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Phl seeks stronger alliance with Vietnam
The Philippine government, through the Department of Foreign Affairs, has expressed its intent to forge stronger maritime cooperation with Vietnam in the South China Sea, where both countries are claimant states. DFA Secretary Enrique Manalo revealed this Tuesday in his speech before the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam. “Our geographies and status as major littoral and claimant states in the South China Sea make maritime cooperation a vital point of interaction between our two countries, as economic and security partners. As in centuries prior, this body of water connects our peoples, despite some differences,” Manalo said. “Beyond its strategic significance, the South China Sea is the lifeblood of millions of Filipinos and Vietnamese people who depend on the sea for livelihood,” he added. Manalo stressed that as maritime nations, the Philippines and Vietnam should prioritize having safe and secure seas and sound marine ecosystems as integral to the future of their citizens and the region. The DFA official is on a four-day official visit to Vietnam for the 10th Philippines-Vietnam Joint Commission on Bilateral Cooperation, three years after the 9th Philippines-Vietnam JCBC was held in Manila in 2019, attended by then-Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. and Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh. Given the previous joint marine research expeditions of the Filipinos and Vietnamese scientists in the 1990s, Manalo said the two countries “must press further on in exploring novel modes of cooperation in maritime safety, search and rescue, marine scientific research, and marine environmental protection.” “Achieving maritime security is a powerful impetus for our Strategic Partnership. Through the Philippines-Vietnam Joint Permanent Working Group on Maritime and Ocean Concerns, we discuss challenges and explore joint initiatives for the effective management of our competing claims in this area, with the overarching goal of preserving regional peace and stability,” he pointed out. He also noted that the two nations also benefit from the rules-based order which he described as the “bedrock of peace and prosperity” in the South China Sea, a shipping passage for an estimated $5.3 trillion worth of trade. “Our Strategic Partnership must affirm that we are invested in keeping the seas open and free for the enjoyment of our peoples and that disputes must be managed and resolved peacefully in accordance with international norms and laws, including the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea as well as the 2016 Arbitral Award on the South China Sea,” he said. The DFA chief is referring to the 2016 arbitral ruling that favored the Philippines’ claims in the West Philippine Sea, which is part of the larger South China Sea. However, China, which claims almost the entire South China Sea, continued to ignore the arbitral ruling, and insists on its nine-dash line claim. In a bid to reinforce its claim in the oil and natural-gas-rich region, the Philippine government started calling that portion of the South China Sea as the West Philippine Sea in 2012. The post Phl seeks stronger alliance with Vietnam appeared first on Daily Tribune......»»
Look to Japan
Largely ignorant sniping seems to be the favored pastime of those reluctant to go along with Mr. Marcos Jr.’s re-warming of our relations with the United States. Often framed as risking a fatal nuclear apocalypse if the US-China rivalry comes to a head, the sniping is obviously meant to scare the gullible. Of the more recent sniping, notable was Mr. Rodrigo Duterte’s warning two weeks ago that the Philippines could be drawn into a “Third World War” if more Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement or EDCA sites were built in the country. Right after, Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Juan Ponce Enrile advised “pontificating” conservative critics to first do their homework before whipping up public outrage. Mr. Enrile didn’t name anyone in particular. But he was obviously disgusted with the political framing of Mr. Marcos Jr.’s notable move of making it easier for the United States to maintain a presence in the country. We, of course, do know where the “pontificating” ex-Philippine leader and his cohorts are coming from. We can ascribe their anxieties to what geopolitical analysts often tell us about smaller states aligned with more powerful hegemons — smaller states face the vexing dilemma of entrapment in conflicts they do not seek when moving too close to a larger power. Such an entrapment predicament — observed long ago by ancient Greek historian Thucydides — was what drove Mr. Duterte, under the guise of neutrality, to keep his distance from the US and experiment with embracing China. But the ex-leader’s experiment, as we all know by now, backfired badly, forcing him near the end of his term — after years of avoiding “entrapment” in US strategies containing China — to reaffirm the country’s long-standing defense alliance with the United States. This is largely because hegemonic China had openly demonstrated our country’s inability to stop its illegal incursions in the West Philippine Sea. In a sense then, Mr. Marcos Jr. is merely restating his predecessor’s belated realization that the challenge posed by China can only be blunted by reaffirming the Philippine-US alliance. Of course, Mr. Marcos Jr.’s embracing tighter security cooperation with the US means he has accepted the risk of entrapment in Asian conflicts that this entails. But to see Mr. Marcos Jr.’s renewing the Philippine-US alliance merely as reluctant hedging against China or as caving to American pressure is geopolitically naïve. In fact, the warming of the Philippine-US alliance can be said to be less about the US, but more about another regional powerhouse most concerned with China — Japan. Japan, as we know, presently has the strongest alliance with the US in the Asian region and has a strong, albeit quiet, influence on Philippine affairs. Yet, far too often, Japan is mistakenly seen as an adjunct to American geopolitical strategies when, in fact, Japan is at the forefront, more than the Americans, of confronting the challenge of China. As American Japanologist Michael J. Green put it, “At the time when the US was just beginning to debate a long-term strategy for competition with China, Japan had already defined its own.” “Japan has arguably the clearest conceptualization, consensus, and implementation of a grand strategy of any of the democracies confronting Chinese hegemonic ambitions in the Indo-Pacific,” Green said. The architect of such a grand strategy was the late Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, whose vision provided solutions on how best to make use of a strategic alliance with a hesitant US to outflank China. In fact, the often cited strategic framework in current geopolitical circles of a “free and open Indo-Pacific” was Abe’s catchphrase, which US President Joe Biden recently fully embraced, as well as Abe’s original idea of the Quad, the Japan-US-Australia-India partnership. In short, for our own purposes of moving forward with the renewed Philippine-US alliance, it means lessening our fixation with the US and studying more closely Japan’s unique proactive efforts vis-à-vis the US and China. *** Email: nevqjr@yahoo.com.ph The post Look to Japan appeared first on Daily Tribune......»»
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Wegotmail: Statement of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan on the Recent Surgein Tensions in the South China Sea
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