In an old, quiet low-rise apartment building near Malacañang, after climbing the narrow wooden stairs to the second and third floors, modern offices surprise you: freshly painted and renovated, complete with conference rooms and TV monitors, sleek new desks, and swivel chairs. Bright and well lit, some parts are draped by the morning sun as uniformed men and women from the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) bustle about preparing for their office’s blessing.

A ribbon on a colorful standing wreath announces the name of this brand-new office: “Office of the Special Staff on the West Philippine Sea.” This is where the PCG spokesperson on the West Philippine Sea, Commodore Jay Tarriela, and his staff moved to. Before this, Tarriela’s job as spokesperson on the WPS was merely added to his other duties, mainly as head of the human resource management.

It is January 2024, almost a year since the government began to make China’s aggressive behavior in the WPS public. There is anticipation in the air as Tarriela and his staff change gears and devote full-time attention to the WPS, a wide information arena to navigate.

A convergence of factors led to the creation of this new office: the change of leadership in the Coast Guard – the new commandant’s reorganization – and the national security adviser’s unrelenting emphasis on shining the light on China’s incursions in the WPS. As NSA, Eduardo Año, a retired general and former armed forces chief of staff with an extensive background in intelligence, also heads the National Task Force for the West Philippine Sea (NTF-WPS), an inter-agency body that coordinates policy and strategy.

This tactic of calling out China and letting the world know how this big power bullies its small neighbor has since been called many names: “assertive transparency,” “measured transparency,” and “strategic transparency.” Taking off from these, the new Coast Guard office recently renamed itself to “West Philippine Sea Transparency Office.”

The goal, really, is twofold: First, to make the Filipinos aware of China’s illegal presence and dangerous maneuvers in the WPS, which deprive our fishermen of their livelihood and violate our country’s sovereign rights. Second, to garner international support and help enforce the 2016 arbitral ruling that declared China’s nine-dash-line claim on the South China Sea illegal.

Not so long ago, in February 2023, the first spark of what was then called a “transparency initiative” lit up the WPS. The trigger: China aimed a military-grade laser at a PCG ship accompanying a Navy resupply mission to Ayungin Shoal, causing temporary blindness to the crew at the bridge of the ship. There at the shoal, a decrepit World War II ship, BRP Sierra Madre, stands guard, manned by a small team from the Marines.

The Coast Guard provided videos and photos of this incident and the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) lodged a strongly worded diplomatic protest against China. 

Turnaround

Looking back, Tarriela said in a recent forum that the transparency initiative went through “birth pains as skeptics questioned its objectives.” At the time, the government was still adjusting to the shift from predominant silence or selective disclosure during the Duterte administration to a complete turnaround under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Tarriela credits Año for carrying the ball, never wavering in their campaign which included embedding Filipino TV, online, and print journalists in the resupply missions, as well as those reporting for the wires and international news organizations.

Skirmishes with China, which continued during the monthly resupply missions in Ayungin Shoal, intensified the transparency efforts of the government, leading to an unprecedented joint press conference on the WPS by the DFA, Coast Guard, Armed Forces, and the National Security Council (NSC) in August 2023. This, after China fired water cannons on PCG and Navy-operated vessels.

Jonathan Malaya, NSC spokesperson, said in a recent webinar that the transparency tactic is “our way of pushing back against China.” How would he assess the campaign, so far? “Mixed success,” he replied. They have raised awareness in the Philippines and internationally “but this has not changed China’s behavior.”

What next?

Initially, the focus was heavy on Ayungin Shoal because of Chinese maneuvers to thwart and intimidate the regular resupply missions. The atmosphere became quite tense for a while but the temperature has since cooled down after the NTF-WPS shifted its attention to another flashpoint, Scarborough Shoal. This is where Filipino fishermen continue to be harassed by the China Coast Guard and maritime militia. 

Last week, satellite images showed a new floating barrier at the mouth of the shoal, months after an earlier one was dismantled by the PCG. This appears to be a response to the PCG’s and the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources’ routine deployments of their vessels to the area to accompany fishermen, providing them fuel and food. 

Reed Bank, rich in oil and gas, is another potential flashpoint that is on the radar of the NTF-WPS transparency initiative. In the Duterte administration, China and the Philippines failed to negotiate a joint exploration deal. China refused to abide by the terms of the service contract which, among others, required them to implicitly recognize Philippine sovereignty over Reed Bank. 

The Philippine Navy is catching up, recently designating its own spokesperson on the WPS to widen the conversation beyond China’s gray-zone tactics and train the spotlight on the Navy’s activities in the WPS.

Overall, the transparency campaign has received rave reviews: a Western diplomat called it a “stroke of genius” and a US think tank said it is a “game changer.” In a study, Raymond Powell and Benjamin Goirigolzarri of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation at Stanford University said that the Philippines “rewrote the counter-gray zone playbook,” describing it as a “potentially revolutionary innovation…worthy of study and emulation…” The challenge, Powell and Goirigolzarri wrote, is “whether the Philippines can effectively sustain and leverage it into a broader gray zone strategy…”

The big ask is: Will the Philippines be able to institutionalize it? Will the transparency initiative continue under a new administration? After all, the maritime dispute with China transcends the terms of presidents. 

