00:48.3
So I'm just going to go through this, right?
00:51.8
First of all, it's a pleasure to be here.
00:53.3
I think this is my first...
00:55.8
I'm going to talk on this side of the continent.
00:57.8
Usually, I'm on the other side.
00:59.1
As you can see, I'm not dressed properly for the fashion culture here.
01:04.3
But I'm glad that we're here in a much more corporate setup so I don't feel so much out of place.
01:09.6
As you can see there in the slide, just, you know, each of those words are entire lectures or seminars in themselves.
01:15.2
I can talk about the Marcoses for a whole semester.
01:17.8
I'm working already on a book from senior to junior, how did we get there.
01:22.2
Obviously, the Philippines is a huge, huge conversation.
01:25.1
Not to mention, of course...
01:25.9
The American and the great power rivalry in Asia.
01:31.3
Now, I want to leave more room for discussion later on because we want to make it more like a seminar discussion.
01:37.9
But so some of the slides there are just for reference points when we're going to hopefully get questions that are more directly related to the points of contention here.
01:49.6
Now, obviously, to make sure that we have certain sort of coherence to our discussion,
01:54.8
slightly, let's go into the conceptual or theoretical framework.
01:59.1
First of all, I know there's a lot of ideological discussions out there.
02:04.5
There are a lot of pundits with their hot takes out there.
02:07.3
I do my own share of that.
02:09.6
But the reality is that when you look at geopolitics, especially in Asia, it's very dialectical, meaning it's mutually constitutive.
02:16.1
You cannot explain the foreign policy of country X by just saying, oh, this is the mindset of the leader.
02:22.1
This is what the leader wants or the leader was bought off.
02:25.0
Or the leader is the lackey of this country or that country.
02:27.7
It's always a dialectical process.
02:29.7
But the reality is that it's also very asymmetrical.
02:32.5
So, of course, we tend to criticize America as a global empire.
02:36.9
But let's not forget in Asia, China is the really outsized power there.
02:42.2
And its relationship with much of the region is asymmetrical.
02:45.9
Therefore, when I approach understanding geopolitics of that part of the world,
02:51.1
if we have the term bounded rationality, I look at the term bounded atheism.
02:54.8
And I look at the term bounded agency, right?
02:56.8
So, one of the most cliched proverbs you tend to hear in security conferences in Asia is,
03:04.8
I think this actually came from Nyerere and folks in Tanzania,
03:08.8
but the single parents for some reason keep on quoting that starting with Likwanyu, right?
03:12.8
Which is, you know, when two elephants are there, if they make love, the grass suffers.
03:17.8
If they make war, the grass suffers.
03:19.8
And I always had a problem with that kind of metaphor
03:23.8
because it tends to reduce much of the world to the grass, right?
03:26.8
So, I said actually a more appropriate way of looking at geopolitics in Asia and the Pacific region
03:31.8
is it's more like a savanna, right?
03:33.8
You have the two big elephants, but you have other kinds of predators and robust animals.
03:37.8
You have the hyenas and giraffes and all.
03:39.8
And that's essentially the interaction that we have in that part of the world.
03:42.8
But nevertheless, obviously, some countries and powers have more agency than others.
03:47.8
But I think the problem in a lot of discourse out there is, you know,
03:51.8
most countries in the region are seen as just puns on the chessboard.
03:55.8
What is the U.S. doing? What is China doing? Who are they manipulating?
03:58.8
Who's robbing to the Batman of America, right?
04:01.8
Because as we discussed now, there is a trilateral summit happening in Washington, D.C.
04:05.8
among the Philippines, Japan, and the United States.
04:08.8
Now, the other thing that keeps on coming up in discussions about Asia is this idea of
04:14.8
we don't want to choose or don't force us to choose between the two superpowers.
04:18.8
Again, you keep on hearing this from Singapore,
04:20.8
from a lot of Southeast Asian countries, also in other regions of the world,
04:24.8
like Central Asia, for instance, you also tend to hear that, Latin America.
04:28.8
But for me, not making a choice is a choice itself.
04:32.8
And it's a choice that comes with its own risks and liabilities and opportunities.
04:38.8
So I think the best way of understanding how a lot of countries in the region
04:41.8
approach their great power foreign policy is 50 shades of hedging, right?
04:48.8
So everyone is hedging, but some are leaning more to one side than the other.
04:53.8
And it's a dynamic hedging, right?
04:56.8
It depends on the circumstances on the ground.
04:59.8
But I think as we speak right now, there is a growing concern that some countries,
05:04.8
especially frontline countries like the Philippines, are increasingly forced to make a choice.
05:09.8
And therefore, they're transitioning towards what you can call soft balancing or, if not, alignment, right?
05:15.8
I mean, is hedging even possible?
05:16.8
Now, again, I'll be very quick about this.
05:17.8
Sorry for being a little bit too academic about it.
05:20.8
So what is hedging?
05:22.8
Obviously, hedging is both a conscious and instinctive commitment.
05:27.8
You know, it essentially comes from finance, the world of finance, right?
05:30.8
You hedge your bets by diversifying your portfolio, putting some of your eggs in this basket,
05:36.8
some of your other eggs in that basket.
05:38.8
It's an insurance-seeking strategic behavior, right?
05:41.8
And it has to be proactive.
05:43.8
It cannot be passive.
05:44.8
So when you say a country is hedging,
05:46.8
that means you have a strategic elite that is consciously looking out for opportunities and ways to offset risks
05:53.8
by sometimes engaging in seemingly contradictory actions.
05:56.8
So best example is Singapore.
05:58.8
They sign a defense deal with the Americans.
06:00.8
The next thing you know, they also have a memorandum of understanding defense deal with China.
06:04.8
But actually, if you pay close attention, they're never exactly symmetrical.
06:08.8
But they give this impression of this country trying to keep things on an even keel with two powers, right?
06:14.8
So we see the tendency a lot.
06:16.8
We see a lot with middle powers and smaller powers in the Pacific region.
06:20.8
Now, not all countries have very, let's say, developed state structures or strategic culture.
06:28.8
So sometimes they can come off irrational and incoherent.
06:31.8
And sometimes, as in the case of the Philippines, the president himself is incoherent and seemingly irrational.
06:37.8
Of course, I'm not talking about the current president.
06:38.8
I'm talking about the previous president, who we'll discuss later on.
06:41.8
But there has to be a certain structural precondition for hedging to happen.
06:45.8
So hedging happens when there's a fear of regional hegemon.
06:50.8
There are anxieties over the commitment of the traditional and status quo power.
06:55.8
And there is a lack of effective multilateral mechanisms to navigate these tensions in the region.
07:02.8
And if you look at Southeast Asia, all of those conditions have been there for quite some time.
07:07.8
This is not something new.
07:09.8
So what we're talking about here is more risks rather than direct threats.
07:15.8
You cannot have hedging when you are about to enter a war and peace situation.
07:22.8
In short, allies cannot be neutral in moments of war.
07:27.8
And in moments of war, countries are forced to choose increasingly.
07:31.8
I mean, maintaining neutrality is close to impossible in moments of total war, conflagration.
07:36.8
Let's look at what happened in Belgium, for instance, during the world wars, and other kinds of countries who had neutrality positions.
07:45.8
I'm still debating this with myself, among others.
07:49.8
Are countries like the Philippines in a position to still hedge?
07:52.8
Or are we being forced to align or at least soft balance?
07:56.8
And when you say soft balancing, you're no longer looking at offsetting risks.
08:01.8
You're looking already at military countermeasures because there's an existential threat.
08:06.8
And that existential threat or semi-existential threat is something that we'll discuss in the succeeding slides.
08:13.8
Now, speaking of hedging,
08:14.8
we see the art of hedging being executed by a lot of our neighbors.
08:20.8
So the Vietnamese have their own version of bamboo diplomacy.
08:23.8
In fact, Vietnam for me was the country of the year last year
08:26.8
because I think they're the only country I know that had a state visit from both Biden and Xi Jinping almost back to back.
08:34.8
I cannot think of any other country who had state visits by the two superpowers in a single year.
08:39.8
And the courtship of Vietnam from all quarters
08:43.8
is something quite interesting, as I've seen.
08:46.8
And as you know, the Vietnamese have a very robust relationship also with the Russians.
08:50.8
So just as they're asking for Qualicom and American companies to come in,
08:54.8
as they're talking to BYD, they're also trying to sign multi-billion dollar arms deal with Russia.
08:59.8
So this is what they do, multi-alignment, multi-vector approach.
09:03.8
Of course, a more interesting case, I would say, is India.
09:07.8
I think the term they use nowadays is multi-alignment.
09:10.8
If I use the term non-alignment with my Indian counterparts,
09:13.8
they say, no, no, no, we don't do that.
09:14.8
That's Nehru. That's Nehruvian.
