South China Sea Strategies for other nations (Not China)

now I read Duterte Shakes Up Relations with US, Shores Them Up with China
The Philippines' new president is cozying up to Beijing and sending mixed messages on existing U.S. troop agreements.

While the world is transfixed by the Duterte administration’s
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on the drug trade, which has drawn global condemnation for its alleged widespread use of extrajudicial killings yet enjoys significant domestic support, the newly-inaugurated President Rodrigo Duterte, a
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, is also shaking up Philippine foreign policy. So far, however, under the country’s new firebrand leader, the country has seen more change than continuity in its foreign policy.

Earlier this year, before the presidential campaign formally kicked off, the Philippines was generally regarded as one of the stronger liberal democracies in Asia, as well as a vibrant emerging market and a staunch ally of the United States. The United States and the Philippines are treaty allies, but under the previous Aquino administration, Washington and Manila signed a new bilateral defense pact, and U.S. security assistance to the Philippines rose markedly.

A new administration in Manila, however, is rapidly reshaping the country’s domestic politics, but its impact on foreign policy remains unclear. When it comes to Duterte’s overheated rhetoric, sometimes it seems he really means what he says, as evidently shown in his
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campaign. As president, he has followed through on the promises to combat the drug trade, even through extralegal means, that he made on the campaign trail.

Shortly after his election victory, Duterte
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, “I will be charting a [new] course [for the Philippines] on its own and will not be dependent on the United States.” Since then, when it comes to relations with Washington, the new president has broken one diplomatic taboo after the other. On multiple occasions, he has
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America’s commitment to come to the Philippines’ aid in an event of conflict in the South China Sea. He has intimated that he will put new restrictions on the movement of American military personnel on Philippine soil, though vowed to honor existing bilateral security agreements.

So far, the Obama administration has tried to walk a diplomatic tightrope with Duterte, generally avoiding any criticism of the new Philippine government. In fact, President Barack Obama was the first head of state to call Duterte and congratulate him upon his election victory. Secretary of State John Kerry made a trip to Manila shortly after the new Philippine president was inaugurated. Washington has begun, though in a carefully crafted language, to criticize Duterte on human rights concerns. President Obama is expected to raise the issue again when he meets the Philippine leader at the upcoming Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit.

Yet Washington’s diplomatic outreach apparently has neither prevented Duterte from
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the American ambassador nor impacted Duterte’s domestic political agenda. If anything, Duterte has moved closer to China in recent months, extending an olive branch to China, despite the latter’s refusal to even acknowledge a United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS)
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this summer, which debunked the bulk of Beijing’s claims over the South China Sea.

Over the past few months, Duterte
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Chinese Ambassador to the Philippines Zhao Jinhua more than any other diplomatic envoy in Manila. The two met shortly before the final award from The Hague was announced. By all indications, the exchanges were cordial and intimate, underlining the Duterte administration’s determination to renormalize relations with Beijing after years of icy relations under the Aquino government. In recent months, Beijing
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large-scale investments in Philippine infrastructure, including in Mindanao, where Duterte served as mayor of Davao for decades.

To ensure maximum diplomatic success, Duterte has appointed former President Fidel Ramos, who deftly managed South China Sea disputes in the mid-1990s and maintains friendly relations with Beijing leaders, as special envoy to China. After a
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visit to Hong Kong, where he informally met a senior Chinese official, Ramos received an invitation for direct talks in Beijing. Duterte himself will likely meet Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on the sidelines of the ASEAN in Laos, paving the way for a potential state visit by Duterte to Beijing later this year. A joint fisheries agreement in the Scarborough Shoal, which is consistent with The Hague ruling, is one potential compromise on the horizon.

To ensure smooth progress in his diplomatic outreach to China, the Duterte administration has
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and has sought to
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the disputes by not vigorously raising the South China Sea disputes in the ASEAN. Obviously, improved ties between the Philippines and China aren’t necessarily inimical to American interests, since the Obama administration has welcomed diplomatic resolution of regional disputes. But Duterte’s approach to the United States has certainly raised eyebrows in Washington.
source:
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This report links to the Philippines' photos of the Chinese boats and notes that none of them are dredgers.
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...
However, the photographs the Philippines used to make its assessment do not show barges or dredging equipment. Many of the photos, published over the weekend by the Philippine Secretary of Agriculture on Facebook and later released by the Department of National Defense, do show the “blue-coloured” vessels described by the Philippine Secretary of Defense, but they are not barges. Still other ships were described as having suspected “cable-laying” equipment that is more likely trawl-net reels or other longline fishing equipment.
...

