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Cross posting from /r/credibledefense, but thought Mottizens might have an angle on this.
As someone with family in the Philippines, I’ve been feeling concerned about risks presented by the country’s close alliance with an increasingly volatile US, especially in the context of a war in the West Philippine Sea/SCS that the US is looking more and more likely to lose. A few years ago, the US felt to me like a better partner than China after Duterte’s reconciliation efforts with Xi were largely rebuffed, and since then we’ve seen a major investment in new US bases in the Philippines, especially Luzon. However, a number of factors make me think that the Philippines would be better off explicitly pivoting towards neutrality.
First, there’s the simple fact that US naval construction remains deeply and utterly broken, as I’m sure most of us are aware, while China’s continues to grow at pace. The starkness of this disparity has grown in recent years and it no longer looks like the US has the state capacity to fix it. Consequently, the likelihood of a conflict over Taiwan that goes badly for the US and leaves the region in control of China is higher than it used to be. Moreover, while the US can pack its bags and go back to Guam, the Philippines will forever be stuck less than 200 miles off the coast of mainland China.
Second, and much more recent, there’s the shift towards a more erratic and transactional foreign policy by the US. While US bases in the Philippines are of mutual benefit for now, it’s not inconceivable to imagine a rug-pull exercise whereby the US pulls its forces out in exchange for a concession from China. Likewise, it’s questionable whether the old ideals of loyalty would mean the US would help with reconstruction if the Philippines got hit hard by Chinese missile strikes in a Taiwan conflict. Additionally, many of the soft-power inducements provided by USAID projects in the Philippines have now been cancelled. I don’t want to turn this into a discussion of the Trump administration per se, but the reality is that US foreign strategy has undergone a colossal shift in the last two months, and that changes the incentives for its partners.
Third, while China wants its extravagant claims to islands in the West Philippine Sea to be recognised, and probably wants economic and political influence in the Philippines itself, there’s zero indication or historical precedent to suggest that China wants to annex any of the major islands in the Philippines. Consequently, it’s really not clear to me that the security advantages provided by US forces are significant enough to justify the very real and kinetic risks associated with hosting US forces. I’m particularly concerned about nuclear risks, where in a rapidly spiralling conflict China might judge nuclear strikes on US military targets in the Philippines to be less likely to escalate to all-out strategic nuclear warfare than eg attacks on US bases in Guam or Japan.
Fourth and finally, the current presence of US bases in the Philippines does offer them a bargaining chip. It seems to me that the Philippines could basically offer a “Finlandization” deal to China where it would commit to total neutrality in any conflict in the region and withdraw from Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement with the US. Probably to sweeten the package it would have to make some painful concessions to China on disputed islands like Scarborough Shoal, but it could potential walk away with robust guarantees of long-term functional autonomy and non-interference, conditional on remaining neutral.
I’d be interested to hear others’ thoughts, though! Am I being too bleak, or missing some upsides to the alliance for the Philippines?
The question is what do you mean by neutrality. For instance up until recently Finland was neutral, but they spend more money on defense than majority of NATO countries, they have compulsory military service and conscription and warplans that involve turning the whole country into one large military fortress. Being neutral means you have to prepare to face all threats without allies and thus it is much more difficult and costly when it comes to defense spending. Unless you are one of the countries like Switzerland, Austria or Ireland for which it is easy to be neutral as they are far away from any belligerent country.
But for instance if you are country like Belgium which was neutral both before WW1 and before WW2, then neutrality means jack shit when bordering a belligerent neighbor. The only thing neutrality achieved was preventing allies to station their troops there before Germans invaded. This fate of neutral countries was probably main reason why Finland recently decided to join NATO, as neutral Finland could prove to be a soft target for Russia once it wrapped its war in Ukraine. With Puting waving old imperial maps before people like Tucker Carlson when explaining Casus Belli, it is is easy to remember that up until 1917 the Grand Duchy of Finland was part of Russian Empire.
Maybe what you meant was something like Philippines becoming vassals of China instead of USA? That could work for preventing war, but it will not work for larger independence and neutrality as it is normally viewed.
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You're being too bleak.
Ancient Chinese proverb: Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
China is vanishingly unlikely to act during this period of disunity between the US and Europe. When they do make the Philippines a client state, it will not be in the style of Japanese WWII aggression. It will be through stronger trade links, a market dominant Han population, and gradual encroachment. When it happens, Reddit will celebrate it. You'll probably celebrate it.