09:16.8
That's Congress Party. We're done with that.
09:18.8
We're in multi-alignment.
09:19.8
And look at it. One day, Modi is with Putin and schmoozing there.
09:22.8
Another day, he's with the Quad countries and Biden and all.
09:26.8
And as Jaishankar, the foreign minister of India, would always put it,
09:30.8
we are here for India.
09:32.8
We're not here to align with any side.
09:34.8
So some would say multi-alignment is also a way of having the cake and eating it too.
09:38.8
So there's a degree of also strategic opportunism there,
09:42.8
as much as there's a degree of hege.
09:44.8
Which brings us to the Philippines and how lucky the Philippines is.
09:48.8
So for a very long time in the Philippines, we have had this impression
09:51.8
that we're blessed with the best geography,
09:53.8
that we're at the intersection of great empires and trading routes and all of that.
09:59.8
And we don't share a land border with any country.
10:03.8
So unlike Ukraine, right, a lot of people say, oh, Philippines don't want to be Ukraine.
10:07.8
Well, except we don't have a land border, especially with a hegemonic power or a former empire.
10:11.8
But the reality is that our geography is increasingly becoming a curse
10:15.8
and also an impetus for us to step up our game in the 21st century.
10:19.8
So, interestingly, empires learn from each other.
10:23.8
So one of the things that China is doing right now is trying to affect its own version of Mahanian grand strategy.
10:30.8
So, you know, the American naval strategic thinker of retired Mahan in the late 19th century
10:36.8
who said that if America wants to be a real power, it has to dominate its adjacent waters.
10:41.8
That idea is not new, it came all the way from the Romans
10:44.8
who dominated and turned the Mediterranean into a kind of a Roman lake, right?
10:48.8
So the idea is that you cannot be really a regional power, a real regional power,
10:52.8
if you don't dominate your adjacent waters.
10:56.8
And if you look at China today, a lot of their defense strategies ironically cite Alfred Bayer Mahan
11:02.8
and they argue that China will not be a real great power if it cannot dominate those immediate waters.
11:07.8
Now, each of those body of waters have their own value.
11:11.8
Both ideational and also material.
11:14.8
Ideational because you have Taiwan there, right?
11:17.8
And there's no way for China to feel complete, that is, this is the rhetoric from the Communist Party in China,
11:22.8
if they don't reunify with the so-called renegade province of Taiwan, right?
11:28.8
And domination of the South China Sea will be very important with that.
11:31.8
Not to mention the disputes over Senkaku Diaoyu with Japan in the East China Sea.
11:36.8
So that's the first island chain that they want to dominate
11:40.8
as their perimeter of defense and also as what they feel is their sphere of influence.
11:45.8
But what China is also looking at is dominating the second island chain, this is the Philippine Sea,
11:49.8
and the idea there is to push out the Americans from this part of the world.
11:53.8
Because they see Americans as essentially an external power, as an alien power, right?
11:57.8
Although they forget that Guam is actually just there and not too far away from the Philippines.
12:01.8
And again, this is also what I call dialectics of empire.
12:05.8
So if you look at Russia, they started in what? Moscovy.
12:09.8
It's a small, you know, kingdom there and the next thing you know they're here in San Francisco.
12:13.8
200 years ago, right?
12:15.8
The idea is that the more you expand, the more you need cushion and perimeters of defense.
12:19.8
And you can go on and on and on and on about that.
12:22.8
So, if you look at the Philippines, we're exactly in the middle of those two, right?
12:27.8
We're already facing and confronting China's pushing out and efforts to dominate its adjacent waters
12:34.8
in the first island chain.
12:36.8
And then also we're increasingly feeling China's growing military power
12:39.8
and military presence in the Philippine Sea, as we'll discuss later on.
12:43.8
So very quickly, just to help you guys understand, for instance, what's happening just in the first island chain.
12:49.8
So, on one side, if you look at the cow tongue shape 9-line, which actually used to be 11-line,
12:57.8
that's what China claims as its own, right?
12:59.8
They have different terms for that.
13:01.8
They're blue national soil.
13:03.8
They claim historic rights in that area because, I don't know, Admiral Zhang He and some of their ancestors
13:07.8
thousands of years ago passed through that area.
13:09.8
But if you follow modern prevailing international law, it's actually going to be something more like that one, right?
13:15.8
If each country just generates 200 nautical miles exclusive economic zone from their coasts,
13:20.8
and then you have all of the maritime entitlements accordingly.
13:23.8
In fact, the Philippines in 2013 pushed for an arbitration case against China.
13:28.8
And legally speaking, the Philippines won this scenario.
13:32.8
Except China is a superpower, and just like America or any superpower,
13:36.8
superpowers tend to be exceptionalists.
13:38.8
I guess, exception to international law, right?
13:41.8
So, it's not only the legal claim.
13:44.8
It's also how you operationalize your claim.
13:46.8
I mean, any major power tends to have revanchist kind of rhetoric and narratives,
13:52.8
but it's operationalizing that narrative that is something that we have to pay attention to.
13:57.8
So, since 2013, China has not only built massive, massive artificial islands,
14:03.8
but it has also militarized them.
14:05.8
And while it's true that China is not the only country that has militarized them,
14:07.8
but the scale, the breadth, and the speed of the militarization of those islands
14:13.8
is incomparable to any other country.
14:15.8
So, you look at those giant land features on top,
14:18.8
those are the Chinese-made artificial islands and militarized ones.
14:21.8
And those on below, the very small ones, are the Vietnamese versions.
14:25.8
The ones that the Philippines controls,
14:27.8
the one in Tito Island is the second largest naturally formed land feature,
14:32.8
but we did not reclaim it in this way.
14:35.8
We did not create, you know, multicameral.
14:37.8
We did not create long-kilometer-long airstrips or huge military facilities.
14:42.8
And the fear is that eventually what China wants to do is
14:45.8
to create an air defense identification zone in that part of the world
14:48.8
by creating networks of airstrips and military facilities
14:52.8
that can allow China to push anyone out through military force.
14:56.8
Now, we're not there yet,
14:58.8
but definitely there are increasing discussions about, you know,
15:01.8
China trying to affect its own sphere of influence in this part of the world.
15:05.8
Which brings me to the other part of this issue.
15:08.8
Again, I know we're in Berkeley,
15:10.8
and we can go on and on discussing about American colonial history in the Philippines,
15:14.8
all the horrible things that the United States did throughout history,
15:18.8
but as far as the Philippines, a lot of countries in the region are concerned,
15:21.8
it's not the United States that they see as a primary source of threat,
15:24.8
but they see actually China.
15:25.8
Now, speaking of the United States,
15:27.8
it has a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines
15:30.8
and a series of other agreements that bind the Americans to the Filipinos.
15:34.8
But the reality is that
15:37.8
the parameters of that mutual defense treaty
15:40.8
was vague for quite some time.
15:42.8
In fact, as I wrote in just a recent piece,
15:45.8
a brief genealogy of Philippine claims in the South China Sea,
15:48.8
if you look at it,
15:50.8
a lot of these features that we control,
15:52.8
we have been claiming them since the Spanish era,
15:55.8
and we have been claiming them since the Commonwealth era,
15:58.8
but the Philippines actually began to operationalize this claim
16:01.8
over some of these land features
16:03.8
after we gained our independence in the mid-20th century.
16:07.8
the Americans were a little bit wishy-washy about that
16:11.8
So what happened in the 70s,
16:12.8
under a certain person called Ferdinand Marcos Sr.,
16:15.8
I'm extremely critical of his human rights record,
16:18.8
of his democracy record,
16:20.8
of his economic management,
16:21.8
but when it comes to foreign policy,
16:23.8
I think Marcos Sr. was quite a proactive Filipino leader.
16:26.8
And what he did in the 70s was
16:28.8
he tried to operationalize the Philippines' claims
16:31.8
by building arguably the first modern airstrip
16:34.8
in the Spratlys group of islands.
16:36.8
In the Tito Island or Pagasa,
16:38.8
which we call it today.
16:39.8
So suddenly the Americans,
16:40.8
particularly under the Nixon administration,
16:42.8
and in this case actually Henry Kissinger,
16:44.8
was worried that the Filipinos
16:46.8
will drag the Americans into war.
16:48.8
That the Filipinos will use, as Kissinger put it,
16:51.8
the Mutual Defense Treaty
16:52.8
as a means for territorial self-aggrandizement.
16:55.8
And in a series of cables that were classified more recently,
16:59.8
Kissinger essentially said that
17:01.8
all we are willing to provide for the Filipinos
17:04.8
is diplomatic and political support
17:06.8
but we will not take their claims
17:08.8
over those islands and features for granted
17:11.8
because they're contested claims.
17:14.8
that gave birth to a policy of strategic ambiguity.
