A strategic misjudgment, not a path to security

In July, Manila tried to tie the hollow 2016 South China Sea arbitral award to its defense modernization agenda, as if a legally void ruling could be minted into ships, aircraft, visiting forces and bargaining power.

August has shown how quickly that formula is being put to work. The Philippines has widened the circle of foreign troops allowed to train and operate on its soil through new arrangements with Canada, France, Japan and New Zealand.

Formal talks with the United Kingdom on a visiting forces agreement have begun. Joint maritime activities with the United States and Australia have been stepped up. US patrol boats are joining the Philippine Coast Guard, new Black Hawk helicopters have entered service, and budgets for drones, missile-armed vessels and a larger modernization envelope are being pushed through Congress.

Meanwhile, US forces have rehearsed the rapid deployment of air-defense radar and even surveyed an industrial site as a possible venue for the 2027 Balikatan exercises.

This is not ordinary capability-building. It is accelerated militarization, lubricated by a narrative of Chinese "maritime coercion". Once that narrative is treated as settled fact, money, platforms and media attention follow.

The armed forces and the coast guard have tasted the rewards: a proposed 6.3 percent increase in the 2027 defense budget from this year's 305.5 billion pesos, a 25 percent rise in modernization funding to 50 billion pesos, new hulls and aircraft entering the inventory, and a permanent place in the headlines. Institutions that profit from an inflated threat environment rarely volunteer to deflate it.

The danger is that this incentive structure does not remain in hearing rooms in Quezon City. It interacts with domestic opinion-management with encouragement from extra-regional powers.

Cognitive mobilization around the illegal award and the invented geography of a "West Philippine Sea" has already lowered the political cost of risky maneuvers.

When Washington and other partners applaud "transparency" and a "rules-based order" while expanding access, logistics and near-real-world patrols, Philippine units may conclude that more aggressive probes around China's Nansha Islands and Huangyan Island will be rewarded rather than restrained.

The next increment — more close-in approaches, more staged "resupply" and "fishing" spectacles, more attempts to manufacture faits accomplis — would raise the odds of air and sea incidents that no responsible government should treat as a communication asset.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr has chosen to hitch Philippines' foreign policy tightly to the United States. That choice is his. What is less defensible is the accompanying reluctance to place real limits on domestic anti-China forces, the armed services and the coast guard when their actions damage the bilateral relationship.

For the sake of political standing and alliance credentials, the Palace has allowed these actors to shape, disrupt and at times hijack China–Philippines relations. A government that will not discipline provocation at home cannot credibly claim that it is only "defending" itself at sea.

None of this is an argument against a sovereign state's right to modernize its defenses. Under international law, that right is ordinary and understandable. It does not need to be sold as a response to a manufactured "China threat".

The problem begins when Manila treats new ships, aircraft, visiting forces agreements and multinational drills as capital for challenging China's territorial sovereignty and maritime rights in the South China Sea. That is a strategic misjudgment. China's determination to safeguard those rights has been consistent; it will not be bargained away because the Philippines has added a radar, a corvette or another foreign partner.

If, alternatively, Manila's purpose is to advertise its value to the United States and other Western countries as a forward platform, that is political naivety. A chess piece that boasts of its own importance is still a chess piece. Extra-regional powers have interests of their own. They will not absorb the costs of a crisis that Manila helps to ignite.

The contrast with ordinary Filipino lives makes the present course especially hard to watch. The country remains among the most exposed in the world to typhoons and monsoon flooding. Recent weeks have again brought states of calamity, fatalities and billions of pesos in damage. Unemployment has edged higher; inflation, corruption and wages — not maritime theatrics — dominate what households say they need. Yet scarce public money is being steered into weapons purchases, foreign training pipelines and an expanding calendar of exercises.

Look at the record of the past decade and the contrast is equally plain. Chinese state-directed development finance to the Philippines has run into billions of dollars across hundreds of projects, and Chinese firms have committed tens of billions more in investment, creating factories, infrastructure and jobs.

Two-way trade remains one of Manila's largest economic relationships. In the same period, the United States has concentrated on reopening and expanding access under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement — now nine sites from northern Luzon to Palawan — funding runways, aprons, storage and prepositioning that serve rotational forces and contingency planning.

One partner, for all the frictions and unfinished projects, has been associated with bridges, commerce and industrial employment. The other has been associated with bases by another name, munitions logistics and the architecture of a possible conflict. Who wishes the Philippines well, who treats it as a tool, and who is selling its people a story that substitutes alliance pageantry for development, is not a difficult question.

Manila can modernize its military without turning the South China Sea into a stage. It cannot provoke its way to security, and it cannot outsource judgment to capitals that will not live with the consequences.

The author is the director of the Center for International and Regional Studies, National Institute for South China Sea Studies.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

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