules and institutions.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: In China, there's more of a philosophical problem here, which is the party itself is still Marxist-Leninist, and Xi Jinping in particular is a good doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: And in that framework, there is no such thing as international law norms or institutions that had any value or power of their own.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: If you had tried to convince Vladimir Lenin that international law had some kind of binding power on states, he would have laughed in your face right before sending you to a gulang.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: The official Chinese response internally, if you're at a party school, would be that the international rules-based order, as developed after World War II, is nothing, never was anything but a reflection of US power in the national system.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: That the U.S.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: set it up purely as window dressing for the exercise of American hegemony.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: That as American hegemony wanes and China's hegemony rises, the rules are irrelevant.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: That they don't have any moral value.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: They were only ever reflections of US power.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: And they only ever had to constrain China when China was relatively weak.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: And even then, only in order for China to seek opportunistic advantage within the system.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: Now that China is no longer weak, the system must change.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: And if other countries don't like it, then other countries should become great powers and they can write their own rules.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_02: Just like that.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_02: Very easy.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: Just like that.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: And the most infamous anecdote on this was the 2010 ASEAN Regional Forum in Hanoi, the first time that Secretary of State at the time Hillary Clinton was compelled by the Vietnamese hosts to raise the South China Sea issue and talk about why the U.S.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: had such a national interest in freedom of navigation.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: And she spoke, and all the ASEAN leaders spoke, along with most of the dialogue partners.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: And at the time, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jet-chu, who would later become the state counselor, Yang Jet-Cho got so angry he stormed out of the room, and then he famously stormed back into the room and he waved his finger in the face of George Joe, who was the Singaporean foreign minister, and yelled, some countries are big countries and some countries are small, and that's just the way it is.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that's gone down as kind of a piece of diplomatic legend within Southeast Asia that no matter what the Chinese say, you always have to bring up the Giorgio anecdote to remind yourself that they're just blowing hot air.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: At the end of the day, they don't see Southeast Asian countries as co-equal states in an international system.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because China does not believe that there is such a thing as coequal states or international system.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: China believes that China matters, the United States matters.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: On its best days, occasionally you have to pay attention to Russia, the UK, and Japan.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody else matters.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_02: That is a very telling anecdote.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for bringing that up.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted to turn now to when you're rank ordering the countries, um the title of the talk, The Philippines.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_02: We we entitled this uh the strategic importance of the Philippines in the South China Sea.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um so I'd love to talk a little bit about Philippine, the Philippines, and how they've been reacting to this.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so when China has been using this gray zone strategy, as it's called in the Philippines, how has it worked and what has a Philippines' response been?
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: So when people use the word gray zone, coercion, gray zone strategy, um, it often gets stretched to the point where I think it becomes analytically useless.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: But what what gray zone I it actually means, where it's actually useful, is when we think about um use of force and use of coercion that stays what the military would call left of bang, right?
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: It does not present a Casa spell eye.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: You don't kill anybody, you don't blow anything up, ideally, you do not present an excuse for a proportionate escalation to lethal force by the other side.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: So this is threats, intimidation, intentional creation of risk, weaponization of risk, use of non-lethals, or what the US military likes to call intermediate force, dazzling lasers and acoustic devices and water cannons and pepper balls and all of that.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason China does all of this, I think twofold.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: One, it does not want to provoke US intervention.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: Keep in mind that we do have a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: It is overlooked in the US that it is the oldest mutual defense treaty we have in the Indo-Pacific.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: So the Philippines is our oldest ally in the region.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: And we have been exceedingly clear since at least I mean, we've been clear since 79 that if you just outright kill Filipinos in the South Chinese, we get we have to intervene.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: But we've been exceedingly clear since at least 2000 that any violence against these islands, even though we remain neutral on their sovereignty, would trigger US obligations under the treaty.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: China wants to be the global leader.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: The last time there was a large scale exchange of fire in the South Chinese Sea was China gunning down sixty four basically defenseless Vietnamese troops in the Spratleys in nineteen eighty eight.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: But as long as China believes that it can get its way by bullying and coercion, then it'll prefer to do that.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: Over the last five years, that strategy has really stalled out for Beijing.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: Two things have happened.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: I think one, it's become a victim of its own success, because what's left of the Southeast Asian claimants now are the things that they care most about.