Photos of the boats:
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according to DefenseOne Even Duterte’s Slurs Can’t Break US-Philippines Ties Cemented by Chinese Aggression
Attention is turning to the Scarborough Shoal, just west of the Philippines, where many fear Beijing will build more islands to expand its control of the South China Sea.

When the US military abandoned its long-held bases in the Philippines in the early 1990s, it wasn’t because it wanted to. It was because the Philippines, as a sovereign nation,
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. Filipino leadership decided the bases were unwelcome vestiges of the Philippines’ time as a US colony, which lasted for most of the first half of the 20th century.

If the US needed a reminder that the Philippines is an independent actor, it got a rude one this week, in a diplomatic sequence that shed light onto the nations’ up-and-down relationship.

“I am a president of a sovereign state and we have long ceased to be a colony,” said Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. “I do not have any master except the Filipino people.” Not leaving well enough alone, he
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US president Barack Obama a “son of a bitch,” or the rough equivalent of that, in Tagalog.

Obama canceled an imminent meeting between the two, and Duterte later apologized for the comment, which followed a reporter asking him how he would respond if Obama brought up the issue of human rights in relation to Duterte’s dubious anti-drug campaign.

Despite the friction, an increasingly assertive China cements the underlying relationship between the two nations. The Asian giant claims most of the South China Sea as its own territory and has in recent years rapidly built artificial islands with military infrastructure, including on Mischief Reef, which is
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of the Philippines. Its forces also took over Scarborough Shoal, quite near the Philippine coast, and barred Filipino fishermen from accessing its rich fishing grounds.

Faced with such aggression, Manila recently
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US forces, giving them access to a handful of Filipino military bases via a 10-year deal called the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. The arrangement does not allow the US military to establish permanent bases of its own in the Philippines, but it does allow for a significant presence that Manila hopes will discourage further Chinese aggression.

Two of the bases hold special significance in relation to the South China Sea.
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, on Palawan Island, is the closest one the Philippines has to the contested Spratly archipelago, which includes Mischief Reef.
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, just outside Manila, is across from Scarborough Shoal, where many have speculated China will soon begin building an artificial island.

Doing so would give China a strategic triangle with its other infrastructure in the sea—in the Spratlys and the Paracels—and help it gain control of the area. In March Obama
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building at Scarborough Shoal, saying there would be “serious consequences” if it did so. The Philippines
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with the United States that dates back to 1951, and every year the two nations hold the
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.

“With our new access agreement with the Philippines our militaries are closer than they have been in decades,” Obama
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(video, starting at 1:22:19) in a speech in Laos, where he was supposed to meet with Duterte on the sidelines an ASEAN summit.

Obama also stressed the importance of the region to US interests.

America’s interest in the Asia-Pacific is not new. It’s not a passing fad. It reflects fundamental national interests. And in the United States across the political spectrum there’s widespread political recognition that the Asia-Pacific will become even more important in the century ahead both to America and to the world.

To defend those interests, the US welcomes all the help the Philippines will give it.
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SampanViking

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News from yesterday (surprised nobody picked up on this)
Speech from Philippines President Duterte, that he is ending joint patrols in the SCS with USN, wants US forces to withdraw from the country and wished to source arms from both China and Russia.

All in all big change in the strategic line up in SCS - story as covered by Bloomberg.

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Blitzo

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News from yesterday (surprised nobody picked up on this)
Speech from Philippines President Duterte, that he is ending joint patrols in the SCS with USN, wants US forces to withdraw from the country and wished to source arms from both China and Russia.

All in all big change in the strategic line up in SCS - story as covered by Bloomberg.

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To clarify, he's only talking about ending patrols outside of Philippines territorial waters, and wants US to withdraw from South Philippines (not the entire country), and the source of arms is mostly relatively light weapons for anti terror operations...

So while it's still a big move (especially combined with everything else over the last two weeks), the immediate repurcussions of the actions described in the article on the SCS issue will be relatively minor.

But the potential medium term consequences of Duterte's latest moves and suggestions on Sino-Philippines relations and Philippines-US relations could be meaningful, and that may in turn have some big influence on the SCS issue... but that's a year or more away, or quite a few months away, at least IMO.




==

Still, it's a hell of a turn around in the prospects of Sino-Philippines relations compared to the beginning of the year.
 
...

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but DoD unfazed by Philippine president's call for end of U.S. military operations
The Pentagon is optimistic that the U.S. alliance with the Philippines remains intact despite the new president’s abrupt call for ending major American military operations there.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter is unconcerned about the comments this week from Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte that appear to signal a major shift away from the U.S..

Duterte said he wants U.S. special operations troops to leave the southern Philippines. The Philippine navy will end joint patrols with U.S. Navy vessels and its military may begin buying weapons from Russia or China rather than the United States, Duterte said.

