Philippines warns Beijing it will enlist US help if China attacks

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A violent encounter between China and the Philippines would trigger a confrontation with the United States, according to an unusual warning from Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration.

If “something happens that is beyond incursion but is, in fact, an attack on, say, a Filipino naval vessel … then I call up Washington, D.C.,” Philippine Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin said during a national broadcast this week.

That’s a rare threat from Manila, as Duterte often takes a hostile tone with the U.S. while seeking to curry favor with China. Locsin was alluding to the Mutual Defense Treaty with the U.S. amid heightened tensions in the South China Sea, where China has built artificial islands and conducted military exercises to assert sovereignty over waterways claimed by the Philippines and other countries. And it comes just days after his defense counterpart dismissed Beijing’s claims.

“Their so-called historical rights over an area enclosed by their nine-dash line don’t exist except in their imaginations,” Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said on Sunday.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made a landmark declaration in July that China’s territorial claims in the region “are completely unlawful.”

The statement seems to have encouraged some governments in the region to offer more emphatic rejections of China’s ambitions.

“To have them say it, and to have the foreign secretary say it on a nationwide news broadcast in prime time clearly is an important bit of signaling,” said Center for Strategic and International Studies analyst Gregory Poling. “The other thing that signals, to me, at least, is that President Duterte is giving Locsin and Lorenzana much more room to improve the alliance.”

Duterte had proven deferential to China in recent years. “The president’s stand is clear: He will put [forward] the national interest of the Philippines, in view of a clash between the two superpowers,” presidential spokesman Harry Roque Jr. told reporters Wednesday, even as Locsin touted the security pact with the U.S. Roque added that the Philippines plans on “being friends to all, and enemy to no one.”

That comment is more muted than some of Duterte’s rhetoric, particularly following months of controversy over his aborted plan to scrap a military agreement with the U.S. out of anger that American officials had revoked the visa of a political ally.

The new rhetorical shift may have been influenced by State Department efforts to resolve a visa controversy that centered on a Duterte ally implicated in extrajudicial killings, but even Locsin made clear this week that Duterte isn’t going to get too close to the U.S. Noting he had rejected a U.S. request related to closer relations between the two countries’ Coast Guards, he tweeted, “We don’t share a coastline with the U.S. like Canada does. So no, nunca, never.”

That rebuff suggests that Manila is hesitant to allow the U.S. to fortify even its nonmilitary presence in the country, despite the potential value of Coast Guard contacts in disputes with China over fishing rights in the contested waters of the South China Sea.

“At the end of the day, if they need help, they’re still going to be calling us asking for help,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Zack Cooper said. “I think the really critical thing then is if the Philippines wants the United States to be able to help them in this kind of crisis, we have to have access to facilities in the Philippines that would allow us to actually uphold our treaty obligations.”

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