Two former Cabinet men, one Washington script

TEN years since the 2016 arbitral award on the Philippine suit vs China, this paper ran two columns side by side on July 14 — one by Orlando “Orly” Mercado, who once headed the Department of National Defense, and one by Rafael “Raffy” Alunan III, who once headed the Department of Interior and Local Government under Fidel Ramos. Both are intelligent men. And both, reading their columns together, produced almost interchangeable pieces that could have been drafted at a Pentagon or State Department press shop.

Mercado opens by calling the 2016 arbitral ruling “one of the greatest legal victories” in our history, one that supposedly established our “sovereign rights” over the West Philippine Sea and rejected China’s claims outright.

Only President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his mouthpieces make this claim. None of the countries closest to us, the Asean countries — even Vietnam and Malaysia that have similar maritime disputes with China — share Marcos’ delusion.

This is the same conflation I have debunked for years: an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) entitlement is not sovereignty. Unclos often invoked by the likes of the two is a treaty to resolve disputes between nations over their maritime claims. Such disputes increased because of the treaty’s expansive definition of EEZs as extending to 200 nautical miles from a nation’s nearest land.

But Unclos has absolutely no authority to rule on sovereignty disputes, as in the case of China claiming that islands in the Spratlys and the waters around these are part of its territory, while the Philippines mainly claims that these are within its EEZ.

The five-man panel that the Philippines convened invoking Unclos had absolutely no power to rule on sovereignty over the Spratlys or Scarborough Shoal. China’s 2006 declaration under Unclos Article 298 even categorically excluded territorial and boundary questions from compulsory arbitration. The tribunal itself in the fifth paragraph of its award, disclaimed any jurisdiction over who owns the islands.

It ruled only on a narrower, technical question: whether certain features generate a 200-mile EEZ or are legally mere “rocks.” China’s claim to the Spratlys is not because of the “nine dash line” drawn on a South China Sea map. Other than historical claims, it is based on the 1935 and 1948 Republican-era maps, the 1958 Declaration on the Territorial Sea, and the 1992 Law on the Territorial Sea.

Calling this award a “legal victory” over China’s sovereignty claims then, is not analysis. It is wishful thinking, delusion and myth-making — precisely the “colossal deception” that was the title of the book I wrote on the dispute some years ago. It is part of the US strategy to make us angry at China, and push us to America’s embrace so that we will allow it to install military bases all around the country, which would be crucial if it fights China that is thousands of miles from its mainland. It is also intended to portray China as the enemy of peoples in the area, thus becoming a psychological obstacle to its becoming the hegemon in Asia replacing the US.

Gray zone

Mercado even refers to what he calls a “sustained gray-zone campaign” by China, describing an adversary bent on “exhausting our institutions” and “persuading Filipinos that resistance is futile.” Mercado here reveals the wellspring of his thinking: “gray zone” tactics were coined and popularized by Pentagon strategists.

He praises the strengthened “defense partnerships with the United States, Japan, Australia,” forgetting that with its tiny navy, the Philippines would merely be the coffee-servers in this fleet.

Strip away the patriotic packaging and what remains is the vocabulary that Washington built to sell its 2011 “Pivot to Asia” — a policy explicitly designed, in the Obama administration’s own words, to contain China’s rise by rallying its neighbors into an anti-Beijing bloc. Mercado is not describing a bilateral fisheries dispute that could be resolved, as it nearly was under earlier administrations, through direct negotiation. He is prescribing a civic-military mobilization against a foreign power, taught to schoolchildren, embedded in doctrine, harnessed to an alliance system centered on the United States.

Here is what should alarm every Filipino far more than any coast guard water cannon: both Mercado and Alunan are elevating what is, at bottom, a dispute over maritime entitlements — fishing rights, EEZ boundaries, access to reefs and shoals rhetorically and doctrinally — into talk of war with China.

Alunan claims that China’s “seizing” of Scarborough Shoal was “a violation of international law,” amazingly ignorant of the much-publicized stand-off there in 2012 that lasted for 10 weeks. It ended when President Benigno Aquino III – or, as former senator Antonio Trillanes IV claims, then-Foreign secretary Albert del Rosario — got hoodwinked by US assistant secretary of state Kurt Campbell’s lie that the Chinese had agreed to withdraw, and ordered our vessels out of the area. It in effect turned over Scarborough Shoal to the Chinese, which such non-use of force to take over a territory is not prohibited by the UN.

