Reciprocal

On the sidelines of the ASEAN summit held in Tokyo, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida met to seal a Reciprocal Access Agreement between the two countries.

The Agreement opens the door for the two countries to send troops to each other’s territory for joint training. It provides a framework for enhanced coordination between the coast guards of the two countries. It will certainly be useful for the parties to contribute to each other’s disaster preparedness.

Ahead of this Agreement, Japan has been assisting our Coast Guard. We have received equipment from Tokyo intended to help build up our meager brown water capacities.

While our diplomats have been carefully highlighting the civilian side of this emerging partnership, it is clear that the immediate context for this are the rising tensions at the South China Sea. The Philippines and China have overlapping territorial claims in the area. Lately, these competing claims have resulted in actual confrontations at sea.

Japan, like the Philippines, considers China as the most imminent security threat. Both countries are wary of the superpower’s aggressive claims to territory and her efforts to rapidly develop her military capacity. Both countries form part of the long island chain considered the first line of defense against Chinese expansionism.

There are two flashpoints in this long island chain: the Taiwan Strait and the West Philippine Sea. Both flashpoints have seen increasingly frequent encounters with China’s more assertive military.

Western militaries have deployed naval assets to insist on freedom of navigation. Their warships have been shadowed by Chinese warships and their patrolling aircraft have been buzzed by Chinese warplanes.

In the West Philippine Sea, supply boats hired by our Coast Guard have been hit with water cannons by Chinese vessels. Last week, a funny convoy formed by Filipino activists tried to sail into areas claimed by China – and protected by a rather ample fleet of Coast Guard and civilian vessels.

Apart from raising the temperature and straitjacketing all other diplomatic efforts to reconfigure this dispute, the convey had no other useful purpose. This