17:18.8
And this policy of strategic ambiguity
17:20.8
goes essentially from Richard Nixon
17:22.8
all the way to President Obama.
17:24.8
That is why when Obama visited the Philippines
17:26.8
on multiple occasions,
17:27.8
especially in 2014,
17:28.8
after signing the Enhanced Defense Cooperation
17:31.8
with the Philippines,
17:32.8
and shortly after making it clear
17:34.8
that the U.S. will stand by Japan,
17:36.8
should there be a war with China over Senkaku de Ayo,
17:39.8
he essentially was equivocating
17:42.8
on whether Americans will help the Philippines
17:44.8
over disputed land features in the area.
17:47.8
Things actually just began to change
17:49.8
towards the end of the Trump administration,
17:52.8
specifically when Secretary Pompeo visited Manila
17:55.8
in March of 2019 and openly said,
17:57.8
any attack on Filipino troops, vessels, or aircrafts
18:01.8
in the South China Sea,
18:02.8
not just generically in the Pacific,
18:04.8
will automatically activate
18:05.8
the Mutual Defense Treaty.
18:07.8
More interestingly,
18:08.8
that year also saw a major incident
18:10.8
when a Chinese militia vessel
18:12.8
sank a Filipino fishing vessel,
18:15.8
and more than a dozen Filipinos almost died.
18:17.8
They were only saved
18:18.8
thanks to illegal Vietnamese fishermen in the area.
18:21.8
So thanks to them,
18:23.8
these folks were saved.
18:24.8
It was kind of an awkward situation.
18:26.8
But interestingly,
18:27.8
the American ambassador back then, Sung Kim,
18:30.8
said that even gray zone attacks by China,
18:34.8
meaning attacks by Chinese militia,
18:36.8
not their conventional forces,
18:37.8
could also activate the Mutual Defense Treaty.
18:41.8
the operational implication
18:43.8
of the Mutual Defense Treaty
18:44.8
between the Philippines and the United States,
18:46.8
has gone through a lot of evolution
18:47.8
throughout the past half a century.
18:49.8
But in the past five years or so,
18:51.8
the parameters have become much sharper
18:53.8
and clearer than ever.
18:55.8
And that's precisely why the stakes
18:57.8
for the United States are extremely high here.
18:59.8
This is not just a fight over,
19:02.8
a bunch of rocks.
19:04.8
This is a matter of ideational
19:06.8
and material interest for China.
19:08.8
Material because the South China Sea
19:10.8
is one of the most fisheries-rich
19:12.8
and diverse places on Earth.
19:14.8
And there could be trillions of dollars
19:16.8
of energy resources also in that area.
19:19.8
So a lot is at stake here.
19:22.8
And this sets the tone for our conversation today.
19:25.8
So that's a long introduction.
19:26.8
Apologies for that.
19:27.8
But the discussion today is,
19:29.8
what's up with Marcos?
19:31.8
What's Marcos Jr. doing?
19:33.8
What's Marcos Jr. up to?
19:35.8
Now, there's a lot of problematic discourse out there.
19:41.8
Because on one hand,
19:43.8
the liberal critics of Marcos
19:45.8
always thought that he is
19:47.8
essentially another Manchurian candidate,
19:51.8
similar to Duterte.
19:53.8
And in fact, during the election period,
19:55.8
what happened with, as you can see,
19:57.8
I deliberately skipped Duterte
19:59.8
because that would be one hour of conversation,
20:01.8
but we can go back to that.
20:02.8
Essentially, what happened with President Duterte
20:04.8
is that once he came into power,
20:05.8
he made it very clear
20:06.8
that he doesn't want territorial disputes with China
20:09.8
to be the defining dimension of bilateral relationship.
20:13.8
And he was extremely critical of the United States
20:15.8
and the Philippines' dependence on the West.
20:18.8
And things really went haywire over the years.
20:20.8
And we can have a long conversation about that.
20:22.8
So when Marcos Jr. ran for presidency in 2022,
20:26.8
he was part of a coalition
20:28.8
with the offspring, daughter of Duterte,
20:30.8
the so-called UNITY.
20:31.8
And during multiple speeches and interventions,
20:34.8
he made it very clear
20:35.8
that he agrees with Duterte's diplomacy-first approach
20:39.8
and that what he wants is, you know,
20:42.8
pursue a new era of golden relationship with China,
20:45.8
which is exactly what he did.
20:47.8
In fact, after Marcos Jr. won the presidency,
20:50.8
one of the first things he did
20:51.8
was to call President Xi Jinping
20:53.8
and he openly said, you know,
20:55.8
we want to shift our bilateral relationship to new heights.
20:59.8
And he also met top leaders,
21:01.8
from China, including Foreign Minister Wang Yi,
21:04.8
and said we want to have a new golden era
21:06.8
of bilateral relationship.
21:08.8
So that's why suddenly there are now
21:11.8
all sorts of conspiracy theories.
21:12.8
That what happened?
21:13.8
Why is Marcos suddenly not nice to China, right?
21:15.8
Was he bought off by the Americans?
21:17.8
That's one rhetoric, right?
21:18.8
The other one was maybe, you know,
21:20.8
he was just, you know, trying to dissimulate
21:22.8
during the election period
21:23.8
and the real Marcos is coming out.
21:25.8
The other one is, oh, these Filipinos,
21:27.8
once again, they're making trouble
21:28.8
and they're the ocean provocateurs
21:29.8
in this part of the world
21:30.8
and dragging the Americans in.
21:32.8
So I call that strategic gaslighting, right?
21:35.8
It's a very important thing to keep in mind.
21:37.8
So what exactly did happen under Marcos Jr.?
21:40.8
So there are actually four factors to keep in mind.
21:42.8
I'll go quickly through this
21:43.8
and we can have a discussion over that.
21:46.8
The thing is this.
21:50.8
Marcoses are OG, right?
21:52.8
They're the original gangster, right?
21:54.8
The problem with Duterte was that,
21:56.8
you know, he was a parvenu, right?
21:58.8
He came from the South.
21:59.8
He didn't have much experience
22:01.8
with international geopolitics
22:03.8
and to be honest,
22:04.8
he was taken for a ride by China.
22:06.8
In fact, what happened during Duterte's period
22:08.8
is what I call pledge trap.
22:10.8
Everyone talks about debt trap.
22:12.8
What happened there was pledge trap.
22:14.8
China made billions of dollars of pledges
22:17.8
but not really much came in
22:19.8
and yet in exchange for those pledges,
22:21.8
Duterte forward deployed
22:22.8
all sorts of geopolitical concessions.
22:24.8
He tried to downgrade relations with America.
22:26.8
He canceled plans for joint patrols.
22:28.8
He did not assert arbitration award in 2016.
22:31.8
So you had a weird situation during Duterte
22:33.8
when essentially the argument would be
22:36.8
it is our right not to assert our sovereign right
22:39.8
because there were some awkward meetings,
22:41.8
I remember, in the ASEAN summit in 2017
22:44.8
when the United States, Australia, and Japan
22:46.8
issued a trilateral statement
22:48.8
calling on China to abide by the arbitration award of 2016
22:52.8
which nullified China's claim
22:54.8
and validated Philippines' maritime claims
22:58.8
And back then, the Philippine Foreign Secretary,
23:00.8
Cayetano, essentially came out and said
23:02.8
it's none of your business if we don't assert our rights.
23:05.8
That's our prerogative.
23:06.8
So you had an awkward situation like that.
23:08.8
And in fact, the Philippines,
23:09.8
when it was the ASEAN chairman in 2017,
23:13.8
tried to downplay the disputes in the South China Sea.
23:17.8
But the thing is, democracies are different.
23:19.8
They never needed China
23:20.8
in the way that Duterte needed China.
23:22.8
When he ran for president in 2016,
23:24.8
we can have a long conversation about that on the record
23:26.8
and off the record.
23:28.8
And Marcos Jr.'s victory in the 2022 elections
23:32.8
was just so overwhelming,
23:34.8
close to 60% of the votes,
23:35.8
that he always had more room for maneuver.
23:38.8
And in many ways,
23:41.8
also as we discussed in factor number two,
23:43.8
one of the things that made Marcos much more open to the West
23:48.8
was how the Biden administration reached out to him very proactively.
23:52.8
My understanding is that
23:54.8
when Marcos was running for president,
23:56.8
his worry was that
23:58.8
a democratic administration in America
24:00.8
would be a little bit lukewarm to him,
24:02.8
to put it mildly.
24:03.8
And of course, we have many folks from the Philippine opposition
24:05.8
who questioned the result of the elections
24:08.8
and said it was a fraudulent election.
24:10.8
But the thing is,
24:13.8
it was quite telling that
24:14.8
during his first press conference as president-elect,
24:17.8
what Marcos said was,
24:18.8
Biden was the first foreign leader to call me.