Let me know what you think. Please email me at marites.vitug@rappler.com. – Rappler.com

What’s most disturbing about his rants, though, is when he plants intrigues and goads the military into rising up against the civilian government. He is a dark undertow that tries to sweep back the armed forces into its politicized past, the failed mutinies and coup attempts of the 1980s, doing the country a great disservice.

Two thoughts seem to be running in Duterte’s head.

• First, he has this inflated sense of his influence on the military, forgetting he is an aging local politician whose time on the national stage has passed.

• Second, he regards the institution of the armed forces as his personal tool, a weapon in his arsenal to be used to serve his own interest.

New context

All this is happening at a time of geopolitical change, when the military is set to embark on a process of transformation. As China increases tension in the South China Sea with its aggressive behavior, as it keeps a covetous eye on Taiwan, and as the strength of the local communist insurgents wanes, the Philippine armed forces is shifting its mission from internal security to territorial defense.

This is historic as it comes after more than half a century of fighting the New People’s Army (NPA), the longest running communist insurgency in the world.

“There was a time when we did not have to worry about these threats [South China Sea] and the intensification of competition between the superpowers,” Marcos said. “…The AFP’s mission has changed.” 

The President has “set the tone, amplified by the defense secretary and the chief of staff,” Commodore Roy Vincent Trinidad, Navy spokesperson on the West Philippine Sea, told me. “The AFP will look at the entirety of the country, not just barangays, and widen its perspective to a global [one], beyond Ayungin…not just the West Philippine Sea.” Trinidad is also deputy commander of the Philippine Fleet. 

Finally, the Navy is finding its place in the sun. Among the armed forces units, the Navy has always been attuned to external defense, its sights on the vast waters. After all, the maritime zone of the Philippines is much larger than its land area.

General Romeo Brawner Jr., who is allowed by law to stay for a maximum term of three years as chief of staff, will preside over the start of this transformation, which will entail a deepening of what Marcos calls “archipelagic consciousness” to boost the country’s territorial defense. 

Modernization

Key elements of the transformation process are the acquisition of warships, fighter planes, radar systems, cyber-security equipment, among others, and the upgrading of skills through joint exercises with allies and like-minded countries such as the US, Australia and Japan.

The modernization of the military is a 15-year program that began in 2013. Dubbed Horizon, it was designed in three phases. Now on its third and last phase, from 2023 to 2028, Horizon 3 has been updated to address external threats.

Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro said in a recent speech that the revised acquisition plan will focus on “an array of capabilities which will range from our domain awareness, our connectivity, our intelligence capabilities or C4iSTAR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, targeting acquisition and reconnaissance) … to our area denial and deterrence capabilities on both the maritime and the aerial domains.”

Duterte’s internal threat

When he was president, Duterte always said that the NPA was the number one security threat to the country.  He focused on the domestic communists despite the continued incursions of China in the West Philippine Sea.  At the time, he was locked in China’s embrace and thus didn’t want the military to regard China as a threat.

This was a turnaround from his predecessor’s position. The government of then-president Benigno Aquino III considered the maritime dispute in the West Philippine Sea as the number one source of threat. In 2015, “[in view of] reports of massive reclamation projects in our exclusive economic zone, it is now very clear that our territorial disputes in the West Philippine Sea have in fact overtaken all security issues in our hierarchy of national security issues,” then-national security adviser Cesar Garcia Jr. said in a Senate hearing.

Former military chief, retired general Emmanuel Bautista, takes us back to history and says that territorial defense has been the traditional role of the armed forces. However, the entire AFP was gradually called upon to fight internal threats since the 1960s. “Weaning away the AFP from internal threats will be a gradual process, part of a long-term plan,” he told me.

It was under Aquino’s presidency that Bautista led the military (2013-2014). At the time, he said, they were already starting to think of the big shift to territorial defense.

So when we hear Duterte’s reckless talk of destabilization by the military, it throws us back to years gone by, so old and passé. His rants should just be treated as background noise. 

Let me know what you think. You can email me at marites.vitug@rappler.com.

“Bagong Pilipinas” (New Philippines) does not situate the country in a changed geopolitical context wherein Marcos himself has clearly taken the lead in standing up to China, the bully. In an apparent zeal to follow his late father’s “Bagong Lipunan” (New Society) brand, so steeped in the 1970s, he merely transplanted the slogan without considering the wider environment, the conflicts that have been happening in the world, and their impact on us.

The seas are where global competition is being played out, from the Red Sea to the South China Sea. In our part of the world, the West Philippine Sea (WPS) has been the source of tension, a potential flashpoint, but it has also been a factor unifying Filipinos in the face of an external threat. 

Neither does the rebranding call for Filipinos to look outward, into the seas that surround us, and ingrain in ourselves a maritime and archipelagic consciousness. 

“Bagong Pilipinas” was launched in July 2023 but a kick-off rally took place only about a week ago. So, is there really anything new about “Bagong Pilipinas”? The fact that Marcos is still publicly searching for a “new paradigm” in dealing with China, despite this leadership and governance mantra, speaks of a gaping void. 

Marcos in Japan

It began in what looked like a December of discontent for Marcos. Tension in the West Philippine Sea continued unabated as the China Coast Guard water-cannoned our Navy and Coast Guard vessels in Ayungin Shoal and Scarborough Shoal. 

Thus, when the President traveled to Tokyo in December last year to attend the Japan-ASEAN summit, commemorating 50 years of friendship, he told the world about the dire situation, the Philippines’ search for “new solutions,” and the need for a “paradigm shift” to lower the temperature.