"This is a longtime ally," Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said Thursday.

"The secretary believes that this is one of the most enduring relationships in the Asia-Pacific region and will be for some time to come.

And he's confident, given our mutual security interests in the region, that any concerns that the Filipinos might have — that these are issues that can be resolved and worked out," Cook said.

Cook said there has been no official communication between the U.S. and the Philippines on the issues Duterte raised.

“Our defense ties have been strong for some time and ... there's no reason that they can't continue to be very strong," Cook said.

Duterte’s comments were the first since he took office in June that questioned the U.S.-Philippines military cooperation.

Duterte said in
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on Monday that the American special operations forces in the southern Mindanao region, about 100 troops, should leave because they are inflaming local Islamic extremist insurgencies. Duterte also pointed to past abuses by U.S. forces during the period when the Philippines was an American colony before 1946.

On Tuesday,
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his government will no longer conduct joint patrols with the U.S. Navy in the disputed waters near the South China Sea, a move that would nullify a deal his predecessor reached with the U.S. military earlier this year.

In a further sign that Duterte is seeking a major foreign policy shift away from the U.S., the Philippine president said he was considering buying defense equipment from Russia and China. The Philippines has traditionally relied on the U.S. and other Western allies for military acquisitions.

Duterte did not offer any details or timelines for his pronouncements.

Expanding involvement with the Philippines has been a key piece of President Obama’s “pivot” to the Asia-Pacific region. An island nation across the sea from Vietnam, the Philippines offers a strategic location to counter China’s growing military ambitions.

In March, the U.S. and the Philippines announced plans for a permanent American military presence there and named five military bases that will support rotational deployments of U.S. forces near the contested South China Sea.

The U.S. Navy’s port visits to the Philippines have increased significantly this year. Other joint-training operations this year have included U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force aircraft detachments and U.S. Army and Marine Corps ground units.
source is MilitaryTimes
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according to USNI News Experts Advocate Harder Stance Against Illegal Claims In South China Sea
Three South China Sea and maritime law experts advocated a tougher stance against illegal Chinese actions, calling for more freedom of navigation operations, possibly with regional allies, that are aimed at Chinese territorial claims that have not previously been challenged.

The experts from the U.S. Naval War College and the Center for Strategic and International Studies agreed at a House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee hearing yesterday that adherence to maritime law in the South China Sea is important not only for regional security but also for maintaining law of the sea elsewhere on the globe.

In addition to unanimously supporting the U.S. ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the experts testified that U.S. Navy freedom of navigation operations (FONOPS) needed to be bolstered.

Bonnie Glaser, CSIS’s senior adviser for Asia and director of the China Power Project, said she would do more FONOPS but conduct them “quietly and without fanfare.”

James Kraska, a professor of international law, oceans law and policy at the U.S. Naval War College’s Stockton Center for the Study of International Law, recommended not only bringing in allies like Japan to the FONOPS effort but said “I would also prioritize for the FON program the many many illegal claims that have never been challenged to my knowledge, such as the straight baselines that cut off the Hainan Strait, which China purports to view as internal waters. And that challenge has never been conducted as far as I know, or at least most likely since the Vietnam War.”

Glaser said she agreed that an ally such as Australia could be an effective partner in conducting FONOPS, either patrolling areas together or splitting up and covering more area But she worried about Japan’s participation.

“The Chinese are putting a great deal of pressure on Japan in the East China Sea, and the day that they sail a navy ship inside 12 nautical miles of a Chinese-occupied territory like Spratly, I worry that the Chinese are going to sail a navy ship inside the 12 nautical miles around the Senkakus,” she said.
“And that would be a very big price for Japan.”

Kraska, speaking from a maritime law perspective, said the U.S. Navy shied away from its full rights at sea when it conducted the first in a series of FONOPS missions last year with
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. The Navy and Pentagon identified the operation as an “
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” in which the warship did not use any weapons or radars or conduct any military drills while passing through an area the Chinese claimed as their own.

“I would not have selected innocent passage, which is the most restricted navigational regime of Law of the Sea, in order to challenge unlawful claims,” Kraska said.
“In particular, we have done so around some features which are not subject to appropriation by any state – for example, submerged features or low-tide elevations which can never, even if they were claimed by a state, they could never generate a territorial sea. So it would not make any sense to observe a territorial sea around a feature such as that,” he said, and an innocent passage operation implies a territorial sea exists.

