By Adolfo Quizon Paglinawan

Part Two of Three: Delusions of Grandeur Clouds Foreign Policy

“It’s high time the Filipino people pressure their government to start sitting down and engaging the Chinese government responsibly.”

June 15, 2024 – In an article appearing in the Manila Times today, American intelligence and foreign policy experts said the United States was just using the Philippines to create the conditions of potential conflict with the China even if it knew it could not fight and engage China and win.

An online media briefing early Thursday morning (Manila time) at the US National Press Club in Washington DC, featured Scott Ritter, Retired Colonels Richard Black and Lawrence Wilkerson. 

In Wilkerson’s analysis, “It’s a different world. It’s a totally different world. It’s no longer unipolar. It’s multipolar. And it’s going to act that way. It’s going to have a new financial system, a new monetary exchange system, a new banking system. Everything’s going to be new.”

Col. Wilkerson was chief of staff of former Secretary of State Collin Powell.

Col. Black, who is also former politician who served in the Virginia legislature, said it was time for the Philippines “to use diplomacy and to attempt to resolve the issue. Whatever you do, do not simply become a tool of the United States and be led into an armed conflict that ends up in disaster for the Filipino people. Because if you do, you will break the heart of a whole lot of us who just dearly love the Philippines and, and the people of the islands.

But it was the chilling answer from Ritter, an external contributor to Energy Intelligence, to the question, “HOW TO STOP AN IMMINENT WAR IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA?” that every Filipino must pay attention to and take close to heart. I am quoting him in toto:”

“Just so you know, I have a little bit of background in the Philippines. In 1986, I was deployed there as a platoon commander to reinforce the Subic garrison. After the fall of the Marcos regime, there was concern about the new people’s army.

“So, I have a warm spot in my heart for the Philippines. Let’s build upon what Colonel Wilkerson had said earlier. The United States is incapable of fighting a sustained conflict against a peer-level force.

“The United States cannot fight and engage China and win. We will not beat the Chinese. We cannot beat the Chinese.

“And we know this, and yet we’re using the Philippines to create the conditions of potential conflict with the Chinese. Please understand that for the Filipino people, this is a recipe for disaster.

“You think America is your friend?

“So too did the Ukrainian people, and they are dying by the hundreds of thousands. Friends don’t let friends die in those quantities.

“The Ukrainians have been displaced by the tens of millions. Friends don’t let friends have their cities destroyed in this manner.

“Friends don’t let friends have families separated, have mothers and children destined to a life of refugee status in perpetual poverty.

“That’s not how friends behave. America has never been the friend of Ukrainians, and we are not the friends of the Filipinos. We don’t like you. If we did like you, we wouldn’t be doing this to you.

“We are using you. You are a tool, nothing but a tool. And when the tool ceases to be useful, we will discard you. And discard you means usually after a war that devastates you. We are using you to gain some sort of momentary leverage over the Chinese. We will fail.

“The Chinese will win, and you will be destroyed. End of story. It’s high time the Filipino people pressure their government to start sitting down and engaging the Chinese government responsibly.

“China is not your enemy. China is your neighbor. China is your friend. China doesn’t want war. And if you would engage China in diplomacy, and as we’ve all indicated here, America has long since lost the skill set necessary to carry out diplomacy. But the Filipinos, the Philippine people can reignite this, to relearn it, to use this skill to prevent a war.

“But if you continue to behave as colonial subjects, and I know that’s a sore, sore, sore subject of the Filipino, because you were the colonial subjects of America. We still view you as our colonial subjects. We don’t like you. We don’t care about you. We just want to use you. Grow up.

“Grow up and act responsibly. Take control of your own future. America is not here to help you.

“America is here only to use you until there’s nothing left. And then we will discard you on the trash heap of history.”

Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps Intelligence Officer whose service over a 20-plus-year career included tours of duty in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control agreements, serving on the staff of US Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf during the Gulf War and later as a Chief Weapons Inspector with the UN in Iraq from 1991-98.

Marcos’ Singapore Contradictions

The mainstream press regarded President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s speech at the 21st IISS Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on May 31 as a cogent and firm statement of the Philippines’ position on the South China Sea and the need to maintain peace and stability in the region by upholding international law.

But in addition to what those in peanut gallery onto deeper analysis by academia, it was a ball of lies and confusing rhetoric.

First, he emphasized that Filipinos are a peaceful people, committed to the values that engender amity, fraternity and sovereign equality among nations.

The man authorized four additional US military bases in addition to the original five of the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement.

He then reaffirmed our people’s adherence to international law.

