Early in the 21st century, China began asserting what it calls its “historic rights” to control of one of the world’s great waterways, covering the vast majority of the 1.3 million square miles of the South China Sea.
China drew up new maps featuring what became known as the “nine-dash line,” which dangled southward from the Chinese mainland lolling like the tongue of an overheated cow to lap waters that drew close to the shorelines of many other countries in the region. Old arguments were revived and refined from the Nationalist era about how Chinese tradition treated the waters as part of China’s sovereign domain, claiming that the sea’s many islands had been discovered by Chinese navigators in antiquity and seldom disputed since.
Having intimidated Vietnam during a bloody confrontation over one of those islands in the Spratly chain in 1988, where 64 Vietnamese sailors and naval infantry were gunned down at a place called Johnson South Reef as they sought to hold their position there, it seemed there was only one country standing in China’s way toward its goal of obtaining regional acquiescence. That was the Philippines, a nation composed of nothing but islands in that sea. Many of those islands are tiny, and the nation’s economy—much poorer than its larger neighbor—was banking on exploiting deep-sea oil deposits in areas within its 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone, and hence conventionally defined by international laws of the sea as its own.
Early in the 21st century, China began asserting what it calls its “historic rights” to control of one of the world’s great waterways, covering the vast majority of the 1.3 million square miles of the South China Sea.
China drew up new maps featuring what became known as the “nine-dash line,” which dangled southward from the Chinese mainland lolling like the tongue of an overheated cow to lap waters that drew close to the shorelines of many other countries in the region. Old arguments were revived and refined from the Nationalist era about how Chinese tradition treated the waters as part of China’s sovereign domain, claiming that the sea’s many islands had been discovered by Chinese navigators in antiquity and seldom disputed since.
Having intimidated Vietnam during a bloody confrontation over one of those islands in the Spratly chain in 1988, where 64 Vietnamese sailors and naval infantry were gunned down at a place called Johnson South Reef as they sought to hold their position there, it seemed there was only one country standing in China’s way toward its goal of obtaining regional acquiescence. That was the Philippines, a nation composed of nothing but islands in that sea. Many of those islands are tiny, and the nation’s economy—much poorer than its larger neighbor—was banking on exploiting deep-sea oil deposits in areas within its 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone, and hence conventionally defined by international laws of the sea as its own.
In 2004, on the back of large-scale Chinese investment then pouring into the Philippines, China was able to convince the government of newly elected Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to sign an agreement allowing for joint oil exploration in the waters off the coast of the Philippines that were claimed by China, even though they all clearly fell within the Philippines’ continental shelf. However, facing public anger after press reports revealed the details of the agreement, Manila allowed it to lapse in 2008, two years before its term was due to end, prompting China to begin pushing claims that the waters in question had belonged to it all along.
Lacking the means to police its own waters, in 2013, the Philippines resorted to international law, filing a case with an arbitral tribunal in the Hague under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), aiming to have China’s nine-dash line claims invalidated. Manila’s ace card seemed to be that both countries had signed UNCLOS, which took effect in 1994. Seemingly aware that its claims were on shaky legal ground, Beijing said that the tribunal in the Hague had no jurisdiction and that its ruling would be ignored. China even declined to present a case.
The tribunal was not deterred. In July 2016, it issued a remarkable unanimous decision that amounted to a near-categorical rejection of China’s claims, finding that assertions of historically remote discovery were no substitute for an established record of actual control. For all of its defiant rhetoric, a great power had been put on the defensive by a minor one.
China did not merely retreat to lick its wounds, though. As I wrote in my 2017 book, Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power, Beijing responded with a vast acceleration of its efforts to control the South China Sea, a waterway through which an enormous portion of the world’s trade passes. Catching the world by surprise, it began building islands from scratch and expanding reefs throughout the sea, endowing them with freshly built towns and cities and with military outposts bristling with sophisticated equipment.
In this same era, the administration of then-U.S. President Barack Obama had begun what it called a “pivot to Asia,” which aimed to rebalance U.S. forces in the world, shifting naval and other military assets away from Europe and the Middle East and toward East Asia. The Philippines had been a long-standing treaty ally of the United States, and everything seemed to point toward the likelihood of a test of strength between Washington and Beijing over respect for Manila’s sovereign interests and for international law. A complicating factor for the United States, which has often used law or rules-based arguments to influence or constrain China, is that the U.S. Senate had never ratified UNCLOS, meaning that even though Washington has observed and often invoked the agreement, it is not a party to it.
