Between Marcos Jnr and the US, it is the family ties that bind
- The political dynasty and Washington go way back and the breach of an undisclosed deal with Beijing explains a lot about the Spratlys stand-off
The current face-off between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea is usually portrayed as Beijing’s sabre-rattling.
Either the Chinese want to intimidate Manila to back off from its tilt back towards the United States under President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr, or it just wants to show him who the real boss is in the region. At least that’s the conventional story we have been fed.
But you have to ask, does it make sense for three countries to risk a war just to fight over the decaying BRP Sierra Madre, a World War II-era ship grounded on the Second Thomas Shoal in the disputed Spratly Islands? Remember, unlike Taiwan, Manila and Washington have a long-standing defence treaty that would obligate the US military to intervene if push comes to shove between the Filipinos and Chinese.
Both China and the Philippines lay claims over the islands, as do Vietnam, and Malaysia. There are plenty of areas the two countries could fight over, and have been doing so for many years. So why does Marcos, of all places, pick the Sierra Madre now?
Now, if Washington and Manila wanted a guaranteed angry response from the Chinese, what would they do? Well, send provisions to the ship, and in the most high-profile manner possible.
Beijing, not unreasonably, would see it as a breach of agreement, as in fact it is. But the mainstream Western media can be relied upon to skip or at least underplay that bit. In fact, Manila has repeatedly sent shiploads of journalists to witness such provision missions.
Washington wants to overturn the status quo in the South China Sea the same way it does in the Taiwan Strait to justify their militarisation and encirclement of China. The trick is to first portray Beijing as the aggressor.
Marcos would always play ball the same way he did by allowing the US military to operate from bases in the northern Philippines. Why?
The Marcos and the US go back a long way.
As Marcos Jnr’s approval ratings nosedive, can ‘anger’ over China help him?
As Foreign Policy magazine puts it in an article dated April 2, 2024, Washington has been “quietly ignoring US court rulings that his father’s estate owes hundreds of millions of dollars to victims of the regime in the 1970s and 1980s.”
The writer was referring to the almost US$2 billion owed to the human-rights victims in the Philippines under the US-backed dictatorship of Marcos Jnr’s late father, from the judgments of American courts obtained some three decades ago. To date, the whereabouts of much of the billions from the Marcos estate remain a mystery.
Remember this is the US government, which has been ruthless in catching and sometimes jailing former foreign leaders, officials and executives; and/or seizing the assets of despots and military juntas it once supported. Hong Kong’s very own former home secretary Patrick Ho Chi-ping and Huawei Technologies’ No 2 Meng Wanzhou are well-known examples.
But somehow, never the Marcoses!
According to a June 28, 2021, Bloomberg report: “The estimated [US]$10 billion that the family amassed ‘is tragically being used to consolidate the Marcoses’ power, prevent them from becoming fully accountable, and is now helping them to fully regain presidential power,’ [Benjamin] Tolosa [Jnr, of Ateneo de Manila University] says.
“Bongbong [Marcos Jnr] has said he doesn’t know the whereabouts of his dad’s allegedly hidden assets. In a 2017 press conference, he said that if the Filipino government found anything, it would be welcome to it.”
The same Bloomberg report quoted Guinness World Records: “The brazenness of Ferdinand Marcos’s graft – a haul the Philippine government later estimated at [US]$5 billion to [US]$10 billion – would become legendary, recognised by the Guinness World Records as the ‘greatest robbery of a government’.”
Just like his father, Marcos Jnr has every incentive to do Washington’s bidding.
