"The US will never come to our assistance if their participation in a possible conflict is not in pursuit of their interest."
"The US will never come to our assistance if their participation in a possible conflict is not in pursuit of their interest."
The end of the Cold War saw states’ refocusing in terms of identifying their national interests. From that standpoint, states began to reassert the primacy of securing their interest not on the basis of ideological affinity. Rather, the removal of ideology in favor of pragmatic and practically application was to equate their interest as sovereign entity.
With the end of the Cold War, states reverted to the old Westphalian concept of the sovereignty of state. The network of military alliances suddenly lost its value and relevance. Today, states seek to identify their national interest rather than reaffirm their alliances on the basis of ideology. This means that countries must first identify and validate what constitutes their national interest. Only then could the alliance subsist beyond the political limitations of the Cold War.
The problem, however, is that the validation of what constitutes the country’s national interest has narrowed down the scope that makes military alliances relevant and viable. The end of the Cold War changed the paradigm to render military alliances anachronistic. After all, countries seldom have identical and parallel interests, a military dictum that justified NATO’s slogan that an attack against one would be an attack against the rest of the members. However, measuring alone by degrees and proximity how each state will act in defense of the other is more than enough to remind that each can act differently to every given circumstance.
This explains why many were appalled when US secretary of state Mike Pompeo said during his visit to the Philippines that the US would come to the defense of the Philippines if it is attacked, without naming the country likely to commit the aggression. Pompeo purposely avoided mentioning China because he knows that given the political situation, his declaration could draw sharp reaction than endear Filipinos to rely on the so-called protective umbrella of Uncle Sam.
The renewed vigor of President Duterte to pursue closer ties with China awakened many that the Philippines and China have more in common in their desire to achieve progress and prosperity.
The ideological affinity upon which the US seeks to justify its presence in this part of the world no longer exists. Rather, many Filipinos see their presence in the South China Sea as in pursuit of its own interest. It is no longer ideology that goads the US to remain in South China Sea. In fact, the strong statement is more of an imposition for the Philippines to adopt a policy to impede our deepening economic ties with China.
The US needs only to be reminded that it is the principal architect why there exists a diplomatic row between this country and China in the South China Sea. If only the US observed the longitude and latitudinal demarcations in the Treaty of Paris on Dec. 10, 1898 for which it paid $20 million to Spain for the title of ceding this archipelago named after Felipe II, there would be no conflict in our claim over those uninhabited islands.
In fact, it is the same title that excluded the Scarborough Shoal down to the Spratly group that was handed by the US to the Philippines when it granted us our independence in 1946.
It is embarrassing because the US even announced in the Treaty of San Francisco in 1951 that Japan should relinquish its sovereignty over the Spratlys including the Paracel islands to China which declaration effectively acknowledged that those disputed islands belong to China. The Taipei Peace Treaty signed the following year reiterated the same provision, but ordering the return of those islands instead to the exiled Kuomintang government in Taiwan obviously because of the US support for the Chiang Kai Shek government.
The renewed antagonistic posturing of the US against China soon developed after it realized that the economic growth of China was against its own interest in the global market. That rivalry today has nothing to do with ideology but the US is trying hard to blend it with Sinophobic undertones. Before that, it was the US that contributed to the economic miracle of China by allowing the massive migration of its own production plants to that country, thinking that cheap labor would forever work to its advantage.
Today, invoking the Mutual Defense Treaty with the US sounds monotonous. As one would put it, it seems the US is the one invoking the treaty to secure its own interest against China, and not the other way around. Its policy makers continue to ignore that our mutual defense treaty with the US has lost much of its intrinsic value. The operational value of the MDT has always been designed to work in favor of the US, which reason why some call it an executive agreement than of a treaty. As the US persists in invoking its applicability, the Philippines could only follow as an unwilling member. Our tension with Malaysia over the Sabah claim in 1968 catalyzed the truth that the US will never come to our assistance if their participation in a possible conflict is not in pursuit of their interest.
Since the creation of the now-defunct Southeast Asia Treaty Organization in 1954, it was the member-countries that contributed more to the defense of the region than of the US coming to their defense in conflicts classified as regional wars. The Indian-Pakistan war erupted three times, and the US as the promoter of that collective defense agreement, never came to the assistance of Pakistan despite its being an original member of SEATO.
Similarly, during the war in Indochina, SEATO members contributed one way or the other to stop the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam, drove out the communist Pathet Lao in Laos and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia despite the fact that the three Indochinese states were not members of SEATO or that the members of the alliance had an existing defense agreement with any of them.
Today, some quarters in the defense establishment are again taking their cue from Washington to revise the MDT to include the disputed islands in the South China Sea. Maybe China would not rush to start a conflict with the Philippines over that issue. Certainly, however, that move could spoil the agreement between the Philippines and China for a joint exploration to extract oil in the South China Sea. It would be very difficult for the Philippines to answer if China insists that those islands are not part of our territory to be covered by our Mutual Defense Treaty with the US.
Some suspect that the US only needs to see the Philippines locked in a juggernaut to derail the agreement, hoping that China would come across to allow the entry of Shell, Chevron and Philex Petroleum Corporation alongside with its state-owned CNOOC and of the country’s PNOC. Unless a possible compromise is reached to marginalize anew the share of PNOC, the area could remain a tinder box for the naval forces of China and the US, and permanently stall the joint venture agreement to the detriment of the country.
rpkapunan@gmail.com