Japan and the Philippines on Monday signed a defense agreement that would facilitate joint drills between them. The pact was made “as both face an increasingly assertive China,” and is in line with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr’s “effort to forge security alliances to bolster the Philippine military’s limited ability to defend its territorial interests in the South China Sea,” The Associated Press (AP) said. The pact also comes on the heels of comments by former US deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, who said at a forum on Tuesday last week that China’s recent aggression toward the Philippines in the South China Sea might be a precursor to a Chinese blockade of Taiwan.
“What they’re doing is trying to demonstrate that they can blockade, create a sense of futility and discredit the idea that the US is going to help not only the Philippines, but by extension Taiwan,” Pottinger said, a report by the Central News Agency said.
The US’ failure to become involved when China Coast Guard personnel rammed Philippine boats and threatened their crew with axes in a contested part of the South China Sea last month had given “Beijing a chance to picture the US as feckless,” he said.
Any defense agreement is a step in the right direction, but what is needed is a multinational, coordinated response to incidents of Chinese aggression. A single defense pact of countries in the first island chain should be formed and, crucially, must include Taiwan.
There are separate pacts and defense agreements between the US and Australia, the US and the Philippines, the US and Japan, and Japan and the Philippines, among others, but that situation creates unnecessary complexity and hampers effective responses.
There have been talks about forming an Asian equivalent of NATO. US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said NATO would engage in four joint projects with the alliance’s “global partners” in the Indo-Pacific region: Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
Beijing has already expressed discontent over the prospect of NATO involvement in the region. The US would be “breaching its boundary, expanding its mandate, reaching beyond its defense zone and stoking confrontation,” the AP reported Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Lin Jian (林劍) on Monday as saying.
Separately, Chinese Lieutenant General Jing Jianfeng (景建峰) said the US and its NATO partners were trying to “maintain the hegemony as led by the US.”
The protests over NATO’s designs in the region show that China is taking note and would likely be deterred by a single, well-coordinated alliance that includes all of the first island chain nations.
There would not be any NATO-style alliance in East Asia, because NATO pivots on Article 5, which would be difficult to implement in the region, Tsinghua University’s Center for International Security and Strategy senior fellow Zhou Bo (周波) told CNBC on Wednesday. Article 5 requires all NATO members to “take the actions it deems necessary to assist” any member country that is attacked.
Zhou does not provide any compelling reason for why this would be hard to implement in an Indo-Pacific alliance, saying only that countries in the region have their own interests and lack a strong will to be pulled into US-led military action.
As Pottinger said, regional support for the US could be eroded by its failure to respond to acts of aggression by China toward its allies. Washington must find a way to either deter the China Coast Guard or help the Philippines bolster its ability to respond to such incidents on its own. It could also send its navy to patrol areas where incidents frequently occur, but it might stop short of meeting Chinese aggression in kind out of concern over unintentional escalation.
China is constantly testing the boundaries of what the US and its allies in the region would accept. If the US hopes to protect the first island chain, it must seek to facilitate a single alliance that includes Taiwan and implements its own version of Article 5.
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