The Philippines has been consistent in filing diplomatic protests against China and summoning the Chinese ambassador, when necessary. On the frontlines, the Coast Guard and the Navy, with their limited ships, conduct regular patrols in the West Philippine Sea.

Still, Marcos said in separate interviews with the foreign and Japanese media: “I cannot say that we have found the answer yet. We are still trying to formulate that answer as we speak. And things are moving very quickly in many parts of the China Sea and so there are changes in terms of approaches, [the aggravations].”

He was crowdsourcing solutions, apparently urging the foreign affairs and defense departments, the National Security Council, and his advisers to come up with new ways of thinking about dealing with China.

Three Ds

As it is, there’s a trinity of strands in Marcos’ response to China: deterrence, dialogue, and diversifying security relations.

• Deterrence is mainly about modernizing the Navy and the Air Force, upgrading skills by conducting joint military exercises with allies and security partners, as well as joint patrols in the WPS. This also includes Marcos’s transparency initiative, making China’s bullying in the WPS public to gain international support.

• The most recent dialogue was conducted in Shanghai, the 8th Bilateral Consultative Mechanism or BCM. Manila and Beijing agreed to improve maritime communication, especially between the foreign ministries and the coast guards.

• Apart from strengthening its alliance with the US and its security partnerships with Australia and Japan, the Philippines has been diversifying its security cooperation. Manila and Ottawa have agreed on a defense partnership, recently signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on Defense Cooperation. France and the Philippines signed a similar agreement to boost defense ties; same with Manila and London. Who would have thought that Netherlands and the Philippines would seal an MOU to promote cooperation in the defense industry? This, they did last year. Even Sweden signed an MOU with the Philippines on the acquisition of defense equipment.

‘Comprehensive defense concept’

Responding to Marcos’s call for a “paradigm shift,” the defense department has come up with a “comprehensive archipelagic defense concept” wherein the military is slated to guarantee the “unimpeded and peaceful” exploration of natural resources within the country’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).”  

Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro said in a speech: “…we are evolving into a defense concept which projects our power into our areas where we must by Constitutional fiat and duty, protect and preserve our resources.” The nuts and bolts of this paradigm have yet to surface.

In line with instilling an archipelagic consciousness, the Navy recently appointed its spokesperson for the West Philippine Sea. Part of their goal is to highlight the Navy’s role, how the grey ships are responding to China’s provocations. This is a fit in the new defense concept. 

Bilateral actions

What else should be in the government’s toolkit? 

Marcos’s state visit to Vietnam last week offers some answers: cooperation between the coast guards of the Philippines and Vietnam, an MOU on Incident Prevention and Management in the South China Sea, and a future joint submission on an extended continental shelf (ECS) to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. These moves show that bilateral actions – not involving China – can help keep peace in the contested waters.

Experts have been urging the Philippines to file for an ECS facing the South China Sea. The ECS refers to the area beyond the 200-nautical-mile EEZ of a coastal state. Antonio Carpio, an authority on the law of the sea, said that the Philippine should make its claim to protect the country’s maritime zone in the face of aggravations from China.

Marcos can also look into the past. The Philippines and Indonesia forged a treaty in 2019 which defined the boundary between these two countries’ overlapping EEZs. This could be a template for similar agreements with claimant countries like Vietnam and Malaysia. 

Let me know what you think. You can email me at marites.vitug@rappler.com.

The two opposition candidates – Hou Yu-ih of the Kuomintang (KMT) and Ko Wen-je of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) – immediately conceded defeat, their speeches civil. Hou told his supporters he was sorry for letting them down. 

Lai will assume office in May and lead the nation at a time of heightened geopolitical tension as Taiwan remains under serious threat from China. The Taiwan Affairs Office of China said the election result cannot halt “the unstoppable trend of the eventual reunification of the motherland.”

On the domestic front, the DPP failed to garner a majority in the parliament. This is expected to lead to gridlocks especially in getting the greenlight to fund an increase in defense spending, a vital part of the DPP’s strategy of building a credible deterrence. 

Taiwan is a young democracy, having had their first direct presidential election only in 1996, after more than three decades of martial law which ended in 1987. Some in Taiwan have said they were inspired by the Philippines’ 1986 popular revolt which ousted the dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, and his family.

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Majority of the citizens in the territory that China wants so badly no longer view themselves as Chinese. More than 60% consider themselves Taiwanese, imbued with the values of democracy and their own sense of nationhood.

Lai said during the campaign that there was “no need to declare independence, because Taiwan is already an independent sovereign state – its name is the Republic of China – Taiwan.”  He framed the elections as a choice between “democracy and autocracy”  but China said it was a  “peace and war” election. That’s going to be four years on the helm, for Lai, to uphold democracy and keep the peace. 

As DPP’s Vincent Chao, head of international affairs, told me, Lai will continue the status quo and steer away from provoking its authoritarian neighbor. Watch the interview here.

Battle for memory in Indonesia

The biggest country in Southeast Asia and the world’s third-largest democracy, Indonesia, will cast its vote in a first round for a new president on Valentine’s Day. The front-runner is Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto, a retired general with a tainted past. He was reported to have been dismissed from the military amid allegations of human rights abuses, was once exiled to Jordan, and banned from traveling to the US.