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: The oil and gas fields they still have are the ones that they're really willing to take some risk for.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: Vietnam being a good example, Vietnam canceled dozens of foreign contracts, and basically every foreigner has bailed out of Vietnam's offshore energy industry at this point.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: What it's got left right now is a place called the Nankansan field, which provides about 10% of the electricity for Ho Chi Minh City.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: It will not abandon it, and so it's expanding that field despite huge Chinese pressure.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: Same with Malaysia on this place called Kasawari, which is the biggest gas find they've ever found.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: Or in the case of the Philippines here in Second Thomas, China's really backed them up to the outposts they actually control and is finding that they're not going to abandon them.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's one thing to give up a patrol route or a fishing ground.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: You're not going to give up an actual military facility.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so the Southeast Asians have become more and more willing to call China's bluff.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that has created, I think, significant frustrations for Chinese operators on the ground who are being told by their leadership that you need to stop all Southeast Asian activity in our area of historic rights unless we give them permission, but don't shoot them.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: And the result are things like what we saw on Monday.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: Chinese troops doing things that are just wildly unprofessional, extremely dangerous, and that lead to unintended injuries and sometimes even fatalities.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: And on this point, I just close this.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: We've I mentioned the 1988 battle in the Johnson Reef.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: There's only been one death of a uniformed service member since then that we know of.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it was last August when a Chinese Navy frigate and a Chinese Coast Guard cutter were trying to block the path of a Philippine patrol ship, and they rammed into each other, and at least two, and probably four Chinese Coast Guard personnel were killed.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: This is what happens when you operate in the quote gray zone like this, right?
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: Non-lethal force is only non-lethal in a statistical sense.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: You hit enough people with high-pressure water cannons, you ram enough boats, you shoot enough people in the eyes with lasers when they're flying overhead, eventually somebody gets killed.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_02: So with that in mind, and keeping in mind the treaty obligation that you had mentioned earlier, what do things look like between Manila and Washington right now?
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_02: And how durable of a relationship do you see between the two countries?
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: So the alliance has undergone a really remarkable period of modernization in a very short period of time.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it's taken me by surprise, and I was one of the, I think, very few champions of the importance of the Philippine Alliance for quite a long time.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: So under the previous Philippine government of Rodrigo Duterte to 2022, the prevailing narrative is that the alliance was on life support.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: And Duterte did come into office with a very anti-American bent, a very pro-Chinese bent, suspended a lot of things, really tried his best for about two years to undermine and potentially even abrogate the U.S.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: Philippine Alliance.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: And was blocked by what we might call the deep state on the Philippine side, the whole Philippine military establishment, the security establishment, and the public, who had enormous incentives and a lot of past dependency on the U.S.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: Alliance, and in which there's huge support among the public for the alliance.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: He was also foiled by the fact that China didn't reciprocate.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: So Duterte made an implicit bargain that if I'm nice to China and I push the Americans away, I'm going to get two things.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to get billions and billions of dollars of Chinese investment in aid, and the Chinese are going to be nicer to us in the South China Sea.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: The aid never showed up, the investments never eventuated, and Chinese forces continued to kick in the heads of Filipino fishers every time they got a chance.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: So by 2020, and certainly 2021, Duterte had largely given up on his efforts to weaken the alliance.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: He had kind of just put it in the hands of his cabinet and his military officers.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so when the Biden administration took office in 2021, you had a very rapid uh, not just repair, but kind of going above and beyond what we had seen under the Obama administration.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: Lloyd Austin, when he became Secretary of Defense, made his very first trip to Asia, to Singapore and the Philippines.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: And in that Philippines visit, he got, he met with Duterte and he got Duterte to rescind his threats to abrogate the core agreement under the U.S.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: Philippine Alliance, which in it besides the MDT is what's called the Visiting Forces Agreement, and that facilitates the entry of U.S.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: troops.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: And then that November in 2021, we had what's called the bilateral strategic dialogue.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: This is the biggest basically assistant secretary or deputy commander of PACOM level coordinating committee that meets every year to figure out what the alliance is going to do for the next 12 months.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: It was the first time they had been able to meet in person since the pandemic.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: And they released this document.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: It was called the uh uh blueprint for a 21st century partnership.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: And what it basically was was a blueprint to modernize the alliance, to make it look more like the US-Japan um or US Korea or US Australia alliances.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: They said they were going to massively increase foreign military financing to the Philippines, that they were gonna um write a set of defense guidelines.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: Basically, what is the alliance for?