But by that he meant only singular compliance to the United Nations Convention of the Laws of the Seas, and an onerous 2016 Arbitral Ruling that the Philippines registered with the Permanent Court of Arbitration, that has been disowned by the United Nations. He has also invited the United States, Japan and Australia, even France and Germany to hold joint patrols in our territory in violation of UNCLOS provisions on “innocent passage”.

“Our commitment to peace and to the rule of law inheres in how we have defined our sovereign home,” Marcos said. “When we established our Commonwealth in 1935, we put together a ‘Constitution’ that defined our territory in accordance with the international treaties that became the basis of our archipelagic unity.”

The Philippines, he said, put forward the archipelagic doctrine, which defines the waters around, between and connecting the different islands of the Philippine archipelago as integral parts of Philippine territory subject to its exclusive sovereignty, regardless of the width or dimensions of these waters.

But he overreaches and insinuates defining our territorial waters beyond what the 1900 Treaty of Washington particularly provides. That treaty specifically adds only the islands of Cagayan de Sulu and Sibutu and their dependencies at the southernmost tip of the Sulu archipelago.

Marcos said “This (archipelagic) doctrine has since been enshrined in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which also clarified the limits of each state’s maritime zones and defined the extent to which they could exercise sovereignty, their sovereign rights and jurisdiction over those zones.”

Of course, he was referring to Article 46 of UNCLOS which was vouchsafed by Paragraph 573 of the 2016 Arbitral Award that the Philippines is an archipelagic state. But in observance of Article 47 of UNCLOS, as clarified by Paragraph 574 of the award, the Philippines cannot demarcate an archipelago in the Spratly area.

“Accordingly, we have made a conscious effort to align our definition of our territory and our maritime zones with what international law permits and recognizes. This has been inscribed in Article 1 of our Constitution,” Marcos said.

Our Constitution cannot amend international law. He himself criticized another country in the same speech alleging it has done so.

This, he said, was in stark contrast to assertive actions that aim to propagate excessive and baseless claims through force, intimidation and deception.

“In the West Philippine Sea, we are on the frontlines of efforts to assert the integrity of the UNCLOS as a Constitution of the Oceans,” Marcos said.

This is misleading and self-defeating. International law is not based on constitutional law. International law is based on relations between and among countries. There is no world government. UNCLOS is just one treaty among more than 250,000 inked through centuries. It is thus obvious that it is not the totality of international law that more than written treaties, also comprises a majority of unwritten customary laws between and among states.

“We have defined our territory and maritime zones in a manner befitting a responsible and law-abiding member of the international community. We have submitted our assertions to rigorous legal scrutiny by the world’s leading jurists,” he said.

“So, the lines that we draw on our waters are not derived from just our imagination, but from international law,” he said. “We have on our side the 1982 UNCLOS and the binding 2016 Arbitral Award, which affirm what is ours by legal right.”

Finally, he admits where his misconception of the problem emanates. Both UNCLOS and the Arbitral Award, have northing to do with sovereignty. So yes, those lines come from his imagination.

There is country that have acquired domain over the South China Sea features through millennia of customary law. In recent history, China has firmed up its sovereignty not only with a statutory construction that started with the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894, through the Cairo Conference of 1943, and perfected it in the 1971 recognition of the United Nations that the Peoples Republic of China is its only one, legitimate government under its Resolution 2758.

Not only does our foreign policy under Marcos ignores this deliberately, but on the ground rebukes and challenges China’s effective control of the affected waters, which is a more compelling customary law. Worse, when the Chinese enforces their sovereignty, we “cry wolf” and accuses the sovereign power of “aggressive and illegal” action. Isn’t this delusional?

“In this solid footing and through our clear moral ascendancy, we find the strength to do whatever it takes to protect our sovereign home — to the last square inch, to the last square millimeter,” the President said.

“The life-giving waters of the West Philippine Sea flow in the blood of every Filipino. We cannot allow anyone to detach it from the totality of the maritime domain that renders our nation whole,” he said.

I think it most unfair for the President of the Philippines to even suggest its armed forces and citizens will draw blood over a wide expanse of rocks where the country does not even have an official map that is authorized by the United Nations and registered with the International Cartographic Association.

Marcos does not want to go war with the Armed Forces of the Philippines armed only with Carpinocchio’s 1734 Velarde map, would he?#

To be continued. Next a student debunks the Marcos’ Asian centrality

Mr. President Bong Bong Marcos, your four additional bases added to the original five, have so far had the tacit approval of the Filipino people. So who authorized Subic Bay to be the 10^th site? Are we missing another one of secrets you have made with the Americans?

   

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