24:21.8
And within weeks,
24:23.8
you had Wendy Sherman,
24:24.8
back then the number two,
24:26.8
at the State Department,
24:29.8
and telling Marcos and the public
24:31.8
that he will enjoy sovereign immunity.
24:34.8
the Marcoses are facing many court cases
24:37.8
in the United States
24:38.8
for corruption and human rights violations
24:40.8
during their era.
24:41.8
So that reassurance game,
24:44.8
that charm offensive by the United States,
24:46.8
I think was very important.
24:47.8
But nevertheless,
24:48.8
Marcos was still giving a chance
24:50.8
to his relationship to China.
24:53.8
what Marcos did was,
24:54.8
within a few months into all this,
24:56.8
he told China that,
24:59.8
maybe you wanna act on your investment pledges.
25:02.8
In fact, there were some discussions in August
25:04.8
and September of 2022
25:06.8
when the Philippines was pressuring China
25:08.8
to enforce some of the projects
25:10.8
that were unfulfilled.
25:11.8
So China has a number of multi-billion dollars
25:13.8
to oppose the projects in the Philippines,
25:15.8
but the funding was not coming in.
25:16.8
There were a lot of delays.
25:19.8
what Marcos was expecting was
25:22.8
to get concrete and tangible outcomes
25:24.8
from his first major election.
25:25.8
And that was his first major overseas visit,
25:28.8
which was to China.
25:29.8
So just like Duterte,
25:30.8
his first overseas state visit
25:32.8
was not to White House,
25:33.8
was not to Japan,
25:34.8
it was actually to Beijing.
25:38.8
that trip turned out as extremely fruitless.
25:41.8
He effectively got nothing.
25:43.8
He only had around just two days there.
25:45.8
He brought hundreds of businessmen there.
25:47.8
But if you look at the,
25:49.8
15, 16, 17 points
25:50.8
that came out of that bilateral meeting
25:52.8
with the Chinese leadership,
25:53.8
particularly Xi Jinping,
25:54.8
there was no tangible outcomes
25:56.8
for the Philippines.
25:57.8
And one of the things
25:58.8
that really worried Marcos Jr.
26:00.8
was that China offered also no concessions
26:03.8
in the South China Sea.
26:05.8
And one of the problems we have
26:07.8
in the Philippines right now
26:08.8
is that we're facing an energy crisis
26:10.8
because the leading source of our natural gas
26:12.8
in Malampay is running out.
26:14.8
We want to develop an alternative source.
26:18.8
close to Spratlys,
26:19.8
but the Chinese are harassing us
26:21.8
and not allowing us
26:22.8
to develop their sources there.
26:23.8
So Marcos Jr. reportedly was expecting
26:26.8
to get some sort of concession
26:29.8
from China in that front.
26:30.8
But China gave him nothing.
26:32.8
And my sense is precisely that
26:35.8
China was also not sure about Marcos Jr.
26:38.8
So they were also holding back.
26:40.8
This is something we can also discuss later on
26:41.8
because one of the things I noticed with China
26:43.8
is that they're not very sophisticated
26:45.8
when they deal with a lot of regional states.
26:47.8
We always talk about China
26:48.8
as a sophisticated state craft.
26:50.8
They plan for the next thousand years.
26:52.8
But the reality is that
26:53.8
I think they got the Philippines wrong
26:55.8
on multiple occasions.
26:56.8
They thought they could get the Philippines
26:58.8
on the cheap during Duterte.
27:01.8
they didn't offer him anything.
27:03.8
And that combined with Americans coming in
27:05.8
and trying to charm him
27:06.8
and bring him to his side,
27:08.8
I think really did the magic.
27:10.8
Now, the third factor,
27:11.8
and this is a very important factor
27:13.8
that I discussed in my piece
27:14.8
for Journal of Democracy,
27:16.8
is there was also a fallout
27:17.8
simultaneously with the Dutertes.
27:20.8
Duterte is no longer the president,
27:22.8
or one of the Philippines,
27:23.8
but the vice president is a Duterte.
27:24.8
And former president,
27:26.8
is also very vocal
27:27.8
in his criticism of the direction
27:29.8
of Marcos Jr.'s foreign policy.
27:31.8
So you also have this domestic dynamic.
27:33.8
And not to exaggerate it,
27:34.8
I would say sometimes
27:35.8
the Philippines feels like,
27:36.8
I don't know, Berlin or Austria
27:38.8
at the beginning of Cold War, right?
27:40.8
Whereby we're at the middle
27:41.8
of these proxy wars,
27:43.8
whereby pro-American
27:44.8
and pro-China factions
27:45.8
are duking it out.
27:46.8
And the greatest manifestation of that
27:48.8
is essentially the House of Marcos
27:49.8
and House of Duterte.
27:53.8
Out of 10, 15 years
27:54.8
of writing about the Philippines
27:56.8
and as an academic,
27:57.8
this is the first time
27:58.8
I see those fault lines coming up,
28:00.8
those geopolitical fault lines coming up,
28:02.8
and essentially dominating
28:03.8
even domestic political discussions.
28:05.8
Now, if you want to know
28:07.8
it's a long conversation.
28:08.8
You can check some of the pieces
28:09.8
that I cited there.
28:10.8
But I would say the fourth factor
28:12.8
is ASEAN inaction.
28:14.8
Remember I said hedging works, right?
28:17.8
You know, if to a certain degree,
28:20.8
you know, multilateral mechanisms
28:22.8
but they're just effective enough
28:24.8
for you to have a hope
28:25.8
that things will not descend
28:26.8
into a zero-sum game
28:28.8
among the superpowers.
28:29.8
But the problem we have right now
28:31.8
in Southeast Asia is that
28:33.8
not only are ASEAN countries
28:37.8
but we have some ASEAN leaders,
28:39.8
I think you know some of these people,
28:41.8
who came over during the APEC Summit.
28:43.8
Some of them are openly, you know,
28:45.8
saying, oh, we're not the Philippines,
28:46.8
and they're actually blaming us
28:50.8
creating tensions in the region.
28:52.8
And even, you know,
28:54.8
some of the leaders I expected more from,
28:56.8
like, you know, Liu Shenglong of Singapore,
28:58.8
for instance, in the New Economy Forum
29:00.8
with Bloomberg last year,
29:01.8
he said something like,
29:02.8
you know, essentially his message was,
29:04.8
hey, Filipinos, maybe you wanna,
29:05.8
you know, be careful what you wish for,
29:08.8
That's the kind of rhetoric we're getting
29:10.8
from some of our neighboring countries,
29:11.8
not to mention some of the more
29:13.8
China-dependent countries in Indochina
29:15.8
who don't wanna do anything
29:16.8
about the South China Sea.
29:17.8
So when you see a combination
29:19.8
of all of these four factors,
29:21.8
it's quite understandable that Marcus Jr.
29:24.8
moved towards a strategic reset,
29:26.8
essentially in the second six months
29:28.8
of his first year in office.
29:30.8
So by February, essentially by February
29:32.8
and March of last year,
29:36.8
there was a market change in his rhetoric.
29:38.8
In fact, you can detect the market change
29:40.8
in his rhetoric during the World Economic Forum
29:42.8
just weeks after he visited China
29:44.8
where he said, you know,
29:45.8
one of the things that keeps him awake at night
29:47.8
is the South China Sea dispute.
29:49.8
Which is day and night different
29:50.8
from his rhetoric just a year or months earlier
29:52.8
when he was saying, no, no, no,
29:53.8
our relationship with China is multidimensional,
29:55.8
this is just one of the issues,
29:57.8
essentially we can split the difference,
29:58.8
we can compartmentalize.
29:59.8
Now suddenly his tone is changing.
30:01.8
And within weeks,
30:02.8
things got even more interesting
30:04.8
because he openly discussed
30:07.8
a trilateral security framework
30:10.8
with Japan and the United States,
30:11.8
which is very poignant as we speak
30:13.8
because that summit is now happening
30:15.8
in the White House.
30:16.8
And then more importantly,
30:19.8
he decided not only to continue
30:21.8
the defense agreement signed
30:23.8
by his liberal predecessor,
30:27.8
the Betanoa of the Marcoses,
30:29.8
but he even expanded that defense agreement,
30:31.8
the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement.
30:33.8
As you know, Americans can no longer
30:35.8
have permanent bases in the Philippines,
30:37.8
that's unconstitutional,
30:38.8
but they can have rotational access
30:40.8
to Philippine bases.
30:41.8
It's kind of a workaround.
30:44.8
it's not only the implementation
30:46.8
and continuation of the defense deal
30:48.8
under Aquino, signed under Aquino,
30:50.8
which was semi-frustrated under Duterte,
30:53.8
but it's the location of the new bases
30:58.8
And a lot of these new bases
30:59.8
are actually towards the north of the Philippines,
31:02.8
which brings us to the conversation over Taiwan,
31:04.8
which I'll discuss with you guys shortly.
