Analysts: Deal on Philippine bases gives US firmer foothold in Asia
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South Korean and U.S. Marines make a beach landing during a joint U.S.-Philippine military exercise in Zambales province, in the northern Philippines, Oct. 7, 2022. Joined by South Korean and Japanese forces, Filipino and American Marines kicked off large-scale military drills amid tensions in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.
Giving the United States greater access to Philippine military bases would allow the superpower to respond more swiftly to flashpoints in the region, as potential conflicts brew in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, analysts say.
The U.S. and Philippine defense secretaries announced this week that the longtime allies had struck a deal for granting American forces access to four more military bases in the Philippines, under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA).
The U.S. will now be able to rotate its forces in and out of and pre-deploy equipment and materiel at a total of nine bases in the Southeast Asian country strategically located in the South China Sea and close to Taiwan.
But at their joint press conference in Manila on Thursday, neither U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin nor Philippine counterpart Carlito Galvez Jr. said openly whether the deal emerged from fears over a potential Chinese attack on Taiwan.
Instead, both sides played it down by saying that the expanded access to Philippine bases would enable them to respond more quickly to humanitarian emergencies and disasters in the region.
“Let’s call a spade a spade,” political analyst Rommel Banlaoi, chairman of the Philippine Institute for Peace, Violence and Terrorism Research (PIPVTR) and a former government adviser on security, told BenarNews, an online news agency affiliated with Radio Free Asia.
“The U.S. should admit that EDCA aims to counter China’s growing military advantage to control Taiwan, the South China Sea and the Korean Peninsula and eventually the whole Asian region.”
Both countries, he said, would do well to be transparent about their true intentions – wanting more American facilities in the Southeast Asian archipelago, which is near these flashpoints for conflict.
“If EDCA sites are for HADR [Humanitarian and Disaster Response], maritime domain awareness and counterterrorism, I think the Philippines has offered more than enough locations,” Banlaoi said.
“I think the U.S. is preparing for greater military contingencies requiring more access to Philippine territories strategically situated at the heart of the Indo-Pacific,” he added.
The Philippines, a longtime close ally and former American colony, was the hub of the U.S. military presence in Southeast Asia during the Cold War. Until the early 1990s, when a nationalist-leaning Senate voted to shut them down, the country hosted two of the largest overseas American military bases – Subic Naval Base and Clark Air Base.