But he has since rehabilitated himself, helped in part by politicians who took him off the dustbin of history. In 2009, former president Megawati Sukarnoputri chose him as her running mate when she ran for re-election. While they both lost, this marked the beginning of Prabowo’s return. Twice, in 2014 and 2019, he made a bid for the presidency but lost. 

It was after the second defeat that President Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, appointed Prabowo defense minister. It was Jokowi’s way of co-opting his  political rival.

Around this time, Prabowo’s tarred human rights record was receding in the public memory, Burhanuddin Muhtadi, a political science professor at the Islamic State University, said in a recent forum in Singapore. I asked him why. “The youth, those born after Reformasi, forgot about Prabowo’s human rights record,” he replied.

Reformasi or Reformation was a vital era in Indonesia that began after President Suharto resigned in 1998, marking the end of his 32-year dictatorship. It was known as one of the most brutal and corrupt in the 20th century. 

Prabowo was then Suharto’s son-in-law but his marriage to the authoritarian ruler’s daughter ended in 1998. He was also an officer and later commander of the Army’s Special Forces, which was known for abuses committed in East Timor.

Muhtadi also said that Prabowo has successfully rebranded himself as a cool grandpa. As The Guardian reported: “At campaign events, Prabowo, 72, has wiggled his hips and waved his arms around – moves captured in viral videos on TikTok, where users call him ‘gemoy,’ meaning cute. On Instagram, his account shows him snuggling and kissing his cat, and posing with his hand in a love heart gesture.”

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More fundamentally, though, the rise of Prabowo points to a flaw in Indonesia’s education curriculum. “This shows the failure to teach history to the young,” Julia Lau, an Indonesian expert at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), said in the Singapore forum.

The similarity between the Philippines and Indonesia, particularly in the rehabilitation of Prabowo and President Marcos, is striking. Not only that. The eldest son of Jokowi, the 36-year old Gibran Rakabuming Raka, is Prabowo’s running mate. Another son was named chair of a youth party while his son-in-law is mayor of Medan. The dynasty starts from the top.

At the forum organized by the ISEAS, Yanuar Nugroho, former deputy chief of staff to Jokowi, said in jest that Indonesia is the only country in the world where the president’s family is deep in politics. I remarked that the Philippines can match and even outdo Indonesia: Marcos’s son is in Congress, his sister is in the Senate, a nephew is governor of Ilocos Norte, and his first cousin is speaker of the House of Representatives. We laughed about it – but the joke wasn’t lost on the Indonesians and Filipinos in the conference.

The politics of memory and dynasties runs deep in these two countries, disturbing phenomena that we need to confront.

Let me know what you think. Email me at marites.vitug@rappler.com. – Rappler.com

The judgment by a small but active segment of social media users was instant: Rappler is absolving itself. You threw the researcher under the bus. You ruined somebody’s future. Command responsibility – name the editors too!

Some made conclusions as if they sat through our processes and knew all the information we had. A number of the criticisms also came from quarters which, in the past, had jumped on any opportunity to throw shade at Rappler. Meanwhile, some spoke of how it should have been done but in doing so betrayed a lack of awareness of the workings of a fairly sizable, practically 24/7 newsroom. We received private messages that picked on peripheral issues while claiming they understood the gravity of the offense involved.

As managing editor who also shepherded the investigation committee, I can tell you that a lot went into that otherwise straightforward statement. We went through several days of thorough probe, disgraceful discoveries, agonizing reconciliation of differing approaches to the resolution process, and finally the painful acceptance that what we thought wouldn’t happen (again, after many years) in fact happened in our newsroom.

Some staff members would rather that we divulged a few more details to the public. The entire team knows the findings and has had open discussions with senior managers and editors about the investigation, and they thought these could shut down the noise.

But, no, that apology/statement was all that needed to come from the organization. The investigation, after all, wasn’t about having the arsenal to win an internet word war.

What this has all been about is exacting accountability – from individuals and us collectively. And the sentiments of a larger universe of social media users we monitored was, Rappler did just that.

Without the specks of personal biases, the baggage of dislike for our organization, or the cloud of lies that had been deployed about what happened, many netizens commended us for having faced the reputational hit squarely. Others defended us against critics who simply refused to see that the steps we took had “accountability” written all over them. We received messages of thanks from individuals to whom the pain of having works stolen was personal.

Away from the larger public eye, however, we have drawn lessons from this regrettable chapter to further strengthen our newsroom processes.

Editors who handled the researcher’s copies have been sanctioned for specific lapses. But we stand firm about shielding them from attempts by some quarters to deflect the heat from the researcher who knowingly and intentionally misrepresented other writers’ works as his. If anything, the only “mistake” the editors committed was to fully trust that the writer did his work honestly and conscientiously.

Our president, community lead, and core managers have put together guidelines for much-improved processes when it involves complaints about our work, breaches of our ethical and professional code, and meting out disciplinary actions.

Editors are now expected to keep wary eyes on certain types of submissions, and tools are available to aid us in this. There is now a sad joke in the newsroom, though: As a matter of practice, editors replied “got this” to staff’s submissions, and went on to check copies for strong headlines, powerful angles, complete and accurate information, balanced and fair presentation, legal footing, and correct grammar and style – because that’s how newsrooms, founded on the principle of trust, operate. But, now, are we going to accept submissions by first asking, “Kinopya mo ba ‘to?” 😞

That aside, there are three things that I am particularly proud of about the outcome of our exercise:

• We protected all of the Rappler journalists, who would have been subjected to unfair suspicions had we kept the identity of their erring colleague.
• By dealing appropriately with the culpable person, we accorded respect to the hard and honest work that has brought the rest of our journalists where they are now in the organization and in the industry.
• Finally, because we dug deeper, we avoided the biggest mistake that could have tarnished the academic records and dashed the journalistic dreams of two college students who were unjustly blamed at the beginning.