31:07.8
And in that year also saw massive,
31:10.8
massive exercises between the Philippines and US,
31:12.8
with Australia, Japan,
31:14.8
even UK also sending representatives.
31:16.8
That was largest ever, I think 18,000.
31:18.8
That's a lot of troops and participants.
31:20.8
So I'm just showing to you guys chronologically
31:23.8
the evolution of Marcos Junior's foreign policy.
31:25.8
So that you can see actually there's a logic,
31:27.8
there's a method to that shift.
31:29.8
There are factors that are shaping that.
31:31.8
And obviously things are really reaching
31:34.8
a boiling point right now because
31:39.8
honestly one of the debate we're having right now is
31:41.8
what's really going on?
31:43.8
Because for a long time China has been engaging
31:45.8
in what you call gray zone strategy,
31:47.8
meaning they leverage their maritime naval dominance,
31:52.8
but they never fire a shot or cannons, right?
31:57.8
So what they do is they deploy massive militia,
32:00.8
they put gigantic coast guard vessels there.
32:03.8
But one of the things that happened over the past few months
32:05.8
is that there were multiple occasions
32:06.8
when China used water cannons.
32:08.8
And these water cannons are getting more and more powerful.
32:11.8
The pressure is getting more and more powerful.
32:13.8
And actually a number of our naval officers
32:16.8
were injured during some of these recent incidents.
32:19.8
So the debate we're having right now is that
32:21.8
is this still gray zone?
32:22.8
Or is this veering towards lethal force?
32:25.8
And therefore what is the implication
32:27.8
for the mutual defense treaty
32:28.8
between the United States and the Philippines?
32:30.8
And as we understand,
32:31.8
Biden is about to publicly call on Xi Jinping and China
32:34.8
not to use aggressive water cannon tactics
32:38.8
that could be actually lethal
32:40.8
and therefore effectuate or operationalize
32:42.8
the mutual defense treaty.
32:44.8
Now one of the things I want to quickly discuss is
32:46.8
I want to also push back against this rhetoric of
32:49.8
the Philippines as being kind of a small power there.
32:52.8
The reality is that this is not the Philippines of 1970s or 2000.
32:56.8
This is a Philippines that has a half a trillion dollar economy.
32:59.8
It's one of the fastest growing economy.
33:01.8
It's about to invest 35, 36 billion dollars in its defense
33:04.8
over the next 10 years.
33:06.8
It's signing massive agreements.
33:08.8
I visited some of our new warships.
33:10.8
A lot of that we're buying from South Korea.
33:12.8
We're looking at buying submarines.
33:14.8
So this is not the same Philippines that we have
33:16.8
been on for quite some time.
33:17.8
It's a country that has more and more resources.
33:19.8
It's the fastest growing country in Southeast Asia,
33:21.8
even faster than Vietnam.
33:23.8
So we're finally having those kinds of resources.
33:25.8
And while China is a very powerful country,
33:27.8
as you can see this is a low index showing power dynamics in Asia,
33:31.8
it's true that U.S. and China are so powerful,
33:33.8
but a lot of other countries are moving up and catching up.
33:37.8
And we can have a discussion about that
33:39.8
because if a lot of these middle-sized countries team up together,
33:43.8
they can actually quite match China.
33:45.8
We can have a long debate about methodology,
33:47.8
but the reality is that while it's an asymmetrical relationship
33:50.8
between China and a lot of its neighbors,
33:52.8
if its neighbors work it together,
33:54.8
if its neighbors continue to grow as fast as they do
33:57.8
and build their basic defense capabilities,
33:59.8
then you will have not totally symmetrical
34:02.8
but much more interesting equilateral dynamic
34:06.8
pluralistic order in that part of the world.
34:08.8
Now, I mentioned a while ago the Taiwan aspect.
34:11.8
So the reason why the ETCA decision
34:14.8
was important is because
34:16.8
we were wondering why are some of these bases
34:19.8
under the ETCA with the United States,
34:21.8
new bases in the north of the country, right?
34:24.8
There are essentially two ways of looking at it.
34:26.8
One is the Philippines is becoming an integral part
34:33.8
of a proactive deterrent strategy over Taiwan, right?
34:36.8
So I don't buy this argument that by 2027
34:39.8
China is going to invade Taiwan.
34:41.8
I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.
34:43.8
We can have a long conversation
34:44.8
about how the Ukraine war
34:45.8
is affecting the strategic calculus in Beijing.
34:48.8
As you know, an amphibious attack
34:50.8
is way more complicated logistically
34:52.8
than a land-based attack.
34:54.8
We can have a long conversation about that.
34:55.8
But the thing is,
34:56.8
the threat to Taiwan is real and present.
34:59.8
And Taiwan is also an extremely important country.
35:02.8
So if you look at the ongoing global chip wars,
35:05.8
I mean, the TSMC of Taiwan alone, right,
35:08.8
produces the majority of the high-end semiconductors.
35:11.8
In fact, more than 90%
35:13.8
of the most high-end semiconductors in the world
35:15.8
are made in Taiwan alone.
35:16.8
So the stakes in Taiwan are extremely high.
35:18.8
It's not only about shared values.
35:20.8
It's not only about the history of Japan in Taiwan,
35:22.8
history of U.S. in Taiwan.
35:24.8
It's also about the fact that Taiwan,
35:26.8
I mean, if oil was the engine of global capitalism
35:30.8
in the 20th century,
35:31.8
the semiconductors are kind of like that.
35:33.8
Except oil was produced in 12, 14 different countries
35:37.8
while the most high-end semiconductors
35:39.8
are all produced in that tiny island, right?
35:41.8
And that's how important
35:44.8
Now, why is the Philippines important?
35:46.8
Why the Philippine-Japan-U.S. trilateral alliance
35:49.8
or what they call JAPOS?
35:50.8
Geography is a huge part of that.
35:52.8
You tend to, I mean,
35:54.8
in academic world, in policy world,
35:56.8
we put the Philippines in the Southeast Asia region,
35:59.8
but the reality is that the Philippines
36:01.8
is much closer to Taiwan.
36:02.8
Like, Manila to Taiwan is just one hour flight.
36:05.8
Kaohsiung to some of the northern city in the Philippines
36:08.8
is just over 30 minutes.
36:09.8
I come from the north,
36:10.8
so when we swim in the north,
36:11.8
in Pagutput area,
36:12.8
literally on radio you can hear Taiwanese radio, right?
36:16.8
We're extremely close to them.
36:18.8
And the same thing with Japan.
36:20.8
A lot of their military bases,
36:21.8
which they're fortifying right now,
36:23.8
are just as close to the northern shores of Taiwan
36:25.8
as the Philippine bases in our super north
36:28.8
are close to Taiwan's southern shores.
36:31.8
In fact, the Philippines geography is even more important.
36:35.8
Because a lot of the simulations done
36:38.8
when it comes to potential invasion of Taiwan
36:41.8
most likely invasion of Taiwan will happen
36:43.8
from the southwestern region
36:45.8
because of topography.
36:47.8
As you know, Taiwan is very mountainous.
36:49.8
So the Philippines will be very much at the front line of that.
36:53.8
Now, obviously we're talking about the war scenario,
36:56.8
but in global strategy,
36:58.8
it's not what happens during war per se,
37:01.8
it's how to prevent that war
37:02.8
through proactive deterrence.
37:04.8
So what's happening right now is
37:05.8
the Philippines and Japan
37:07.8
are essentially teaming up together with the United States
37:09.8
to proactively deter.
37:11.8
The potential invasion of Taiwan.
37:13.8
Although, again, I have my doubts
37:14.8
about all of those timelines
37:15.8
that are being heard there.
37:16.8
This is really a deterrence game out there.
37:18.8
But in the Philippines,
37:21.8
there's a new debate coming out.
37:23.8
And the new debate is this.
37:24.8
Some of the strategies in the Philippines say,
37:27.8
actually, Taiwan is more important to us
37:30.8
than the South China Sea.
37:32.8
Because in the South China Sea,
37:34.8
we're fighting over small islands and land features, right?
37:37.8
From a strategic and military standpoint,
37:39.8
a bigger nightmare for the Philippines
37:42.8
is if China becomes our neighbor
37:44.8
from a giant island of Taiwan.
37:47.8
That will immediately put us
37:48.8
within the range of danger.
37:50.8
And therefore, their argument is,
37:51.8
it's not so much the Philippines helping the US and Japan
37:54.8
to protect Taiwan,
37:56.8
it's about also the Philippines protecting its own interests.