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: Which is it's shocking to realize that we've never done that, even though the Philippines is the oldest U.S.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: ally in Asia.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: We've done it three times with the Japanese since the 70s.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: Never bothered to ask the Philippines what they thought the U.S.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: Philippine Alliance was supposed to accomplish.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we were gonna expand what's called the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, which is a 2014 agreement that gives the U.S.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: rotational access to predetermined Philippine bases, because we don't have U.S.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: bases in the Philippines anymore, and we never will again.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: But we are net under EDCA, we are permitted to build facilities for the use of both uh militaries and rotate U.S.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: forces and materiel through through these bases.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we were supposed to finally conclude a Jasomia, which is a general security of military information agreement.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: This is a basically allows the sharing of highly classified uh intelligence in near real time.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: So it's the kind of thing that you absolutely must do if you're trying to establish joint command and control and the like.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: We we've never had a Jasomia with the Philippines because we didn't trust their information security enough.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um and we were supposed to set up a maritime security dialogue uh that was going to deal with this gray zone stuff.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: So that was 2021.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um they accomplished all five of them within four years.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the Jasomia was the last one.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: And and for context, similar agreements and structures in the US-Japan context, we started setting those up after the first Korean nuclear crisis, so about 94, we started these discussions.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: It took more than 12 years to do that.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so it's really been on hyperdrive.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: And to give you a sense of scale here, when the Biden administration took office, the Philippines was the largest recipient of US foreign military financing in the Indo-Pacific.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: It was still only getting something like 30, 20 to 30 million dollars a year.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, like uh I think at the time Tunisia got more FMF from the US than the entire Indo-Pacific did.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so the Philippines was the biggest at like 30 million.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um it was 50 million by the first year of the Biden administration, then a hundred.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: In the FY24 NDAA, it was 500 million um that was uh appropriated.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: And then last year in the NDAA, the Congress passed the Philippine, uh, I think it's called the Philippine Reassurance Act that authorizes a maximum of$500 million a year per year for five years.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: So that is potentially$2.5 billion over five years for a country that just four years ago was getting 20 to 30 million a year.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: This is enormous advances.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_02: So looking ahead, what are the two or three developments that you think you're most closely watching, or you think we should all be keeping an eye on?
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_02: And where might the next crisis emerge?
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_02: And what would that signal to you about where things are headed?
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, on the water, despite this incident, second Thomas on Monday, the most dangerous area is Scarborough Shoal.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: Scarborough Shoals a this little collection of rocks that I mentioned.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's about 150 miles off the coast of Luzon.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's clearly within the Philippine Exclusive Economic Zone, although theoretically, because they are rocks above water at high tide, it qualifies as an island, not a fully entitled island under national law, but it it is subject to a sovereignty claim.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it was under effective Philippine administration at least from the end of World War II until 2012, when China seized control of it.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um tensions at Scarborough have been building right for the last three years, probably.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the number of Chinese forces around the shoal doubled between 2024 and 2025, and they're set to double again this year.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: And Scarborough was the location I mentioned where the Chinese killed their own men.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's we've seen so much Chinese effort at Scarborough over the last six months that for the first time in more than a decade of AMTI, of our initiative tracking vessel activity, we're actually seeing China force to pull vessels away from other patrol locations.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: So, like Vietnam, for instance, has gotten a significant break on its oil and gas fields over the last six months because Chinese Coast Guard forces have to spend less time there because they're spending so much time trying to block Philippine activity at Scarborough.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we've seen a number of collisions and near fatalities.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh within a week of the Trump Sea meeting in Beijing this year, we had the China U.S.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: Coast Guard conduct its first ever joint patrol with the Philippine Coast Guard around Scarborough Shoal.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: And now we've got the U.S.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: announcing that six U.S.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: Coast Guard cutters as part of this new expeditionary squadron will be operating out of Singapore and the Philippines going forward.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I'd expect more and more U.S.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_01: activity around Scarborough.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're looking for like where might we wake up tomorrow and find out that there's been an exchange of fire between either China and the Philippines that brings in the US or directly between China and the US, it's Scarborough show.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's still, the problem with the South Genesee is it could literally happen anywhere.