Mercado goes over the top. He wrote that China is an “existential threat” to the Philippines, using Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s repeated term to describe Iran. This, I’m afraid, points to Mercado’s weakening grip on reality, that he sees the Philippines as the Asian equivalent of Israel fighting Iran, or Ukraine resisting the Russian invasion.

Ukraine

Mercado amazingly holds up Ukraine’s war against Russia as the template for Philippine strategy: “inexpensive drones, precision weapons and distributed sensors can inflict enormous costs on a much larger force.”

“We should invest not only in expensive platforms but also in unmanned systems, coastal missile batteries, surveillance networks,” he says, a shocking demonstration of delusion.

Mercado is assuming China is our enemy, and that we should prepare to fight it as our “existence” is in danger. But that like the Ukrainians, we too could bleed a superpower. This is insane. That is the actual danger in these columns: They assume as reality what is entirely the American propaganda line and they normalize war talk as the natural next step in a maritime entitlements dispute.

Not to boast, but in contrast to these two, I have been studying the South China Sea issue since 1974. This was when Alunan’s boss President Ramos risked journalists’ lives, including mine, by getting them to ride on World War II Huey choppers to fly over the minuscule structures on stilts that China had built at Mischief Reef — to take photos that were splashed in headlines all over the world. (Only in 1998 that then-US Navy ensign Michael Studeman — who would become an admiral in the US Office of Naval Intelligence — in a masteral thesis report that China made the move in retaliation against a secret grant of a six-month oil exploration permit to Alcorn Petroleum and Minerals, violating an agreement between the two nations not to allow such prospecting in the area.)

I have written a 2022 book on the issue titled Debacle: The Aquino Regime’s Scarborough Fiasco and the South China Sea Arbitration Deception that Amazon distributes. I have written 130 columns on the issue, both in this paper and when I was writing for the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Not a single fact and assertion in these publications have ever been challenged by any writer or scholar.

Mercado and Alunan are writing columns indistinguishable from a US Indo-Pacific Command talking-points memo — inflating a jurisdictionally narrow ruling into a sovereignty verdict, relabeling coast-guard water cannons as literal acts of war, and warning of a Beijing-directed “deep state” burrowing into Philippine institutions. It is a sad testament though that the American narrative of the “China threat,” built and marketed since the Obama Pivot to Asia, has been fully absorbed by our elite.

I admire these two columnists for taking time off from gardening, golf, or whatever else occupies their twilight years to strain their minds to write occasional columns. But ego-boosting as it may be for them to have their photos and bylines in a respected newspaper, they should at least spend some intellectual effort to do research on this sensitive issue, and not just rely on the narrative of a pro-US mainstream media.

They should realize that their columns are entirely based on ignorant US-controlled media narratives, they are only helping the US drive a wedge between us and the likely global economic superpower, China.

Isn’t it obvious that our close neighbor, if we do not publicly treat it as an enemy, could help us in a big way through official aid, investments and trade to get out of the economic quagmire we are in? Other than the US, we are the only country in the world whose leaders see China as, to use Mercado’s term, an “existential threat.”

Didn’t it even cross their mind that Vietnam — a very nationalistic country that lost 64 soldiers and sailors in a clash with Chinese forces in the 1988 at Johnson South Reef — is deeply intertwined with China not only diplomatically but through trade, manufacturing and investment, even as the two countries are in a dispute over territorial and maritime claims in the Spratlys? Haven’t they heard of the fact that it was the influx of Chinese investments and the surge in trade with China that helped boost Vietnamese economy that it overtook us in 2020 in terms of GDP per capita ($3,196, while Vietnam’s $3,352 as against our $3,196?)

While it has vehemently protested against Chinese intrusions into its EEZ whenever this occurred, Vietnam never has echoed the American propaganda against China as much as our political and economic elites do.

We have to snap ourselves out of the US propaganda’s spell. We are not giving up our maritime disputes with China, but we should follow China’s revered leader Deng Xiaoping’s advice long ago on his country’s territorial dispute with Japan: “Our generation is not wise enough to find common language on this question. Our next generation will certainly be wiser.”

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Two former Cabinet men, one Washington script
Source: Breaking News PH