37:58.8
Because what the Philippines is also doing right now
38:00.8
is giving Americans more and more basic access
38:03.8
so that in exchange,
38:04.8
it will also improve its ability
38:06.8
to have surveillance, ISR,
38:08.8
and defensive positioning
38:10.8
in its northern regions
38:11.8
and towards the Philippine Sea.
38:12.8
So there's an ongoing debate there.
38:14.8
And speaking of debate,
38:15.8
there's also domestic pushback.
38:17.8
So some of governors in the Philippines,
38:19.8
like Governor Mamba, for instance, in Cagayan,
38:21.8
are openly critical of this.
38:23.8
In fact, the very sister of the President,
38:25.8
let's just call it sibling geopolitics,
38:27.8
is openly against this direction
38:29.8
of the Philippine foreign policy
38:30.8
under her own brother,
38:32.8
And on multiple occasions,
38:33.8
she came out and essentially opposed
38:35.8
any kind of major exercises
38:37.8
between the United States and the Philippines
38:39.8
in the northern regions of the country.
38:41.8
And I think this debate will be even more
38:43.8
intensified in the coming months
38:45.8
as the prospect of Japanese rotational military access
38:50.8
to Philippine bases also gains ground.
38:53.8
in the coming hours and days,
38:54.8
Japan and the Philippines are expected to sign
38:56.8
a reciprocal access agreement,
38:58.8
which allows for more bilateral military drills
39:01.8
in exchange of defense equipment.
39:03.8
But some are suspecting that Japan wants to also push
39:06.8
its own version of ETCA or mini-ETCA in the Philippines.
39:09.8
So a lot of things are moving on right now.
39:11.8
So this raises a number of questions,
39:13.8
and that's why, as you notice,
39:14.8
I'm trying to avoid over-explaining some of the parts
39:16.8
because we can go on forever for that,
39:18.8
but I won't leave that for discussion.
39:20.8
The dilemma for the Philippines essentially is this,
39:22.8
and this is the debate.
39:23.8
Is our security cooperation with the United States
39:26.8
really about deterrence, deterrence of China,
39:29.8
helping us in the South China Sea,
39:30.8
avoiding a war in Taiwan,
39:31.8
avoiding occupation of Taiwan by China?
39:34.8
Or is this just going to increase
39:35.8
the Philippine dependence on the United States?
39:37.8
This is a debate out there.
39:39.8
You can guess where I am on this side of the debate,
39:41.8
but I'm willing to listen to both sides of this.
39:44.8
And it's a very intense debate
39:45.8
we're having now in the Philippines.
39:47.8
The other one is,
39:50.8
what will China do?
39:52.8
Because my suspicion is China will not just sit idly by.
39:57.8
And of all the three countries I mentioned,
39:59.8
Japan, Philippines, and US,
40:00.8
I think the Philippines is clearly the most vulnerable one.
40:04.8
it is hard not to think
40:07.8
that the way China is treating us in the South China Sea,
40:11.8
this semi-lethal water canoning,
40:14.8
is their way of saying,
40:15.8
be careful what you're doing in the North,
40:17.8
especially vis-a-vis Taiwan.
40:19.8
So my suggestion always was,
40:20.8
maybe we can work it the other way and say,
40:23.8
we can calibrate the amount of security cooperation
40:26.8
we'll have with the US
40:27.8
in exchange for China not harassing us in the South China Sea.
40:30.8
But then again, there are other people who are going to debate that,
40:32.8
no, that's a wrong way of looking at it,
40:33.8
because Taiwan is the most important part for the Philippines,
40:36.8
because we don't want China to be our neighbor to the North.
40:38.8
So these are the kinds of debates that are ongoing in the Philippines.
40:41.8
The other debate that is also ongoing in the Philippines is,
40:43.8
why are we doing this?
40:44.8
Why are we even aligned with the United States?
40:46.8
Why can't we just hedge and do the multi-alignment game
40:49.8
that the Vietnams and Indias of this world are doing?
40:53.8
I forgot to mention it,
40:54.8
Vietnam and India also have territorial disputes with China.
40:58.8
In the case of Vietnam, of course, they're maritime disputes.
41:01.8
And in the case of, of course, India,
41:02.8
it's a disputable dispute.
41:03.8
It's a disputable dispute in the Himalayan region.
41:05.8
So some are saying, why can't we do it like them?
41:07.8
Again, that's a long conversation we can have later on.
41:10.8
And then, as I said,
41:12.8
theoretically and geopolitically,
41:14.8
I mean, or rather operationally,
41:16.8
can the Philippines continue to just hedge?
41:19.8
Or the Philippines will eventually be forced to fully align
41:21.8
with the United States and Japan in this picture?
41:24.8
the whole sensibility that I was trying to communicate
41:27.8
in this mini-lecture
41:29.8
was that a lot of the things Philippines is doing
41:32.8
is not because we're being told by the Americans to do it.
41:35.8
It's more of about China is forcing our hand.
41:38.8
So we're in this really difficult strategic predicament right now.
41:42.8
And every move we make
41:43.8
is gonna have a lot of risks for the country
41:45.8
as much as opportunities.
41:49.8
as I said, there's a lot of strategic gaslighting
41:53.8
This idea of Philippine,
41:55.8
essentially it's Philippine exceptionalism.
41:57.8
That the Philippines is an outlier in ASEAN.
41:59.8
We're the only one who has a bad relationship with China.
42:02.8
We're the one dragging in the Americans.
42:04.8
And we're the troublemakers.
42:06.8
I have a big problem with that kind of discourse.
42:08.8
This one, I'm very squarely on the other side of the debate.
42:11.8
My argument is that
42:12.8
the Philippines would have loved to have a pragmatic
42:14.8
and fruitful relationship with China,
42:16.8
except we're not getting that.
42:17.8
We didn't get it under Duterte.
42:19.8
Marcos tried it, it's not working.
42:21.8
And there's just no way for any Filipino president
42:23.8
to just sit idly by
42:25.8
while all of these things are happening in the South China Sea,
42:28.8
not to mention the threat in Taiwan.
42:30.8
Because one thing I didn't mention a while ago is that
42:31.8
all authoritative surveys in the Philippines show that
42:35.8
80 to 90 percent of Filipinos
42:37.8
want the government to take a more assertive stance against China.
42:40.8
And 70 to 80 percent of Filipinos want
42:43.8
the country to team up with the United States and other countries
42:46.8
to better protect its sovereign rights.
42:48.8
So as Marcos Jr. correctly pointed out,
42:50.8
this is not about his personal preference,
42:52.8
this is about his mandate.
42:54.8
This is about what the Filipino people want him to do.
42:57.8
Which in retrospect makes Rodrigo Duterte
42:59.8
a very curious case that we can discuss.
43:02.8
Anyway, this was not a lecture
43:05.8
to make you experts on these issues.
43:07.8
We can go on and on about it.
43:09.8
But what I tried to do over the past 30 minutes or so
43:12.8
was to just pass on the sensibility
43:14.8
and the dilemmas and predicaments
43:16.8
and the ongoing debates in the region,
43:18.8
in the Philippines and beyond,
43:19.8
and how countries like the Philippines
43:21.8
are really squeezed in between the superpowers.
43:23.8
On that note, thank you very much
43:24.8
and I look forward to your questions and comments.
43:29.8
I'd like to request, Professor,
43:31.8
Professor Agarwal to start the conversation.
43:33.8
Maybe Richard, you can sit down first here.
43:35.8
Sure, yeah, please, please.
43:37.8
So we have 30 minutes
43:39.8
and I'll give the first 15 minutes, I guess,
43:41.8
to Professor Agarwal
43:43.8
and then maybe Vinny, you can just open it up.
43:45.8
Yeah, I think that's fine.
43:47.8
Well, thank you very much.
43:49.8
I must say that was the most comprehensive talk
43:51.8
I've heard in a long time,
43:53.8
covering all aspects of international relations,
43:56.8
risk management, hedging, balancing, and so on.
43:59.8
So pretty thorough.
44:00.8
But I have a few questions
44:02.8
that we might be thinking about
44:03.8
that you addressed a little bit.
44:04.8
So let me begin with the role of ASEAN.
44:07.8
You know, you said the Philippines is an outlier
44:10.8
and ASEAN has trouble having national kind of unity among itself.
44:13.8
The ASEAN countries are often at loggerheads,
44:15.8
particularly over countries like Myanmar,
44:18.8
you know, military dictatorship and so on.
44:20.8
Do you think ASEAN has a role to play here
44:23.8
in countering China in some way,
44:26.8
given that many of the ASEAN members themselves
44:28.8
have differing foreign policies?
44:30.8
Like Vietnam, which is much friendlier with China
44:32.8
than the Philippines is currently, at least.
44:34.8
So is there a role for it?
44:36.8
Because after all, ASEAN was created in 1967
44:38.8
with the goal of trying to counter communism,
44:41.8
and now it's kind of a different communism.
