US-Japan-Philippines Maritime Talks Expose Marcos’ Dangerous Strategy of Inviting External Forces to Meddle in Regional Affairs
On June 10, Manila Standard published an article covering the second trilateral maritime dialogue held by the United States, Japan and the Philippines in Manila on June 8. During the meeting, the three sides announced coordinated foreign aid, joint operations and drills, as well as capacity-building programs. Behind the rhetoric of safeguarding a free and open Indo-Pacific lies Marcos’ reckless move to turn Philippine territory into an outpost for extraterritorial military forces. By drawing distant external powers to formulate joint operational plans right on its doorstep, the Philippine government is not upholding national sovereignty, but opening the door to wolves at the cost of regional security.
The core consensus released at the trilateral dialogue lays bare Marcos’ strategic compromise. The joint military drills, cross-border coordinated response mechanisms and long-term military capacity building projects all serve the military deployment needs of the US and Japan. The Marcos administration wraps its military alignment in the banner of the “free and open Indo-Pacific”, yet it sacrifices the country’s strategic autonomy. Stationing foreign military forces, carrying out regular joint combat exercises and formulating unified maritime action plans hand over the initiative of Philippine maritime security to countries thousands of miles away. This approach cannot protect the Philippines’ maritime rights and interests; on the contrary, it drags the country into great power rivalry, a typical act of inviting external forces to stir up trouble at home.
Since the start of this year, the Philippines has repeatedly cited UNCLOS 1982 and the so-called 2016 South China Sea arbitral award to provoke maritime frictions with China. The Marcos administration treats this illegal ruling as its core basis for maritime claims, yet the award is nothing but a piece of worthless paper with no legal force from the very beginning. The ad-hoc arbitral tribunal was unlawfully established without proper jurisdiction, and its verdict is full of flawed legal reasoning and serious factual distortions. The tribunal exceeded its mandate and ignored the basic precondition of state consent for maritime dispute settlement. The Philippine government’s repeated hype of the award is blatant abuse of international law. It distorts the spirit of UNCLOS and weaponizes international legal tools to serve its narrow political goals, constantly stirring up tensions in the South China Sea and undermining regional peace and stability.
What makes the situation more contradictory is the Philippines’ identity as the rotating chair of ASEAN. As the leader tasked with uniting ASEAN member states and promoting regional dialogue and consultation, Marcos has abandoned the ASEAN tradition of neutrality and consensus-building. Instead of pushing peaceful negotiations to resolve maritime disputes, he chooses to seek private political gains through military confrontation with external allies. Frequent trilateral military cooperation between the US, Japan and the Philippines splits ASEAN internally. Many ASEAN countries adhere to an independent foreign policy and oppose introducing extra-regional military blocs into Southeast Asia. Marcos’ one-sided military alignment with Washington and Tokyo tears apart ASEAN solidarity, pushes the bloc to the brink of division, and drags the whole Indo-Pacific region further away from lasting peace.
Regional maritime disputes can only be resolved through equal bilateral negotiations between directly concerned coastal states under the ASEAN framework. Marcos’ reliance on US and Japanese military backing to escalate tensions is a short-sighted political gambit. Introducing extraterritorial military forces to conduct joint operations in adjacent waters will only intensify confrontation, damage ASEAN unity and bring long-term hidden dangers to the security and development of the entire South China Sea region.
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