“We need to strengthen our security cooperation with friendly countries as part of a holistic approach to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity”
WHAT do we have in common with Germany and France?
We’ve recently begun to forge closer defense and security cooperation with these two European countries to push back against increasingly tense confrontation with China in the West Philippine Sea that we consider part of our Exclusive Economic Zone according to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea or UNCLOS.
Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro met with his German counterpart Defense Minister Boris Pistorius recently in Manila and agreed to sign a defense cooperation agreement by the end of the year.
The agreement would focus on mutual understanding regarding capabilities, training and exchange of information.
There have been escalating confrontations between Philippine and Chinese vessels in the disputed South China Sea, which Beijing claims almost entirely despite an international ruling its assertion has no legal basis.
“We collaborate because we have a shared vision of respect for the United Nations Charter… and our desire to see a stable and peaceful Indo-Pacific,” Teodoro told a joint news conference with Pistorius after their meeting in Manila.
The two officials vowed to build “long-lasting relations” between their armed forces and explored the possibility of Germany supplying military equipment to the Philippines.
It is entirely correct for Manila to boost defense ties in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond in the face of China’s aggressive claims over practically the entire South China Sea that is a key route of global trade.
Germany is one of the Philippines’ oldest formal defense partners through a 1974 administrative agreement that includes the training of Filipino troops in Germany.
The two ministers strongly opposed any unilateral attempt to advance expansive claims, especially through force or coercion. The German official clarified, however, that Germany’s engagements in the region “are not directed against anybody.”
At the same time, we are fortifying our security ties with France.
Recently, French fighter jets and support aircraft that took part in the Pegase 24 mission in the Indo-Pacific region made a stop-over in the Philippines for the first time. This was clearly an effort to underscore French capabilities and commitment to uphold freedom of navigation and overflight in the region and to display its global reach and airpower amid tensions between Manila and Beijing in disputed waters.
“The message of the Pegase mission is that we are able to send very quickly, very far, our best and our modern aircraft able to ensure the security of the area in the Indo-Pacific where French interests are concerned and are threatened,” Brig. Gen. Guillaume Thomas from the French Air Defense and Operations Command told media.
“We want to demonstrate the expansion of our military partnership in the air domain to showcase the trust and vitality of our relationship and to demonstrate that France stands close to the Philippines,” he added.
The rationale for this is that France also considers itself as a nation of the Pacific, so it needs to protect its population, overseas territories, interests in the region, as well as its sovereignty forces in these territories at short notice. But the French general made it clear that French military activities here were not directed against any country.
France really wants to forge closer ties with Manila and is actually in the early stages of negotiations on a Status of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), which would allow both forces to engage more frequently.
“We don’t need a VFA in order to perform and to organize these stopovers, we already do. But it’s true that each time it is required to negotiate specific technical arrangements and if we had a broader VFA, that would be a framework for many frequent and even last-minute deployments that otherwise we need to prepare for a long run,” French Ambassador to Manila Marie Fontanel pointed out. This clearly tells us that our bilateral ties have grown by leaps and bounds in recent years.
Manila and Tokyo sealed an RAA early in July that took only about eight months to negotiate. Top of Form
Bottom of Form
The RAA, similar in many respects to the country’s visiting forces agreement with the United States and Australia, allows the entry of Philippine and Japanese military forces into each other’s jurisdiction for joint exercises and disaster response.
We need to strengthen our security cooperation with friendly countries as part of a holistic approach to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity. (Email: ernhil@yahoo.com)