44:43.8
It's not the communism of, you know,
44:46.8
North Korea or North Vietnam.
44:48.8
It's the communism of China,
44:49.8
but in this case, it's more than communism.
44:51.8
It's really superpower politics.
44:53.8
So does ASEAN have a role here?
44:56.8
Absolutely, ASEAN has a role here.
45:00.8
I think I'm one of the last few
45:04.8
ASEAN aficionados in the Philippines
45:06.8
because to be honest,
45:07.8
whenever I'm in a meeting with other Philippine experts,
45:10.8
the terms I hear is,
45:12.8
ASEAN is useless.
45:14.8
ASEAN is an enabler of China.
45:16.8
ASEAN is an apologist of China.
45:19.8
In fact, some of the leaders in the region
45:20.8
are openly coming out and saying,
45:21.8
oh, don't demonize China.
45:23.8
They seem to be lawyering for China.
45:24.8
But if you look at the history of ASEAN,
45:26.8
it is not true that ASEAN is non-interventionist.
45:28.8
It's just not true.
45:29.8
We know during the Cold War period,
45:30.8
when it was a much more tight-knit group
45:32.8
of similar-minded leaders,
45:34.8
unfortunately, back then dictatorial leaders,
45:37.8
they actually were very aggressively intervening in regional affairs,
45:39.8
including what was happening in Cambodia.
45:41.8
We know that for a long time,
45:42.8
ASEAN leaders actually supported the Pol Pot regime
45:44.8
in the United Nations
45:46.8
when Vietnam invaded and occupied Cambodia.
45:48.8
And then later on,
45:49.8
there was a moment of redemption
45:50.8
when they pressured Hun Sen
45:52.8
and some of the domestic factions in Cambodia
45:54.8
to move towards pluralistic politics
45:56.8
as an unsaid precondition for joining ASEAN.
46:03.8
That's why when the leader of the opposition of Cambodia,
46:07.8
when they go to Indonesia,
46:09.8
thank you for the contribution you made in the 1990s
46:11.8
to push us towards more pluralistic politics.
46:13.8
We hope you do the same, right?
46:15.8
If you look at ASEAN also,
46:17.8
we have a long history of essentially
46:19.8
doing it the Frank Sinatra way.
46:21.8
If we cannot agree 100%,
46:23.8
we cannot have a consensus,
46:25.8
then we can do it minilaterally, right?
46:27.8
In an ad hoc flexible way,
46:29.8
which doesn't require unanimity.
46:31.8
And I think the most constructive example
46:34.8
is during the Istimor situation.
46:36.8
As you know, obviously,
46:37.8
Istimor is a sensitive issue to Indonesia.
46:39.8
You couldn't expect the maximally positive contribution
46:44.8
by Indonesia at some point
46:45.8
because of the history, the bitterness.
46:47.8
So what happened was Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand,
46:50.8
they directly contributed to peacekeeping operations
46:53.8
and institution building
46:54.8
that helped Indonesia
46:55.8
and Istimor to successfully transition
46:57.8
to a more or less robust democracy
46:59.8
towards the end of 1990s and the early 2000s.
47:02.8
So there are many examples
47:04.8
where actually ASEAN countries came together,
47:08.8
intervened in regional affairs,
47:09.8
but in a constructive manner.
47:11.8
I would also add the Philippines' decision
47:13.8
to take China to international court.
47:14.8
That was not supported by any country at this officially,
47:17.8
as far as I know.
47:19.8
after the Philippines' unilateral decision,
47:21.8
because this was not done in consultation,
47:23.8
because no one was going to support it,
47:25.8
at least publicly,
47:26.8
with the slight exception of Vietnam,
47:28.8
which you can have a discussion about.
47:31.8
when we won the arbitration case,
47:34.8
All of our neighbors are using it
47:35.8
for protecting their own interests.
47:37.8
So the Malaysians, for instance,
47:39.8
in 2019 pushed for formalization
47:44.8
of their extended continental shelf claim
47:47.8
in certain parts of the South China Sea.
47:49.8
And they invoked the Philippine Arbitration Award.
47:51.8
When there was a little bit of pushback
47:53.8
from China during the Maathir era,
47:54.8
their foreign minister openly said,
47:58.8
now we have an option
47:59.8
of also taking it to international court.
48:02.8
which are not directly involved
48:04.8
in the South China Sea dispute,
48:05.8
but are now involved
48:06.8
because the tip of China's nine-dash line is so vague,
48:09.8
it's overlapping with their North Natuna Sea,
48:11.8
they are also invoking on clause
48:13.8
in our arbitration case.
48:14.8
And obviously Vietnam,
48:15.8
which is the most important case.
48:18.8
So if you look at Vietnam,
48:20.8
my understanding is,
48:24.8
they led us on a little bit.
48:27.8
Because honestly,
48:28.8
when we filed our arbitration case in 2013,
48:30.8
for the next two to three years,
48:31.8
we kept on going to Vietnam, right?
48:33.8
Getting invitations to talk about South China Sea.
48:35.8
And I think some of us got an impression
48:36.8
that Vietnam might join us
48:38.8
or file a parallel case, technically speaking.
48:41.8
They never did that.
48:42.8
But the Vietnamese essentially took the outcome,
48:45.8
supported it more or less,
48:47.8
diplomatically and officially.
48:49.8
And they also tend to always invoke
48:52.8
that arbitration case to threaten China.
48:54.8
Whenever China pushes the envelope a bit too much.
48:58.8
our decision not to consult ASEAN
49:01.8
and to do what we felt was the right thing
49:04.8
ended up being the right thing also for the rest of ASEAN.
49:07.8
Giving leverage to Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia
49:09.8
in ways that they would not have had otherwise, right?
49:13.8
So that's why it's a complicated picture.
49:15.8
And the other thing about ASEAN is that
49:17.8
the ASEAN of nowadays is very different
49:19.8
from ASEAN of the Cold War era
49:21.8
or even ASEAN of 2010s.
49:23.8
So I'll give you an example.
49:26.8
when Indonesia was the ASEAN chairman,
49:28.8
Thailand and Cambodia almost came to blows
49:30.8
over that holy temple on their border.
49:33.8
And Indonesia stepped in
49:35.8
and encouraged the two countries to take their case
49:37.8
to the International Court of Justice,
49:38.8
if I'm not mistaken,
49:39.8
and eventually it was resolved.
49:40.8
So again, you could say that's a form of intervention
49:42.8
or shuttle diplomacy.
49:45.8
when Cambodia under Hun Sen tried to block
49:47.8
any discussion of the South China Sea,
49:49.8
this is shortly after the Scarborough crisis,
49:51.8
again, Marty Netaragawa,
49:53.8
the great foreign minister of Indonesia,
49:56.8
went across the region and made sure
49:58.8
that under the next chairman,
50:00.8
which was Brunei,
50:02.8
this will not happen again.
50:04.8
That we'll never give a prerogative to the country
50:06.8
to block a regional issue from being even discussed.
50:09.8
Because that created very, very ugly exchanges
50:12.8
between the late President Aquino and Hun Sen.
50:14.8
If you were there in the November summit in 2012,
50:16.8
they were going at it.
50:17.8
It was really, really bad.
50:18.8
And there were some people in the Philippines
50:21.8
we have to pull out from ASEAN.
50:22.8
This is a useless organization.
50:23.8
So what I'm saying is,
50:25.8
it's not true that ASEAN always operates on consensus.
50:30.8
The problem is that nowadays,
50:31.8
our understanding of consensus is unanimity.
50:35.8
it's impossible to get unanimity
50:37.8
on any sensitive issue,
50:38.8
whether it's Myanmar or it's South China Sea,
50:41.8
because of the extreme diversity
50:43.8
of the 10 member states.
50:44.8
That's why we know behind the scenes,
50:46.8
people like Lee Kuan Yew,
50:47.8
this is in Wikileaks, right?
50:49.8
I wrote something about that,
50:50.8
said that the moment we think
50:52.8
we accepted the Cambodians
50:53.8
into the regional organization,
50:55.8
we pushed ourselves back for 20 years, right?
50:58.8
Kosikan Bilahari,
50:59.8
the great Singaporean diplomat,
51:02.8
he got into trouble with Cambodia
51:03.8
by openly saying,
51:04.8
maybe we should expel these guys, right?
51:06.8
Thankfully, that worked
51:07.8
because Cambodia behaved itself.
51:09.8
I mean, I don't mean it in a patronizing way.
51:11.8
I mean it on the South China Sea issue.
51:12.8
They didn't do anything crazy
51:13.8
on the South China Sea issue.
51:15.8
But that's the thing.
51:17.8
Unlike the European Union,
51:18.8
there's no Copenhagen criteria.