That looks to me like having pulled some people to safety. – Rappler.com

This is what has unfolded before us. The son of the late dictator has grudgingly looked good among his non-supporters. He didn’t have to do any heavy lifting to woo those who didn’t vote for him: he just showed himself to be different from his predecessor.

It was a service former President Rodrigo Duterte handed to Marcos on a silver platter, providing the stark contrast such that Marcos’s rule has become acceptable. The resistance to the strongman Marcos’s son, while still lingering, has been put on snooze.

The reality is: the Marcos presidency has given us some breathing space, restoring normalcy to our democracy, no matter how flawed. We no longer feel the heavy hand of a former leader who perpetuated violence and throttled our freedoms. 

Looking back, Duterte shattered our expectations of what a good leader is. So, even the ordinary stuff Marcos does – properly reading his speeches, coming to meetings on time, getting up from bed early (7 am, he once said), not holding long-winded Cabinet meetings that last till the small hours, not imposing incoherent late-night addresses to the nation, not blurting out brittle, threatening curses – have been magnified as if they were feats of leadership.

So far, however, Marcos has done well on foreign policy, returning us to our geopolitical bearings. He has asserted our country’s sovereign rights, assailing China for its aggressive behavior in the West Philippine Sea. He has strengthened alliances with the West and friendly countries. 

These days, when anti-Marcos friends gather, we hear this common remark: “I can’t believe I am saying this but Marcos has been saying the right things.” This is quietly said, in a tone of hesitant acceptance, as if we were talking about a taboo.

Sara’s turn

Now, it’s Vice President Sara Duterte who is doing Marcos the same favor. Out of her lips come pronouncements that echo her father’s red-baiting views, a shared obsession with the dying communist insurgency as the existential threat to the country.  She’s ideologically stranded, stuck in an old paradigm that paints the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) as the main security threat at a time when the world has changed.

She called Marcos’s decision to restart peace talks with the National Democratic Front and the CPP an “agreement with the devil.” Her father pursued the same tack and dove even deeper. He went to bed with the CPP, appointed representatives of the Left to his Cabinet – until their relations went sour. 

Sara was all praise for two hosts of the Sonshine Media Network International (SMNI) who, like her father, routinely red-tagged people and peddled fake news. SMNI, owned by preacher and US fugitive Apollo Quiboloy, also a close ally of the Dutertes, “disguises propaganda as news, and uses its platforms to attack journalists and activists,” a 2022 investigation by Rappler showed.

Her regard for the rule of law is weak, as if it were pliant, something she could bend in her favor. Thus, she opposed the clamor of some members of Congress that the Philippines cooperate with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the probe of her father’s drug war saying that it would “degrade” our courts. 

Marcos, for his part, has shifted his stance on the ICC from complete rejection of any form of cooperation to studying the option of returning to its fold.

On China, which hardly anyone could miss as the big bully harassing our Coast Guard and Navy ships, our fishermen in our very own Exclusive Economic Zone and rampantly violating international law – Sara’s silence is booming.

While there exists some tension between father and daughter over family issues, it has become clear that their minds come from the same mold. This is a scary prospect for the 2028 presidential election should Sara make a bid for it.

Ugh, I know, being an audience to these two political dynasties, leaving us with little choice, makes us so bereft.

The great unraveling in 2024

Think about it, Bongbong and Sara actually share a number of similarities. They’re scions of two well-entrenched political families, members of the political elite, children of  strongmen, products of money and patronage politics, both with a sense of entitlement. 

Sara owes her popularity to her father, a populist and authoritarian leader who came to power as a backlash to 30 years of liberal democracy, bookended by the Aquinos. While there had been economic and social progress, inequality persisted.

Bongbong also owes his popularity to his father, whipped up by a manufactured nostalgia over his regime – backed by a deluge of disinformation on his martial-law rule as the golden age of the Philippines – as well as fading memories as a young generation of voters came to the fore.

Such was the basis of their hollow unity, a convenient getting together of political clans. But their views on certain issues have diverged, with Sara on the right and Bongbong moving to the center.

As we have seen, the big split has begun. The year ahead will partly be defined by this great unraveling in national politics, an open conflict between the Duterte and Marcos camps that could turn strident.

Taiwan elections

Before I close, just a heads-up. The first election of 2024 that will have an impact on us and our national security will happen on January 13 in Taiwan. So far, it’s a close call. The ruling pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party leader William Lai is leading by a whisker over his main challenger from the Beijing-friendly Kuomintang, Hou Yu-ih.

The election will take place amid declarations from China that it will take over Taiwan. Our geography – we are uncomfortably near Taiwan – puts us in the crosshairs of a potential conflict in the Taiwan Strait.

Many await the results with bated breath.

In the midst of this suspense, I wish you all a happy new year!

Let me know what you think. You can email me at marites.vitug@rappler.com

What will the Philippines do to protect these flashpoints in the long term, and how will it avert a violent confrontation with China? What creative thinking is going on about BRP Sierra Madre beyond the occasional repair of its insides?

