Showbiz Politics: The Myth of US-Philippine Defense Pact Promoting Regional Peace

As I said yesterday, showbiz has practically consumed most of social affairs in the Philippines.

More evidence of showbiz in the context of the bilateral military agreement between the heads of state of the US and the Philippines. 

From the Philippine Inquirer:

“The Philippines-U.S. Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) takes our security cooperation to a higher level of engagement, reaffirms our countries’ commitment to mutual defense and security, and promotes regional peace and stability,” Aquino said during their joint press conference.

Hours after the EDCA was signed, Aquino said the two countries’ defense alliance, even before the agreement, served as a “cornerstone of peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region for more than 60 years.”

The populist model for attaining "peace and stability" can be summarized as: the “bullied” should get a “big backer” to ward off the “bully”.

This may work perhaps if the object of contention has been about the bullied. But what if it isn’t? What if the target has been instead the “backer”, where the “bullied’ is really just a pawn in their rivalry?

[As a side note, the reason why the "bully" behaves this way maybe due to the actions of the "backer" or the "rivalry". That's one aspect offered to us by US political insider K. Philippa Malmgren, who observed that "access to the shipping lanes in and out of China has become an increasingly high-priority issue. After all, that's how 90 percent of critical food and energy supplies arrive in China and also how most things leave China. Yet all China sees is the ever-increasing presence of the U.S. Navy encircling them and rendering sea access less certain. Let's not forget that 10 percent of the world's fish supply comes from "near seas". (bold mine)]

History shares us some lessons here

Philippine participation in World War II according to the Wikipedia.org (bold mine)

The Commonwealth of the Philippines was invaded by the Empire of Japan in December 1941 shortly after Japan's declaration of war upon the United States of America, which controlled the Philippines at the time and possessed important military bases there.

Let us put on the military tactician’s thinking hat on. Let’s say the opposite side has decided to go to war with the “backer”.  Which would the military planners of the aggressing nation attack first? Nations allied to the enemy with bases or without bases? Well, world War 2 has provided the answer; The Philippines was bombed a day after Pearl Harbor in December 8, 1941

I rightly predicted that the Philippine political trend has been headed towards this direction in early 2012. Sell nationalism to get popular approval to justify the defense agreement.  But then I wrote about the treaty, the recently concluded agreement is reportedly a “pact”—between the two executive offices—without congressional approval.

Yet despite the ”pact”, the peace and stability model—the “bullied” should get a “big backer” to ward off the “bully”—unfortunately seem to have fallen through.

From today’s headlines at the Inquirer. (bold mine)

Obama gave no categorical commitment whether the 62-year-old Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) between the two countries—the backbone of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (Edca) signed by Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin and US Ambassador Philip Goldberg—would apply in case the Philippines’ territorial dispute with China escalates into an armed confrontation.

Steering clear of the question, Obama instead pointed to Beijing’s “interest” in abiding by international law, saying “larger countries have a greater responsibility” to do so.

“Our goal is not to counter China; our goal is not to contain China,” he said in a joint press conference with President Aquino in Malacañang, reflecting a delicate balancing act throughout his weeklong trip that earlier took him to Japan, South Korea and Malaysia.

So the “pact” turns out to be a noncommittal military agreement which reveals of the extent of its lopsidedness in favor of the US. The US President Obama seem to have stiffed the Philippine administration and their mainstream supporters when he said that the US had no "specific position on the disputes between nations". Ouch. The Philippine government and the mainstream seem to have heavily been expecting a "big backer" role the US should have supposedly assumed.

Why the noncommittal stance? Most possibly because the US cannot commit to fight each, and engage in, every conflict of her allies. The US has already had her hands full in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Mali, Somalia, Yemen and etc. The Washington Blog estimates 74 different wars which the US has been engaged in. Ukraine may now be in the pipeline. 

You see, to expect the US to make a full commitment and yet deliver her promises with overstretched resources and personnel…well, that’s entertainment! Aside from the dozens of wars, the US has hundreds of bases around the world (estimates vary: Ron Paul 900, Charlmes Johnson 737) if not more than a thousand (Aljazeera, Global Research). The US budget for military spending in 2014 has been estimated at US$ 630 billion

And the non-committal stance by the US essentially debunks the one of the many impossible things believed by domestic populist politics, particularly Nationalism (and Nationalism based spending) is BEYOND the scope of economics and economic reasoning.  The lesson here is Economics drives politics.

The US President may have also been aware that an explicit support could have raised the risks of moral hazard, where the Philippine goverment may become more adversarial in her relationship with China.

With the base pact, I expect that the political trend, as I wrote in 2012, will now revolve around...

In reality, military bases have mostly been used as a staging point for political interventions in local affairs and for justifying the maintenance and or growth of the defense budget for the US federal government.

Promoting regional peace? Hardly. Maybe more of amplifying risks of geopolitical instability. 

And this “pact” looks more like a validation of the 2 time war medal the late Major General Smedley Butler’s claim that “war is a racket”