Nonetheless, everything seemed to indicate that the United States would try to bolster its alliance system in East Asia by helping one of the region’s weaker countries, the Philippines, to protect its territorial claims at sea. That is, until June 2016—just two weeks before the announcement of the Hague ruling—when a political outsider named Rodrigo Duterte became president of the Philippines. In short order, Duterte, taking advantage of lingering resentment in some quarters of the American colonization of the Philippines, which lasted 48 years, ending in 1946, scrambled all of these diplomatic cards. He called Obama a “son of a whore” and separately announced: “We have this pact with the West, but I want everybody to know that we will be charting a course of our own. It will not be dependent on America.”
Duterte, who pushed back against Western human rights criticisms of his campaign of extrajudicial killings of alleged drug traffickers, drew close to China, and the recently contentious South China Sea was put on ice. To seal the two countries’ warming relations, Beijing returned to the checkbook diplomacy of the Arroyo years, promising to boost trade with the Philippines and increase investment. Duterte came close to revoking a Visiting Forces Agreement with the United States but never took that step.
It was always unclear how long this détente with Beijing would hold, and by late in Duterte’s presidency, Manila had begun to show renewed displeasure over the extent of China’s maritime claims and what it saw as frequent incursions into Philippine waters, interference with its fishing boats, and effective veto over the development of deep-sea oil deposits.
This week, the other shoe dropped. Duterte’s successor, Bongbong Marcos—the son of Ferdinand Marcos, the former dictator and U.S. ally who ruled the Philippines for nearly two decades until he fled the country for exile in Hawaii in 1986—reportedly agreed to a dramatic strengthening of his country’s alliance with the United States, which will likely include access to two military bases in Luzon, in the north of the archipelago. The recently elected Marcos government has been careful to say that its newly reinforced defense ties with the United States are not aimed at any other country, meaning China.
There can be little doubt, though, about the Philippines’ motives. It has already attempted to employ a traditional weapon of the weak—an appeal to international law—to no avail. Having experimented with the idea that the economic advantages that come from cooperating with China could compensate for infringement on its national rights, it appears to have decided that sovereignty is more precious. Speaking in Davos, Switzerland, last month, Marcos said of tensions in the South China Sea: “It keeps you up at night. It keeps you up in the day. It keeps you up most of the time.”
He appears to have calculated that strengthening relations with Washington can help deter China from more aggressive moves toward the Philippines. If so, this would be a fine illustration of a country availing itself of a classic arrangement in international relations known as “offshore balancing,” where in this case a weak country seeks help from a powerful, faraway country to help hold its ground in the face of an imposing neighbor.
This is far from the United States’ only concern, though. During the Biden administration, Washington has been busy reinforcing alliances with a number of countries in the region, with worry over the prospect of a war in Taiwan foremost in mind. More than anything else lately, it is this that keeps senior Pentagon officials up at night.
Just last week, for example, it emerged that U.S. Air Force Gen. Michael A. Minihan had warned his personnel in a memo sent on Jan. 27 that war with China over Taiwan was coming soon. “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025,” he wrote. “Xi secured his third term and set his war council in October 2022. Taiwan’s presidential elections are in 2024 and will offer Xi a reason. United States’ presidential elections are in 2024 and will offer Xi a distracted America. Xi’s team, reason, and opportunity are all aligned for 2025.”
The United States is presently upgrading and expanding its presence in Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost island chain, as well as building up its Pacific military capability on the unincorporated U.S. island of Guam, 1,600 miles east of Manila. And Washington has been cheered by Japan’s stepped-up efforts to arm itself with long-range missiles and naval warfighting systems. The United States has also called on Australia and even faraway NATO in its efforts to deter a Chinese attack.
Now, Washington hopes that the Marcos government will allow it to use runways in the Philippines in the case of an armed conflict with China. Having U.S. fighter planes and bombers dispersed as widely as possible in the region is key to U.S. planners’ hopes to withstand the early phases in a war until resupply can begin from much farther away in the Pacific, whether Hawaii or the continental United States.
For almost everyone else—Americans, Chinese, Taiwanese, people living in neighboring countries in the South China Sea, and even people in countries much farther afield—one must hope that a war over Taiwan’s future never breaks out. The outcome of a faceoff between the world’s two most powerful nations would be unpredictable, except in the utterly predictable sense that it would be almost unimaginably destructive in military terms and would have a devastating impact on the lives of people everywhere. If you find this hard to fathom, just look for examples of how the vastly smaller ongoing war in Ukraine has affected countries around the world.
Moreover, as the recent history of the Philippines and of the larger region shows, a pendulum that has already repeatedly swung both toward you and away from you before can always swing away yet again. It is the dilemma of the powerful that the minor parties they deal with can reverse course in response to the highest bidder. News from the Philippines has U.S. war planners feeling good at the moment, and perhaps for some time to come. But as Duterte showed, the luxury of being able to change one’s course never expires.
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