Philippines Gathering Allies To Tame China At Sea

A hallmark of the Ferdinand Marcos Jr administration, however, is also reaching out to so-called“non-traditional partners”, most notably India and Vietnam, which also have their own territorial disputes with China.

The Philippine president is now pursuing a new maritime agreement with Vietnam, likely based on the 2016 arbitral tribunal ruling, as well as expanded defense cooperation with India, which is set to deliver the much-vaunted BrahMos missile defense systems to the Philippines this year.

The Philippines and Vietnam have the most similar threat perception vis-à-vis China among the sea's varirival claimants, with both embroiled in decades-long maritime disputes with the Asian power.

Both have employed a combination of strategic and diplomatic means to counter China's expanding footprint in overlapping areas of claim.

Philippine-Vietnam bilateral relations, however, reached new heights in the early 2010s when Manila filed an unprecedented arbitration case against Beijing under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

Across Southeast Asia, only one country openly backed the Philippines and even suggested a potential joint legal case against China at some point in the future.

Vietnam's most important legal intervention came in 2014, when it submitted a highly sympathetic position paper on the Philippines' efforts to leverage international law to resolve the disputes.

“It is Vietnam's consistent position to
fully reject China's claim over [Paracels] and [Spratlys] archipelagoes and the adjacent waters, as well as China's claiming
of 'historic rights' to the waters, sea-bed and subsoil within the 'dotted line' unilaterally stated by China,” the Vietnamese foreign ministry said.

Crucially, then-Vietnamese prime minister Nguyen Tan Dung openly threatened to file a parallel legal case following China's deployment of a giant oil rig to an area near the disputed paracel islands , which sparked massive protests and a temporary diplomatic breakdown between the two communist neighbors.

During this period, the Philippines and Vietnam also expanded maritime security cooperation, including Vietnamese warship goodwill visits to Manila and friendly games among their troops stationed in the Spratly group of islands.

But the burgeoning ties came to an abrupt halt when then-president Rodrigo Duterte largely ignored Vietnam in favor of warmer ties with China.

On multiple occasions, his top officials, including his former foreign affairs secretary, even tried to portray vietnam as a hostile rival in the south china sea, partly in an effort to downplay China's massive reclamation activities in the area.

Since coming to power, however, Marcos Jr has placed Vietnam at the heart of his regional strategy of balancing China. In his first year in office alone, Marcos Jr has held at least three meetings with high-level Vietnamese officials.

The bilateral talks ostensibly covered food security, since Vietnam alone is responsible for 90% of the Philippines' total rice imports. As acting agriculture secretary, Marcos Jr is intent on expanding cooperation with Vietnam to new heights.

Crucially, however, the Filipino president also sees Hanoi as a key maritime security partner. Recently, the Filipino president admitted that the two sides have been negotiating a new maritime cooperation agreement, which likely aims to enhance defense cooperation but also delineate overlapping claims in the Spratlys based on the UNCLOS.

Last December, Vietnam and Indonesia successfully finalized decade-long negotiations over maritime border delimitation. The Philippines is likely seeking a similar deal with Vietnam based on the 2016 arbitral tribunal ruling at The Hague.

“Now that we are going to start discussions on the agreement that we have between the Philippines and Vietnam, I think it is a very, very important part of our relationship and it will bring an element of stability to the problems that we are seeing now in the South China Sea,” Marcos was quoted as saying following a recent meeting with Vietnamese officials.

Marcos Jr hailed the impending maritime cooperation agreement as“a very big step” toward building a united front to confront“common challenges”, namely China's expanding footprint in the South China Sea.

Meanwhile, India is emerging as another major“non-traditional” partner. The two sides held their 5th meeting of their Joint Commission on Bilateral Cooperation (JCBC) in New Delhi earlier this year, where Philippine Secretary for Foreign Affairs Enrique Manalo and Indian Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar discussed ways to accelerate comprehensive strategic cooperation including on maritime security.

In their joint statement, India and the Philippines stressed“the need for peaceful settlement of disputes, and for adherence to international law,” with New Delhi reaffirming the finality and binding nature of the 2016 arbitral tribunal award.

Just a week earlier, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi andPresident Biden agreed to address“challenges to the maritime rules-based order, including in the East and South China Seas” amid expanding maritime defense cooperation under the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue framework.

Under its“Look East” policy, India is rapidly expanding its economic and strategic footprint in Southeast Asia, with the Philippines emerging as a promising partner. In fact, Manila is India's first major defense customer following the finalization of the us$375 million
brahmos missile defense deal last year.

The Philippine military is expected to deploy the new missile defense system, which has a top speed of around Mach 2.8 and is capable of carrying warheads weighing 200 to 300 kilograms from aircraft, warships or land to its frontier provinces facing the South China Sea.

The Philippine Marine Corps' Shore Based Anti-Ship Missile battalion will be operating the Indian anti-ship missile system. To boost bilateral cooperation, India is also set to place a permanent defense attaché in Manila for the first time in recent history.

“We are natural and traditional partners. India and the Philippines have much to offer each other,” Manalo said during his visit to India earlier this year.

“We think this is perhaps only the beginning of further defense cooperation, not only in terms of weapons, but also in training and best practices. This is an important event in our defense cooperation,” he added, referring to the BrahMos missile system.

Follow Richard Javad Heydarian on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @richeydarian