In the years past, it’s as if our policymakers stumbled into making certain decisions, simply reacting to the gravity of events. They thought in election cycles, every six years, narrowing their fields of vision.

To refresh our memories, I will go back to two major events that shaped part of the national security policy, hoping to remind our leaders that strategic decisions have to be made now—and not when a crisis is about to unfold.

One happened in 2012, during a crisis, and the other in 2019, with a foreign investment gone awry. The first eventually strengthened the Philippine Coast Guard and thrust it into a pivotal role in the West Philippine Sea, and the other led the Navy to its long overdue home, the government making up for years of neglect. This also allowed the Navy to beef up its territorial defense in the West Philippine Sea.

One: Scarborough crisis and the Coast Guard

It was in 2012 when China and the Philippines engaged in a tense standoff over Scarborough Shoal that lasted over a month. It ended with China seizing Scarborough which is part of the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone or EEZ.

The crisis began when the Navy tried to accost Chinese fishermen poaching yet again in Scarborough. This was a routine mission for the Navy, having been deputized by the government to perform duties of the Coast Guard which, at the time, did not have enough ships.

But China did something different. For the first time, it called the world’s attention to the Philippines’ use of the Navy, sending a warship to perform a civilian law-enforcement function. It portrayed the Philippines as an aggressor.

Immediately, Manila sought to ease the tension and pulled out the BRP Gregorio del Pilar, then the crown jewel of the Navy, its fastest ship at the time. The Coast Guard jumped in and sent its ten-year-old search-and-rescue vessel, the BRP Pampanga.

This was the Coast Guard’s baptism of fire. The BRP Pampanga was unprepared. Its fresh water supply was limited and Its desalination plant was badly in need of repair or replacement. Of the four binoculars on the ship, one was borrowed, the other was unreliable, while the others had cloudy vision.

The state of BRP Pampanga showed that the government didn’t give the Coast Guard much attention despite the fact that the maritime law-enforcement demands were enormous. The Philippines, after all, is one of the top ten countries in the world with the longest coastlines. 

Moreover, the Coast Guard’s role was eclipsed by the Navy which traditionally dominated sea patrol. These two services were also embroiled in a long-standing turf war. After all, the Coast Guard used to be part of the Navy. It left its mothership in 1998 but its transition to a civilian agency was not easy. Thus, even 14 years later during the Scarborough standoff, the Coast Guard was still ill-equipped.

But the standoff changed the fortunes of the Coast Guard. Then-President Benigno Aquino III started to upgrade the Coast Guard, initiating an Official Development Assistance loan from Japan for ten patrol vessels.  His successor, Rodrigo Duterte, continued this. Today, Marcos is on the same track, recently approving the purchase of five more patrol vessels from Japan. 

The Coast Guard has since surged to the frontlines of the West Philippine Sea, a long way from the days when it drifted on the periphery.

Two: Hanjin’s bankruptcy and the Navy’s home

It is hard to believe that, for decades, the Navy didn’t have its own base with a harbor where its frigates could dock. Through the years, their ships squatted in commercial ports like the North and South Harbors in Manila, as well as in Davao and Zamboanga.  

It only dawned on me, while doing research for an upcoming book on China and the Philippines during the Duterte years, that our Navy had been homeless. Think about this: A maritime country with a Navy that borrowed berths. I had difficulty letting this fact sink in.

Having their own home wasn’t on their near-term horizon. But the bankruptcy of Hanjin shipyard in Subic in 2019 became an opportunity for the Navy. When Chinese companies showed interest in taking over the shipyard, the Navy acted immediately to foil this.

They proposed to then-Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana that the Navy set up its base at the 300-hectare shipyard in Subic. Lorenzana brought this up with Duterte during a command conference of the Armed Forces of the Philippines in Malacañang. Duterte then called in Carlos Dominguez, then finance secretary, to cobble a deal, together with Teodoro Locsin Jr., then foreign affairs secretary, and Babe Romualdez, ambassador to the US.

It took almost three years to negotiate an agreement with a US private equity company, Cerberus Capital Management. Finally, in May 2022, the Navy took over 90 hectares of the shipyard, leasing it from Cerberus.

The Navy’s capital ships—their most modern and the latest in their inventory—now have a berthing place, facing the West Philippine Sea.

Let me know what you think. You can email me at marites.vitug@rappler.com. – Rappler.com

In a span of two days, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. showed his range of diplomatic moves toward China. First, he made nice with President Xi Jinping. Then he revealed – perhaps prematurely and not accurately – plans to move away from a China-led Code of Conduct for the South China Sea. 

Here’s how those days unfolded. 

In the lead-up to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ gathering in San Francisco in November, he requested to meet with Xi on the sidelines of the summit. He would later say that he wanted to “get the view of the Chinese president on what we can do to bring down the temperature, to not escalate the situation in the West Philippine Sea…”

But even as Marcos was announcing this in a video message from San Francisco soon after his meeting with US Vice President Kamala Harris, the scheduled meeting remained iffy. It looked like frantic last-minute arrangements finally nailed down what turned out to be a brief pull-aside, an informal meeting between the two leaders on November 18, accompanied by Wang Yi and Enrique Manalo, the top diplomats of both countries.

Marcos had always said that it was imperative for China and the Philippines to continue to communicate to ease tension in the contentious waters. “We tried to come up with mechanisms to lower the tensions in the South China Sea,” Marcos told reporters after the pull-aside. “I asked that we go back to the situation where both Chinese and Filipino fishermen were fishing together in these waters.” 