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Why do you expect that nuclear bombs would be the weapon of choice if China wanted to knock out US bases in the Philippines? The comparatively short distance from the mainland, relatively difficult setting for air defense against numerous low-flying targets and likelihood that China would consider its immediate neighbours to be soft-power targets to some extent all point to it being a good use case for their rapidly evolving drone technology. I'm also not sure if nuking a base in the Philippines would be seen as safer than nuking Guam - American servicemen would die all the same, and my sense was that most of the world, America included, does not even think of Guam as an area with a civilian population. If the US leadership at that point is at all concerned with the opinion of the peanut gallery, nuking a US (directly involved belligerent) base and large numbers of hapless civilians of a third country that happened to be in the way will surely be seen as giving the US more of a moral mandate to nuke back than just nuking a US base?
(Remind the world that the Guamese exist? Might take too long on global thermonuclear war time if done afterwards, and inspires questions about colonialism that nobody particularly wants to deal with. Grant it statehood? Altering the hair's-breadth equilibrium of US politics in such a fundamental way is usually not seen as worth the political capital it would cost.)
(edit:
What do you see about that sub? The substance seems essentially indistinguishable from /r/worldnews or the long-degraded /r/geopolitics, except everyone is LARPing as an FP writer.)
To be clear, I don’t think a nuclear strike on the Philippines is intrinsically likely, but conditional on the war going nuclear, the Philippines might well be prioritised over Guam as a first target primarily because it wouldn’t set the precedent of targeting American soil.
For example, imagine the US loses a carrier, and decides to respond with an SLCM-N strike on a Chinese command vessel. China decides it needs a symbolic strike to respond, but doesn’t want to move too far up the escalation ladder too fast, so it hits an isolated but operationally significant US base in the Philippines. Civilian casualties might be comparatively low; if you hit Fort Magsaysay Airfield for example civilisation casualties might be in the low thousands, similar to what you’d get from hitting Guam.
Right, but will the Chinese interpret (and expect the Americans, and other observers, to interpret) Guam as American soil for this purpose? In a limited (non-MAD) nuclear exchange, it seems that optics/bystander moral buy-in would matter nontrivially for escalatory decisions, and accepting any civilian nuclear casualties in the Philippines (and of course fallout, which is still itself treated as beyond the moral pale to inflict upon someone) would surely, in descending order of confidence, (1) be seen as making China more deserving of retaliation in the eyes of third-party bystanders and (2) the same in the eyes of the American public. It would also put everyone else hosting American bases on high alert - Japan might grit its teeth and mostly sit out a Taiwan invasion, but how would that calculus change if it also had to make a snap decision between kicking the Americans out and having Okinawa nuked?
(On that matter, there is perhaps some argument that if the Chinese do prefer to fire a warning shot at American overseas bases, the Japanese ones would be preferable over the Philippine ones? In a CN-TW conflict scenario, Japanese hearts and minds would be as lost to the Chinese as Polish ones are to the Russians over RU-UA; the same can't be said of the Filipinos)
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Maybe just read this post again and take a breath. How would this post sound to an objective person?
This is not going to happen anytime soon. The Philippines are not a priority for China. There's not going to be a nuclear war between US and China. Etc.. Etc...
It might be a good time to think about your social media diet.
Counterpoint- if the specter of WW3 with Russia is enough for Trump-aligned parties to want to cut ties with Ukraine to hedge risk and cut potential costs, the specter of WW3 with China is enough for non-Trump aligned parties to want to cut ties with Trump-aligned parties to hedge risk and cut potential costs.
I'm fully open with calling both of them hyperbolic, but hyperbole has a lot of sway in the governing coalition of the current white house, and those who embrace hyperbole on one side of the world don't exactly get to claim that others are being unreasonable for similar framings of concern on the other. The use of the framing as legitimate enough to drive sudden shifts in US policy likewise legitimizes the use of framings by other parties, including in directions against american preferences.
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It’s certainly a timely post. A Philippine F/A-18 just went missing over the South China Sea about an hour ago.
Sorry for being a pedant, but the missing aircraft is an F/A-50, they'd don't operate Hornets.
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