Assurances and Alliances in the Trump Era

Following the failed “no deal” summit meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, the U.S. secretary of state was off to meet with a U.S. treaty ally. But as Secretary Mike Pompeo’s plane left the tarmac in Vietnam, it wasn’t bound for South Korea or Japan — where a briefing may have been due on what went wrong with Kim. Rather, Pompeo was off to the Philippines on a previously scheduled trip. His business there was important; the leaders of South Korea and Japan would be brought up to speed on the diplomatic season’s banner summit meeting by phone.

In the final months of 2018, the alliance between the United States and the Philippines was in overt jeopardy. The two countries have been treaty allies since August 30, 1951, making Manila Washington’s oldest formal ally in the eastern hemisphere, the first to receive security assurances. On December 20, 2018, however, Philippine Secretary of National Defense Delfin Lorenzana openly called for a review of that treaty, seeking to interrogate its continued usefulness. In the final days of the year, he noted that the government should be prepared to “maintain it, strengthen it, or scrap it,” depending on what the review turned up.

All of a sudden, a longstanding U.S. alliance was in mortal danger. Since Trump’s inauguration in 2017, threats to U.S. alliances have become commonplace. The U.S. president has regularly called for allies in Europe and Asia to pay more. Indeed, even as Lorenzana’s comments were reported in the Philippine media, press in the United States appeared ambivalent. If an alliance-related story was picked up at the time, it concerned the difficult final rounds of negotiations between the United States and South Korea for a new Special Measures Agreement — the agreement that governs allied cost-sharing between the two sides and has been in place since 1991.

The core issue at the center of what ailed the alliance between Manila and Washington — and what brought Lorenzana to the point of openly mooting the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty’s scrapping — had to do with assurances. Unlike other Trump-imposed concerns about the viability of U.S. alliances in Asia, the Philippines was expressing long-standing frustration with Washington’s inability to make clear the conditions under which its defense obligations to Manila would stand. The core concern, as Lorenzana confirmed publicly in an interview on January 8, was the continued refusal of the United States — or rather, a senior U.S. official — to confirm that Articles IV and V of the 1951 Treaty would apply in disputed parts of the South China Sea administered by the Philippines.

The United States had chosen to undertake a position of strategic ambiguity on this matter. The second term of the Obama administration coincided with fast-increasing tensions in the disputed waters of the South China Sea, but the United States was hesitant to draw any red lines — even after the 2012 seizure of Scarborough Shoal by China from the Philippines. The 2016 ruling by a Hague-based tribunal in favor of Manila in its 2013 case filed against Beijing, while supported enthusiastically by Washington, which treated it as binding on both the Philippines and China, didn’t change matters. What gave this era of ambiguity all the more of a sting in the Philippines was the 2014 assurance to Japan, delivered personally by then-President Barack Obama, that the disputed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, which China claims as the Diaoyus, would be covered by the U.S.-Japan security treaty because Tokyo administers the islands.

In 2018, I was in Singapore at the Shangri-La Dialogue, the premier annual Asian security conference, when Jim Mattis, then the U.S. secretary of defense, was asked by a Filipino attendee about this issue. In his answer, Mattis noted that regarding “these matters,” American “public figures do not want to give specific answers,” because these are “complex issues.” 

“We stand by our treaty allies, but this is a discussion between the current administrations in Manila and in Washington D.C., and it is not one that can be answered as simply as your question would indicate,” Mattis added at the time. That moment emphasized the extent to which little had changed between the Obama and Trump administrations, even as the latter publicly recognized that it was in a period of great power competition with China and increased its presence in the South China Sea with stepped up freedom of navigation operations.

Lorenzana’s gambit at the end of 2018, remarkably, worked. Pompeo’s trip after the summit meeting with North Korea in Hanoi had a singular purpose: to put out the fire that appeared to be spreading within the U.S.-Philippine alliance. Unmentioned so far, of course, is the stress that has been applied on the alliance by the Philippines’ president, Rodrigo Duterte. Duterte, an avowed anti-American, threatened to abrogate the very basis of the relationship months into his term in late 2016, putting both the 1999 Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) and the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Act (EDCA) into doubt. The VFA and EDCA form the cornerstone of the modern U.S.-Philippines partnership and, even as the country’s armed forces and population remained overwhelmingly pro-American, Duterte presented a challenge at the highest levels of government in Manila. (The VFA forms the basis of the broader U.S. presence in the country, which was transformed in the early 1990s; it could survive without the 1951 treaty itself.) In any case, the Philippine president’s simultaneous pursuit of a range of pro-China policies laid waste to the five years his predecessor, Benigno Aquino III, had spent shoring up Manila’s position as a staunch U.S.-aligned regional partner.

But after all this, Pompeo finally delivered on the long-sought assurance in March 2019. He met with his counterpart Teddy Locsin, the Philippine foreign secretary, and clarified the scope of the treaty. “China’s island building and military activities in the South China Sea threaten [Philippine] sovereignty, security and therefore economic livelihood, as well as that of the United States,” Pompeo said. “As the South China Sea is part of the Pacific, any armed attack on Philippine forces, aircraft, or public vessels in the South China Sea will trigger mutual defense obligations under Article IV of our mutual defense treaty.”

With that, a new red line has been drawn. The 1951 U.S.-Philippine treaty appears to be safe, for now. But with assurances come challenges to American credibility. In the days following Pompeo’s statement, Beijing sought to demonstrate why the Obama administration, for instance, might have been hesitant about disambiguating the scope of the treaty. China’s “maritime militia” — a tool of grayzone coercion in its near seas — swept in and began challenging Philippine vessels at sand bars near Thitu Island, the largest Philippine outpost in the disputed Spratly group. The move came just a day after Pompeo’s assurance, testing American resolve. The alliance didn’t react.

In effect, China proved just as quickly as Pompeo had offered up the assurance in Manila that its fait accompli tactics in the South China Sea would be unswerving, even in the face of U.S. assurances to allies like the Philippines. There were no incidents at or near Thitu Island that would necessarily have given cause to either side to trigger Article IV obligations, but Beijing was probing and testing for a reaction. In the coming weeks and months, similar standoffs could take place at Second Thomas Shoal, where the Philippine Navy vessel BRP Sierra Madre sits stranded, or even at Scarborough Shoal, prompting a more serious deliberation in Washington, D.C. Either way, China’s immediate provocation should cause reflection in Washington about the advisability of such an assurance.

Duterte, too, reminded observers of his continued reservations about the United States. While he nominally welcomed Pompeo’s assurance, he followed it up with skepticism about process in comments to reporters, noting that “in America, it has to pass through Congress.” 

“Any declaration of war will pass Congress. You know how bullshit America's Congress is,” the typically colorful Philippine leader added. He was right: Article IV of the treaty accounts for each side taking action “in accordance with its constitutional processes.”

After the assurance, it’s not only China’s grayzone maneuvers in the South China Sea or Duterte that pose problems. Even with the United States now making it past a longstanding hurdle on assurance, there is the problem of Trump. The U.S. president has remained silent on the clarifications offered in Manila, but given his track record, it wouldn’t be unexpected if he were to demand further concessions from the Philippines for the privilege of American assurances. In this context, it’s best to take Pompeo’s firefighting for what it was: a necessary step in response to alliance hardball out of Manila. Problems will persist for this alliance, especially once Washington decides that it will treat Manila as it has treated its other alliance partners.