After the APEC meeting, Marcos made a stop in Hawaii in what looked like part of his journey of redemption. Thirty-seven years ago, the Marcoses arrived in Hawaii, his dictator father kicked out by a popular revolt. Last month, Marcos returned to the island as president, swept by the tide of fading memories.

Bilateral code of conduct?

But China was still on Marcos’ mind as he made a rare visit to the US Indo-Pacific Command, the US military’s biggest unified geographic combatant command, covering the vast South China Sea.

Two days after his feel-good meeting with Xi, showing him to be reaching out to the giant power, Marcos revealed information that surprised many and earned China’s displeasure. At the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies (APCSS) in Hawaii, an institute of the US Department of Defense, he said that the Philippines was negotiating with Vietnam and Malaysia to arrive at bilateral codes of conduct for the South China Sea. This is because the ASEAN-China Code of Conduct (COC), which seeks to regulate maritime activities in the South China Sea, has been as slow as molasses. It has been in the works for 21 years.

(Ian Storey of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, who has been tracking the forever saga of the COC negotiations, likened these to watching the movie Groundhog Day where events kept repeating themselves.)

At the APCSS forum, Marcos was effusive and at ease, answering questions lengthily. I have since learned from diplomatic sources that the talks with Vietnam were not focused on a COC but were broader, aimed at reaching an agreement on maritime security cooperation. As Marcos told the outgoing Vietnamese Ambassador Hoang Huy Chung in August: “Now that we are going to start discussions on the agreement that we have between the Philippines and Vietnam, I think it…will be a very, very important part of our relationship and it will bring an element of stability to the problems that we are seeing now in the South China Sea.”

As for Malaysia, no such talks were taking place. 

It turns out that the President misspoke. 

Later, when asked about the bilateral COCs with Vietnam and Malaysia, Ambassador Babe Romualdez clarified in a TV interview that Marcos “probably meant a joint agreement of some sort” but did not elaborate.

Still, negotiating a bilateral COC with each claimant country is a welcome idea to settle maritime disputes with them.

‘Let’s try everything!’

I am trying to understand where Marcos is coming from. Did he conflate the ideas and plans in the various briefings he has received?

It became clear to me that the core of his thinking on diplomacy was to try a range of actions all at the same time to achieve peace. He said in the APCSS forum:  “I am a great believer in trying everything all the time simply because you can’t predict by any stretch of the imagination where you will succeed. My best example is: who would have thought the diplomatic relations between the US and China would come about because of table tennis? And it did…. Let’s try everything!”

Marcos seems nostalgic for the days of ping-pong diplomacy, when sports could thaw relations between countries and in fact even became a historic moment leading to the end of the Cold War. The world, however, was much simpler then. 

Let me know what you think. Email me at marites.vitug@rappler.com. – Rappler.com

More than anything else, it’s our geography that is putting us on the map of like-minded countries. The Philippines is close to Taiwan, with the northernmost islands of Batanes just a heartbeat away. Equally significant is the fact that our country’s waters form part of the contentious South China Sea.

In these two fronts, China has become more assertive. President Xi Jinping has said that “national reunification” was one of his priorities, stressing the need to oppose pro-independence forces in Taiwan. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the nagging question has been: Will China do the same to Taiwan?

In the West Philippine Sea, Chinese bullying of Philippine Coast Guard and Navy-run ships has been accelerating, especially in the missions to resupply the troops in Ayungin Shoal. 

Apart from our geography, an interlocking reason is President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s strengthening of security cooperation with the US and traditional friends like Japan and Australia. In this uncertain geopolitical environment, they have found the Philippines an indispensable ally under a leader who has cast his gaze on the West. 

From Albanese to Kishida

Look who have come to Manila. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was the first Australian leader in 20 years to visit the Philippines. The European Commission (EC) President Ursula von der Leyen’s visit was the first by an EC president in nearly 60 years of diplomatic relations. 

Expectedly from the US, our treaty ally, we’ve had a number of visits, including by Vice President Kamala Harris, State Secretary Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. 

Japan has been a steadfast presence and top Official Development Assistance donor. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is the second most recent head of government to grace our shores (before Timor-Leste President Jose Ramos-Horta) and the first Japanese leader to address a joint session of Congress. In the past, the honor was given to two US presidents, George W. Bush in 2003 and Dwight Eisenhower in 1960.  

After all, Japan is the Philippines’ first strategic partner, the highest level of diplomatic relationship which the two countries forged in 2011.

What does it mean to be a strategic partner? While this partnership is comprehensive, the elevation of bilateral relations to a strategic level “prioritizes security cooperation,” Julio Amador III of the think tank FACTS Asia, wrote.  “Manila expects closer cooperation especially in military and maritime matters.”

New strategic partner

Before Albanese came over, we had low-profile relations with Australia. Some commentators had described Canberra’s ties with Manila as “undercooked” and undervalued.

But Australia has upped its visibility in Manila with a string of visits by four of its ministers, capped by the Prime Minister’s visit in September when he and President Marcos upgraded bilateral ties to a strategic partnership.

Australia is now the third strategic partner of the Philippines, joining Japan and Vietnam. In an interview, I asked Australian Ambassador Hae Kyong Yu what we can expect from this elevation of ties. “More of everything,” she replied, including greater maritime cooperation with the Philippine Coast Guard, among others. 