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: We've got hundreds of rocks and reefs and so many points of contact.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: But this is the one that would have the best odds and should worry us the most.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: The other thing worth watching right now is this diplomatic balance that the Philippines has been trying to strike, which is really falling apart, between the fact that this year the Philippines is the chair of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: So this week, Marco Rubio is in the Philippines for the annual foreign ministers' meetings, the ASEAN ministerial meetings, and what's called the ASEAN Regional Forum.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_01: As the chair, the Philippines has been pushing hard for the conclusion of what's called the code of conduct.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: This is a 30-year dream of ASEAN at this point to get China to sign a legally binding document that would manage these disputes, not solve them, but manage how they behave.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it's clearly fallen apart.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody's saying it's dead again.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's dead.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's been dead for 25 years.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: The first version of the code of conduct was presented to China the same year that Titanic was the number one movie in the world.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: So it's dead.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: But the Philippines had to go through this rigmarole this year of pretending that they really thought this could be the year.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: Meanwhile, this is also the 10-year anniversary of the Philippines' massive victory over China in the Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2016, which was the first time that any country had ever been taken to compulsory dispute settlement under UNCLOS.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_01: The Philippines brought 15 claims against China and they won 14 of them.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so the Philippines has been trying to strike the balance between how much do we crow about the award and try to rally international support to demand that China finally comply with it versus play the good cop because we're the chair of ASEAN and we have to be seen as responsible.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we're kind of we're seeing this come unglued now because as it's clear the code of conduct isn't working, we're seeing more and more talk about the arbitration, which led, for instance, to the US and 13 other countries at the UN just last week issuing this big letter, uh joint letter demanding that China comply.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I think you'll see more of that, the Philippine trying to pile pressure on China.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: Philippines is also just pissed off.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they're they feel like they've not gotten any reciprocation for what they've tried to do this year.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um President Marcos was in New York at the beginning of the month.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm sorry, at the end of last month, for the uh UN, the annual votes on the UN Security Council.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Philippines was supposed to take a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and they had like a shocking, I think went to five ballots, loss to Kyrgyzstan in what was clearly orchestrated by a Chinese and Russian lobbying effort.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: So the Filipinos are just angry.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_02: I just wanted to finish with a very quick lightning round.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um and if you could just give us kind of the headline version, like one or two sentences for each, I'd really appreciate it.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_02: So do you think are we closer to conflict than we were a year ago?
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: As a matter of mathematics, yes.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_01: We are seeing more and more interactions that could lead to conflict.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: What is the biggest misconception about China's strategy?
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: That China is preparing to fight the US Seventh Fleet for control of the South China Sea.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: China's strategy is to convince all of the US's allies and partners that the US is a paper tiger and won't fight anyway, and get them to abandon their claims and therefore neutralize any U.S.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: ability to even operate in the theater.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_02: What is the most dangerous place on the map right now?
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_02: I think you mentioned maybe Scarborough Shoal, but would you Scarborough, yeah.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I but I would heighten that to make a clear point here.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_01: Scarborough Shoal is the most dangerous place in Asia right now.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: We spend far too much time thinking about Taiwan.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: If a fight's coming over Taiwan, we're gonna see it at least six months in advance.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: If a fight's coming over the South China Sea, we're gonna wake up and find out about it tomorrow.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_02: Great distinction.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think the U.S.-Philippines alliance will be stronger or weaker three years from now?
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think it'll be weaker, but I think it may plateau.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: The Philippines has an election in 2028.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: And Rodrigo Duterte's daughter is currently the favorite, although I think she's probably I would not bet on her over the field, but she is certainly the leading candidate to potentially become the next Philippine president.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_02: Excellent.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_02: And what is the one development that you think everyone should watch?
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: Xi Jinping's actuarial chart.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because at the end of the day, doesn't matter how clever we are or how determined we are, there is absolutely no way to resolve this as long as Xi Jinping remains in charge of the Chinese Communist Party.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Greg.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_02: This has been fantastic.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_02: You've really taken us from kind of the current event to the broader history to what the view looks like from Beijing to Manila.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Global Insight.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: You can subscribe to Global Insight.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: For more analysis, events.