51:20.8
The idea of being a member of South China Sea
51:22.8
organization is just geographic, cultural,
51:24.8
and to a certain degree, psychological.
51:26.8
So when you have an extremely diverse
51:28.8
organization of 10 members,
51:30.8
with very different threat perceptions,
51:32.8
very different webs of interdependence
51:34.8
with China, right?
51:35.8
I mean, if you're Laos or Cambodia,
51:37.8
you are so dependent on China
51:38.8
in ways the Philippines is not, right?
51:40.8
So let me take that question.
51:43.8
you've given me some examples,
51:45.8
given us examples
51:46.8
where ASEAN was able to intervene.
51:48.8
Intervening in domestic affairs
51:49.8
and dealing with Thailand disputes
51:51.8
is very different than creating
51:53.8
a counter alliance against China.
51:55.8
ASEAN working together,
51:56.8
given that in many ways,
51:58.8
Cambodia and Laos
51:59.8
are in the pockets of the Chinese, right?
52:01.8
So in that sense,
52:02.8
even though I'm a big ASEAN fan too,
52:04.8
I don't see what ASEAN can do
52:06.8
from a military perspective
52:07.8
or a joint perspective.
52:09.8
And you've given a few examples.
52:10.8
Okay, they're using the Philippines case,
52:12.8
but the Philippines shot itself
52:13.8
in the foot with Duterte
52:14.8
by not even promoting the case.
52:16.8
So Philippines have lost a lot of credibility
52:18.8
in my view as well, right?
52:19.8
So the question is,
52:20.8
is it really possible for ASEAN
52:22.8
to do some of the things
52:23.8
maybe make the Americans
52:25.8
or someone else would like to do,
52:26.8
which is actually serve
52:27.8
as a counterweight to China?
52:29.8
So there are three levels to that.
52:31.8
you have certain member states
52:33.8
which see the Philippines
52:34.8
as the ASEAN provocateur
52:36.8
and America as a kind of
52:37.8
a meddling external power.
52:38.8
And they essentially buy
52:40.8
the Chinese narrative on this.
52:41.8
We know which countries these are.
52:42.8
I don't want to get
52:43.8
into diplomatic trouble.
52:44.8
And then you have this perspective,
52:46.8
because I gave a talk
52:47.8
in ASEAN summit last year.
52:49.8
We had interesting discussion
52:51.8
The other perspective is this.
52:53.8
of our Indonesian friends
52:54.8
tend to be very much invested
52:56.8
in this argument.
52:57.8
The idea is this.
52:58.8
ASEAN is just too weak
53:00.8
at this point in time
53:01.8
to stand up to China.
53:03.8
And at the same time,
53:04.8
we're doing good economically.
53:07.8
So just give us 10 to 15 years.
53:09.8
We're growing faster from China.
53:11.8
And then by 2030, 2035,
53:13.8
we're going to sit down with China
53:14.8
on a much better terms of engagement.
53:17.8
So let's just do nothing crazy now.
53:19.8
Focus on economic growth.
53:21.8
a totally crazy argument.
53:22.8
Because for the first time
53:24.8
Indonesia, Vietnam,
53:25.8
are all growing faster than China.
53:27.8
Indonesia is already going to be
53:28.8
a multi-trillion dollar economy.
53:30.8
Philippines and Vietnam.
53:35.8
let's be the Deng Xiaoping, right?
53:36.8
You know, hide your claws
53:37.8
or whatever little claws you have.
53:39.8
And in 10 to 15 years,
53:40.8
we'll be strong enough
53:41.8
to deal with China
53:43.8
Then comes the third group.
53:44.8
The third group is,
53:48.8
except anything could happen
53:49.8
in the next days and months.
53:51.8
Forget about the next 10 years.
53:54.8
that we can keep things
53:56.8
for the next 10 to 15 years?
53:58.8
I mean, I just talked about
53:59.8
the second Thomas Scholl situation,
54:01.8
which is extremely explosive.
54:02.8
And that third school of thought
54:05.8
mini-lateral cooperation
54:08.8
So the most natural one
54:11.8
the Philippines and Vietnam.
54:13.8
we can have a long conversation
54:15.8
because Vietnam is also going
54:16.8
through its own political transition
54:18.8
They're essentially purging
54:20.8
and the reformist figures.
54:22.8
with Vietnam standards
54:24.8
kind of KGB-style guys
54:25.8
who are taking over
54:27.8
even more paranoid
54:28.8
about Western influence
54:29.8
in their country.
54:30.8
But nevertheless,
54:31.8
when Marcus visited Vietnam
54:32.8
earlier this year,
54:33.8
he got a very good reception
54:35.8
and both sides agreed
54:37.8
of maritime agreements,
54:38.8
including potentially
54:39.8
maritime security agreements
54:41.8
there's a certain degree
54:43.8
of security cooperation there.
54:45.8
Now, no one is under any illusion
54:47.8
that Vietnam and Philippines
54:48.8
alone can hold China
54:51.8
or three countries,
54:52.8
let's say maybe Indonesia
54:53.8
and their more assertive Prabowo,
54:54.8
that's still up in the air
54:55.8
because Prabowo could be also
54:56.8
like a Duterte, Toscan.
54:57.8
But if they work with the Quad,
54:58.8
they work with other trilaterals
55:00.8
then they can collectively
55:01.8
have a different kind of
55:02.8
counterbalancing effect.
55:03.8
So that's the third
55:04.8
school of thought.
55:05.8
So there are multiple layers here
55:06.8
and I think the problem
55:08.8
is that we tend to hear
55:09.8
just one school of thought
55:11.8
there are multiple schools
55:12.8
of thought simultaneously
55:14.8
So that's the third
55:15.8
school of thought.
55:16.8
So there are multiple layers
55:18.8
there are multiple schools
55:19.8
of thought simultaneously
55:21.8
So maybe you could say
55:23.8
Philippine domestic politics
55:24.8
on which I'm not an expert
55:25.8
but it seems that you have
55:28.8
sister and then there's
55:30.8
and they say they get along
55:31.8
but on the other hand,
55:32.8
she's being criticized
55:33.8
by her own brother.
55:34.8
So is it a sustainable
55:36.8
domestic coalition
55:37.8
to pursue a strategy
55:40.8
with the United States
55:41.8
and countering China
55:42.8
which is what you're advocating
55:43.8
which I'm actually for.
55:44.8
So I'm not going to
55:45.8
criticize that strategy
55:46.8
but is it domestically,
55:47.8
given that you have
55:48.8
this weird vice president
55:50.8
from the previous administration
55:51.8
and then you have Marcos
55:55.8
history of old gangsters
55:58.8
It's a pretty weird coalition
55:59.8
if you think about it.
56:01.8
people are free to listen
56:02.8
to our podcast series
56:03.8
because we discuss
56:05.8
No, but kidding aside,
56:14.8
of the former president,
56:17.8
of multi-alignment
56:22.8
Marcos administration
56:23.8
but I'm still the daughter
56:25.8
the sister of my brother
56:26.8
and everyone is bashing
56:28.8
But I think things
56:29.8
are going to get more
56:31.8
as we move forward
56:32.8
because as the tensions
56:35.8
essentially there's
56:36.8
a loyalty call nowadays.
56:37.8
So one of the biggest stories
56:38.8
in the Philippines
56:40.8
is Sarah Duterte,
56:41.8
the vice president
56:42.8
who has everything
56:44.8
the Gaza conflict,
56:48.8
on the South China Sea disputes.
56:50.8
And the only time
56:52.8
that we saw her making
56:58.8
on the anniversary
57:04.8
or something like that.
57:06.8
I mean you can ask
57:07.8
my Mandarin-speaking friends
57:08.8
how good her Chinese was.
57:09.8
Actually the meme nowadays
57:11.8
Sarah Duterte's comment
57:12.8
and then they get
57:13.8
a clip of her Mandarin statement.
57:15.8
it's becoming more
57:16.8
and more difficult
57:17.8
for Sarah Duterte
57:18.8
to be that kind of
57:19.8
a multi-aligned figure
57:20.8
and I think she's being
57:21.8
more pulled and pulled
57:22.8
to the side of her father
57:23.8
and as I understand
57:24.8
the father is seeking
57:25.8
to visit China again
57:27.8
as a kind of a special friend
57:29.8
In fact last year
57:32.8
with Henry Kissinger.
57:34.8
And now this month
57:35.8
he's hoping to go back to China
57:36.8
and they're just,
57:38.8
unabashed about it.
57:41.8
and interestingly
57:43.8
nationalist groups
57:48.8
they were kind of enemies.
57:49.8
So suddenly you have
57:51.8
strange bedfellows
57:53.8
happening in the Philippines
57:55.8
the center of gravity
57:59.8
are critical of China
58:00.8
and want us to have
58:01.8
stronger ties with the United States
