Twenty-five years after the United States pulled its military out of the huge
Subic Bay naval base and Clark Air Force Base amid anti-American sentiment, the
US has returned to the Philippines with the biggest presence for decades as it
seeks to counter Chinese influence and to defend a Filipino military that is
clearly not capable of defending itself against the Chinese.
Rearming under the Enhanced Defense
Cooperation Agreement is being hurried along in the wake of the Philippine
Supreme Court’s ratification in mid-January because of the need to get the
bases operational before President Benigno S. Aquino leaves office at the end
of June. All of the presidential candidates except perhaps for Manuel A.
Roxas are considered unknown quantities in terms of continuation of the Aquino
government’s policies.
EDCA, as the pact is known, is
vulnerable to changes and cancellation, partly because Aquino bypassed the
Senate to complete the agreement through executive order. Since the pact was
created by executive order, it could be undone by executive agreement on the
part of the incoming president.
That may well be unlikely, given the
current state of affairs, with the Chinese encroaching almost to the Philippine
doorstep with the bases it is creating in the South China Sea. Nonetheless, the
prevailing wisdom is that if the US-Filipino bases are operational, it would be
unlikely for the incoming president to decommission them.
Accordingly, on March 19, officials
of both countries told the media five Philippine bases are to be developed for
dual-country use under EDCA, which was signed in April of 2014 but was held up
by opponents in the courts.
China immediately objected to the
announcement of the enhanced military presence, charging it was unnecessarily
provocative and aimed at undermining China’s rightful ownership to the entire
sea. “By collaborating to confront China politically and militarily, the United
States and its allies may be thinking they can undermine the external environment
of Chin and slow down its peaceful development,” Beijing charged in an
editorial in the state-owned Xinhua news agency.
The bases include four Air Force
facilities and the country’s largest army base, Fort Magsaysay, primarily a
training area whose facilities include airborne and amphibious training, jungle
survival and guerrilla warfare. US forces already use a small part of the
reservation to store weaponry and equipment needed for annual Balikatan
exercises with the Philippine military.
Others are the Lumbia airport in
Cagayan de Oro on Mindanao Island, which will be converted into a US storage
depot for disaster relief equipment, the Mactan-Benito Ebuen air base, which
shares a 10,000-foot runway with the Mactan-Cebu international airport, and bases
on Palawan, near where the Chinese military has continued its construction
activities around Scarborough Shoal.
The US left the Philippines in 1992
over a rent agreement, ending a military presence that began when Spain ceded
the islands to the United States in 1898 although it was interrupted by World
War II. The US re-landed with General Douglas MacArthur and remained there for
decades. It was from the Philippines that the US ran much of its military
operations during the Cold War and the hot one in Vietnam as well. The
60,000 acre Subic Naval Base – as big as the entire island of Singapore – was
the Navy’s principal supply and ship-repair installation in the region, most of
which was shifted to Guam and Singapore. Asia Times
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