The US-Philippines new defence model looks familiar

It’s a smooth comparison, but quite a disingenuous one. Both countries have more than adequately equipped military forces, so any arrangement with the US for increased access to local facilities – or, in Australia’s case, joint training with US Marines – is, at best, a token enhancement of their defence capability, and more of a vehicle to project a concerted front against China’s muscle-flexing in the region. More to the point, neither of those countries labours under the complicated history and fraught relations with the US that the Philippines is heir to, especially with regard to American military bases and their problematic legacy.

On closer look, the “new model” that Hagel invokes is, in fact, quite old. The “rotational approach” the US and Philippine governments have repeatedly used to describe the new arrangement they have in mind is basically the same set-up that currently governs US forces present in the country under the 1999 Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), under which any number of US soldiers are stationed in the Philippines on a “temporary” basis.

But the temporary nature of their visit masks the fact that US forces (of various strengths, in different locations) have been present in the Philippines every day since 2002. In other words, the “visiting” part of the VFA applies only in a nominal sense – to the individual American soldiers temporarily deployed in the Philippines. US military presence in the country, however, is as good, or as bad, as permanent.

What looks set to change is not the rotational presence of US troops per se, but the even greater access they would have to Philippine facilities. According to Defence Secretary Voltaire Gazmin, it’s not just the former US naval base in Subic that’s on the table for available use by the US military under the “enhanced” framework agreement being hammered out.

“Subic is one of the facilities mentioned for US forces to access. As soon as the framework agreement is complete, we will provide the necessary access to all these facilities; and this is not limited only to Subic but to Philippine military facilities, if necessary.”

It’s true that the Philippines is vulnerable militarily and will need all the help it can get to cobble together a minimum credible defence posture against China’s maritime aggressions. But there is something quite unseemly, too, about Gazmin’s indiscreet, over-eager announcement, which throws open the doors wider to US troops and vessels, way before any firm details about the framework agreement has been publicised. At the very least, it undermines the Philippine position, underscoring its weak bargaining status in the negotiations – a disposition that the US, with its own interests to protect and advance, would, again, only be too willing to exploit.

One only has to look at recent Philippine-American history to know that closer military ties with the US can bring as many problems as benefits. For decades, the country has had to grapple with a conflicted sense of sovereignty while the US bases loomed over the Philippine political landscape. Their toxic legacy remains – in the unfinished clean-up of the bases’ physical environment; the number of unresolved crimes by US military personnel; and in the lopsided terms of the VFA, which threatens to become even more uneven with the Philippines too eager to grant American forces easier access to many more Philippine facilities.

Before Gazmin publicly and unilaterally commits the Philippines to any new military arrangement with the US, the public must first be apprised of the nuts and bolts of the framework agreement, and the Senate has to ratify it after a comprehensive and transparent discussion of its merits.

The Philippines does need help, but precisely for that reason, it must gather support for its position with greater care and caution, lest it finds itself outclassed again – out of the frying pan and into the fire.