The Philippines and Australia are both maritime countries and are among the top 10 countries with the longest coastlines in the world. The Philippines can take a leaf from Australia in improving maritime awareness and managing coral resources.

Watch the interview here: 

Play Video

Canada: defense cooperation

From Down Under, next in the Philippines’ radar is the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on Defense Cooperation with Canada. Ambassador David Hartman has said that the MOU will not be like a Visiting Forces Agreement “but more of a manifestation of the government of Canada wanting to collaborate with the government of the Philippines, with the Armed Forces and other stakeholders to exchange best practices, train together, exchange technology and shared military exercises.”  

Like Australia and the Philippines, Canada is a maritime country. It has the longest coastline in the world.

Even before the expected signing of the MOU, two significant things have happened:

• Vessels from the Royal Canadian Navy visited the Philippines a number of times in the past months, culminating in a joint sail in the West Philippine Sea in September;
• Canada has given the Philippines free access to its Dark Vessel Detection program, a space-based monitoring and surveillance system. This means that the Philippines can watch its seas more effectively for illegal fishing and for vessels that turn off their Automatic Identification System and sail into our waters illegally.

On the ground, Canada has expanded its presence in Manila, with its embassy now becoming Canada’s fourth largest diplomatic mission in the world. It includes its first resident defense attaché and new staff to manage a growing aid and bilateral cooperation.  

When Canada’s foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, came to Manila in May, she said that now is the “time for ambition” in Philippine-Canada relations. The rhetoric shows that ties between Manila and Ottawa, which were at a low point during the Duterte years, dogged by human rights concerns and waste dumping, have nowhere to go but up.

Watch my conversation with Ambassador David Hartman here:

Play Video

Let me know what you think. You can email me at marites.vitug@rappler.com. – Rappler.com

Clearly, the dispute over our waters has spilled into the information space. No longer confined to the distant seas, the controversy surrounds us in social and mainstream media.

A day after the two incidents happened last month – the China Coast Guard hit a Navy-run wooden resupply boat and a maritime militia bumped a Philippine Coast Guard vessel bound for Ayungin Shoal – the Philippines held two separate press conferences to denounce not only the collision, but also China’s distortion of facts.

Soon after, the spokespersons of four government agencies – the National Security Council, Department of Foreign Affairs, Philippine Coast Guard, and the Armed Forces of the Philippines – briefed the media and Malacañang held another press conference, showing that the collision was “being taken seriously by the highest level of government.” 

Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro was unequivocal: “Disinformation and influence operations are in the playbook of China…so we are countering the narratives such as this…explaining to our countrymen why they should not believe in China’s narrative.”

China claimed that the Philippine supply ship had “deliberately crossed into the path of the Chinese coast guard vessel, resulting in contact with its bow.” Moreover, China’s foreign ministry told the Philippines to stop “stirring up trouble and making provocations at sea.” 

Target of disinformation

Apart from publicly debunking China’s false news, what else can the Philippines do to counter these insidious moves? Taiwan provides some of the answers.

Why Taiwan? It is the one country in the world that has been most flooded by disinformation from a foreign actor. Since 2013, China has relentlessly pounded this nation of 23 million with false narratives to influence public opinion in its favor. 

Civil society groups there continue to do fact-checking with unstoppable vigor, exposing not only the messages but also the cyber armies. 

But Taiwan has gone beyond fact-checking to include new tools in its arsenal.

A recent conference in Taipei organized by the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy was an eye-opener. I met civil society personalities who were at the forefront of fighting disinformation, including academics, activists, researchers, software developers and engineers. I learned how they have collaborated to successfully expose fake news, mainly from China, that aimed to undermine trust in Taiwan’s thriving democracy, sow discord, and inculcate doubts about the US, a strong ally.

The Taiwanese are at the cutting edge of this endeavor, making their country the most advanced, at least in Asia, in countering disinformation from a foreign actor, adding to their other laurels: the world’s largest manufacturer of chips that power mobile phones to fighter jets; the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage; and the home of the highly-popular Din Tai Fung.

Prebunking

Prebunking is what they actively do these days, apart from continuing the usual reactive ways to combat fake news.  This includes an early detection system to nip the false narratives in the bud – and making these public. In this way, citizens are alerted so that when they encounter the bogus news, they would be able to recognize it and stop its spread.

Puma Shen, an associate professor at the National Taipei University, heads DoublethinkLab, which developed digital tools to track China’s disinformation. He is currently involved in a regional project to develop an early-warning system to detect fake news, build a network to counter these malign narratives, and develop policy recommendations which various countries can use.

The Taiwan Information Environment Research Center, through its data-based research, delves deeply into fake narratives aiming to polarize public opinion. The Center, co-headed by a software engineer, then flags these to the public. Most common are reports that question the US-Taiwan partnership – promoting skepticism towards the global power – and hailing China as an economic and military power.

Another organization, the Institute for Information Industry, is bridging academic technology and industrial applications to combat disinformation. It was founded to popularize IT in Taiwan and has since evolved into a “digital transformation enabler,” lending its hand to the frontliners in countering Chinese manipulation of information.

Countering disinformation is a battle for Taiwan’s survival as China’s authoritarian hand continues to undermine the nation’s vibrant democracy, especially in the lead up to the January 2024 presidential election.

Let me know what you think. You can email me at marites.vitug@rappler.com. – Rappler.com