Landmark defense pact

Strategically speaking, praising the defense pact the Philippines and Japan signed last Monday as “groundbreaking” or a “landmark” isn’t an exaggeration.

For one, unprecedented is the fact that it took only eight months — from the start of formal negotiations to the signing — for the Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) to be put in place. A record-breaking feat that’s ample proof of the high-level political and military resolve to go beyond talking about the merits of a robust security alliance and actually putting more strategic flesh into the partnership.

Still, as Foreign Secretary Enrique Manalo put it, the two countries beforehand had a “basic agreement,” which helped to quickly forge the RAA, a pact that allows troops to be deployed to each other’s country for joint military drills and disaster relief operations.

The RAA is Japan’s first-ever defense agreement with an Asian nation and the country’s third.

At any rate, the “basic agreement” refers to the shared alarm over China’s “dangerous and escalatory actions” in recent months in the South China Sea (SCS) and elsewhere.

In essence, the shared alarm between the two countries tacitly acknowledges that China is disrupting the region’s status quo and is trying to radically alter the balance of power through the aggressive use of its gray zone strategy.

The RAA’s immediate strategic concern, therefore, is about forging viable strategies against China’s escalating grey zone tactics, which now threaten the exclusive economic zones of China’s neighbors and vital world trade sea lanes.

Needless to say, both the Philippines and Japan are on the front lines in confronting China’s aggressiveness, which has armed both countries with valuable insights for the crafting of a combined strategy to blunt China’s gray zone tactics.

(For the uninformed, Japan is currently facing off with China’s coast guard in the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, with a recent report saying the Chinese have been hovering over the Senkaku Islands for a straight 200 days now.)

This collaboration, therefore, contextualizes China’s initial reaction to the Manila-Tokyo defense pact.

“The exchange and cooperation between countries should not… target any third party, or harm the interests of any third party,” declared China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian.

China’s position at the same time reveals her fears that both the Philippines and Japan might lobby more regional countries to stretch their bilateral defense ties into a strategic multilateral mechanism like the Philippines, US and Japan had done.

Meanwhile, the Manila-Tokyo defense pact nonetheless also has an underlying message for the United States, albeit unstated.

While the country and Japan are essential US allies, the RAA is also a subtle call from the two for the US to deepen and clarify further the strategic foundations of its partnership with the Philippines in the same strategic vein as Japan did with the RAA.

The call is important. Not only because it assuages Filipino fears of abandonment by the US when it is crunch time but also because of the urgent need to make clear what really are the commitments and obligations under the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT).

Meanwhile, the RAA teases other longer term prospects for the country besides a robust security alliance. Not least of which is the military prospect that the defense pact will possibly accelerate the country’s need for asymmetric strike capabilities like anti-ship and anti-air missiles in order to better deter China’s hegemonic ambitions.

But even more important is the fact that the defense pact opens up prospects for making the country more economically resilient against China.

Secretary Manalo essentially made this point when he said in the wake of the RAA that both the Philippines and Japan “agreed to further deepen economic cooperation and enhance our ability to react to unexpected economic developments.” Japan is the Philippines’ second-largest trading partner next to China.

Manalo’s point strikes at the heart of the issue that China’s outsized economic clout plays a large part in Philippine strategic calculations. Japan enhancing her economic support for the country, in effect, enables the country to further resist Chinese coercion.