Kraska advocated the U.S. taking a harder line on unlawful Chinese claims of territorial seas. He said a territorial sea cannot be established unless a country first establishes a baseline of where its shores end, with the territorial sea then extended up to 12 nautical miles outward. He said no baselines have been established near the Spratly Islands and only illegal baselines have been established near the Paracel Islands, meaning “there are no lawful territorial seas around any of those islands.” Baselines cannot be drawn around rocks, submerged and low-tide elevation features, meaning no territorial sea could be established there.

“Why would we then recognize a putative territorial sea around a rock just because some other countries claims that they happen to own it?” he said.

To address this issue, “I would recommend that Mischief Reef (in the Spratlys) be overflow by aircraft. There is no national airspace above it, no matter which country tries to claim it, and there is no territorial sea around it. High seas freedoms and full overflight rights apply on those features,” Kraska said.

Beyond agreeing that the U.S. needs to be more direct in countering illegal Chinese territorial claims, the panelists also discussed how China was attempting to enforce those claims – not primarily through the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s fleet of gray-hull navy warships, but through the white-hull coast guard ships and the rarely discussed blue-hull maritime militia ships.

“Make no mistake, these are state-organized, -developed and -controlled forces operating under a direct military chain of command,” Andrew Erickson, a professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute, said of the maritime militia ships, which are essentially fishing trawlers outfitted with strengthened hulls, guardrails to protect the hulls when ramming other ships, and water cannons to harass nearby vessels.

“This is a force that thrives in the shadows of plausible deniability, and I tried to make the case today that it is well within our power to shine enough light to dispel a lot of those shadows,” he said at the hearing. During last year’s Lassen FONOPS patrol, “small commercial craft with the hallmarks of maritime militia vessels approached [Lassen] provocatively, having apparently anticipated its presence. Who knows what contingencies they might have been practicing for or what footage they might have been capturing for later misuse. So before China is able to put the United States or one of our regional allies or partners in a misleading but precarious position of appearing to confront ‘innocent civilian fisherman,’ American officials must finally publicly reveal the third sea force’s true nature and deeds.”

Erickson said he worried that the maritime militia may turn on a U.S. warship, leading to a Gulliver’s Travels-type scenario with being Gulliver taken captive by the tiny Lilliputians. To avoid being stymied by this fleet – which he called little blue men, much like Russia’s ambiguous little green men – Erickson said the next administration needs to publish a comprehensive policy statement on freedom of navigation and consider how China employs all its assets to block that freedom at sea.

“We cannot tolerate a situation in which their navy bear hugs our Navy in search of best practices and diplomatic cameo (opportunities) as a kind of a good cop, while their other two sea forces, the coast guard and the maritime militia, play the role of bad cops doing the dirty work in the South China Sea,” Erickson said.
“So I think by looking at this issue comprehensively, by raising attention to it in Congress and asking the administration to do the same, by communicating all of this with resolve to our Chinese interlocutors, I think we can create a much better baseline and understanding in the South China Sea. It won’t solve all the problems, but it will reduce risk.”

Glaser raised a similar point, noting that the U.S. needs to make its position on freedom of navigation clear – and make clear that it is willing to take action if China will not comply.

“We have to be willing – not just able but willing – to put the United States on the line here and incur some risk,” she said.
“If we are willing to incur some risk then I think the Chinese will take us more seriously.”

She suggested that the Obama administration has been reluctant to do this because it has pushed hard to cooperate with China on important global issues like combating climate change and reaching a nuclear deal with Iran. Glaser said the administration may worry that putting pressure on the Chinese to cease destabilizing behaviors in the South China Sea would risk current and future collaboration on other issues, “but I think we can do both.”

Other suggestions raised during the hearing include full funding for the
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, slated for about $60 million this next fiscal year, as suggested by Glaser. Kraska recommended putting more U.S. warships in the South China Sea and the Pacific to boost presence and demonstrate a commitment to upholding maritime law. Stationing Littoral Combat Ships in Singapore is a good start, he said, but “hulls in the water matter” and more are needed.

Kraska also suggested ...
... size-limit reached; goes on in the source:
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advill

Junior Member
according to USNI News Experts Advocate Harder Stance Against Illegal Claims In South China Sea

... size-limit reached; goes on in the source:
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These are OUR backyards (South China Sea & East China Sea). Let the parties concerned settle the problems among themselves i.e. for SCS & East China Sea/Sea of Japan. There should be no interference or unnecessary posturing or side takings either for the US or China. Joint patrols regardless of geo-political interests should be avoided where possible. FON is a must for all countries. The passages thru' SCS, the Straits of Malacca & the Indian Ocean should always allow freedom of movements for trade and business etc. Also there should be NO utilization of force/blockades to dominate choke points. They only create suspicions, & very major problems. Quoting economists on global & individual nation's priority: "It's the Economy ----- Stupid". So Jaw Jaw Not War War.
 
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