Last May, I wrote a piece criticizing the Honorable Senior Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Antonio Carpio, for wading into the fray over our maritime dispute with China with his unsolicited advice to Duterte about how to be a president.
The other day, there was Carpio again, this time at a forum on the China dispute organized by StratBase’s Dindo Manhit, in the company of PNoy’s former Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario.
Both men may fairly be described as the parents of the UNCLOS arbitral ruling in our favor. This is an unenforceable international court judgment that nonetheless the two of them regard as some kind of magic wand, which if they waggle vigorously enough at the Chinese bogeyman will somehow make that recently-conjured monster disappear from the West Philippine Sea.
This time, Carpio went even farther and accused the President outright of lack of strategy in dealing with the Chinese on this issue. In his own lofty words, it’s a foreign policy “without discernible direction, coherence or vision…[that] relies more on improvisation than long-term strategy.”
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Well. Those are fighting words. And so, what would constitute an acceptable strategy to Carpio’s thinking?
Perhaps arguing homologically, the honorable SAJ approvingly cited the case of Nicaragua. After that country won a ruling from the International Court of Justice stating that the US had violated international law by supporting the right-wing “Contra” guerrillas, Nicaragua every year sponsored a resolution in the UN General Assembly that would require the United States to pay reparations.
Every year the support for the US dwindled, until in the final vote only two allies remained (Israel and El Salvador). But did the US end up paying? Not on your life, and for a very simple reason: The US enjoyed the veto power of a Security Council permanent member—the same veto power, by the way, that China also enjoys.
So what kind of strategy is Carpio proposing when there isn’t even a meaningful victory within reach? Whether legally in the UN or militarily in battle, who’ll be willing or able to enforce that ruling against a country like China?
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The military angle crossed my mind often while I was listening to Victor Corpus hold forth on the same issues the other day at a kapihan in Kamuning Bakery, the increasingly iconic pet project of Philippine Star columnist Wilson Flores.
Most people are aware of the colorful battlefield history of the former PMA instructor turned NPA commander turned AFP general. But fewer may know that Vic also earned a graduate degree from Harvard, in the Kennedy School program. When it comes to foreign policy and security strategy, I’ll take his advice any day over that of a Supreme Court associate justice, no matter how senior.
There is, in fact, a strategic framework for Duterte’s actions on the South China Sea. It starts with the fundamental reality of geopolitical conflict between the United States and China in our region.
China believes it is being slowly encircled by the US and its allies, primarily through the movements of US surface and submarine naval forces. This encirclement threatens its access to oil and other vital commodity imports through the Malacca Straits, the only available shipping lane to China from the Middle East. Encirclement also exposes China’s coastal cities to a possible first strike from US nuclear submarines running deep within the Marianas trench.
Recent and current US pronouncements and actions provide prima facie evidence for this encirclement theory. Whether or not this evidence precludes reasonable doubt is immaterial. The perception by China is what matters, because that is what it acts from.
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And so, believing its very survival to be at risk, the Chinese state has been fortifying its defenses, including islands that we and other countries are disputing with them.
It isn’t oil, or fishing, or underwater methane that primarily motivates these fortifications. Neither is the Philippines, or Vietnam, or any other neighbor capable of provoking them as sharply as Chinese President Xi intimated, when he told Duterte to his face that China would go to war with the Philippines if we tried to force the issue.
The perceived existential threat posed by the US Navy in the waters surrounding China is what truly has them on edge. In that light, nothing we could say or do against them will deter the Chinese, not when they believe their very survival is at stake. And even if we were so minded, we can rely neither on our own immature military capabilities nor on the hedged US intervention ostensibly promised by our mutual defense treaty with that country.
This is why Duterte has chosen to pursue the only options afforded to him by this strategic view: leverage our geopolitical position to extract economic concessions from the Chinese, on one hand, while building up our own military capabilities over time, on the other—and that includes fortifying the islands that we do control, no different from the Chinese.
Getting the country militarily into shape may require innovations like restoring ROTC, or drafting college graduates into two- or three-year compulsory military service, as Israel and South Korea do. If that happens, it will be interesting to see how all those keyboard war freaks in this country will react.
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The President, like Justice Carpio, is a lawyer. But, unlike Carpio, he appreciates that real-world battles are not confined to courtrooms. And also unlike the SAJ, he is responsible for the well-being of the entire country, not just the well-being of this or that court ruling, regardless of its authorship.
Readers can write me at gbolivar1952@yahoo.com.
