Manila and Washington have grown nearer amid growing stress with Beijing within the disputed South China Sea.
Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr has welcomed US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin to Manila, stressing the necessity for normal and open engagement between Manila and Washington to make sure an “agile” response amid persevering with stress within the disputed South China Sea.
Marcos has moved the Philippines nearer to the US since changing Rodrigo Duterte in 2022.
On Tuesday, he greeted Blinken and Austin on the Malacanang Palace forward of conferences with their Filipino counterparts, Enrique Manalo and Gilberto Teodoro. It’s the first time Manila has hosted the so-called “2+2” conferences between the 2 international locations.
“I’m all the time very comfortable that these communication strains are very open so that each one the issues that we’re doing collectively, when it comes to our alliance, when it comes to the precise context of our state of affairs right here, within the West Philippine Sea and within the Indo-Pacific, are constantly examined and re-examined so we’re agile when it comes to our responses,” Marcos stated.
Blinken stated the talks have been proof of “a gradual drum beat, a really excessive stage of engagements between our international locations”.
“We’re actually grateful for this partnership,” Blinken advised Marcos.
The Philippines is one in every of a number of Southeast Asian nations that declare elements of the South China Sea and tensions with China, which claims nearly the complete waterway, have risen sharply over the previous yr.
Second Thomas Shoal, which lies about 200km (124 miles) from the western Philippine island of Palawan and greater than 1,000km (620 miles) from China’s southern Hainan island and the place Manila carries out common resupply missions to a ship that it grounded there in 1999, has emerged as a key flashpoint.
Final month, a Filipino sailor misplaced a finger after a confrontation that Manila described as “intentional-high pace ramming” by the Chinese language coastguard.
Whereas Manila turned down US provides of help, it reached a “provisional association” with China this month to handle variations, however the particulars of the deal haven’t been launched.
State Division spokesman Matthew Miller stated Blinken and Austin mentioned with Marcos “their shared dedication to upholding worldwide legislation within the South China Sea”, with the US officers reiterating the US’s “ironclad commitments to the Philippines” underneath the 2 international locations’ Mutual Defence Treaty.
Blinken and Austin travelled to Manila after talks with their counterparts in Japan, one other key US ally within the area, the place they introduced an improve of the US army command in Japan and labelled China the “biggest strategic problem” going through the area.
That go to additionally included a gathering of international ministers from the so-called Quad grouping that features the US, Japan, Australia and India. The group condemned China’s actions within the South China Sea the place it has grow to be more and more assertive regardless of a global courtroom ruling in 2016 that its claims had no authorized advantage.
China’s Ministry of Overseas Affairs hit again at Washington and Tokyo over the Quad assertion saying its actions constituted “regular army growth and nationwide defence coverage” and accusing the Quad of “artificially creating stress, inciting confrontation and containing the event of different international locations”.
The Pentagon has stated US officers will even announce $500m in international army financing for the Philippines through the go to, a part of $2bn in help for Asian Pacific international locations the US Congress sees as “confronting Chinese language aggression”.
The Pentagon has additionally proposed spending $128m on infrastructure enhancements at Philippine bases accessible to US forces underneath the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Settlement (EDCA). There at the moment are 9 websites underneath EDCA, after Manila agreed final yr so as to add 4 new websites, together with three within the north which can be seen as notably essential within the occasion of China invading Taiwan, the democratic island Beijing claims as its personal.
The US and the Philippines have additionally been negotiating an intelligence-sharing deal generally known as a Common Safety of Army Data Settlement, which they’d aimed to achieve by the top of 2023 however haven’t but concluded.
