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Cross posting from /r/credibledefense, but thought Mottizens might have an angle on this.
As someone with family in the Philippines, I’ve been feeling concerned about risks presented by the country’s close alliance with an increasingly volatile US, especially in the context of a war in the West Philippine Sea/SCS that the US is looking more and more likely to lose. A few years ago, the US felt to me like a better partner than China after Duterte’s reconciliation efforts with Xi were largely rebuffed, and since then we’ve seen a major investment in new US bases in the Philippines, especially Luzon. However, a number of factors make me think that the Philippines would be better off explicitly pivoting towards neutrality.
First, there’s the simple fact that US naval construction remains deeply and utterly broken, as I’m sure most of us are aware, while China’s continues to grow at pace. The starkness of this disparity has grown in recent years and it no longer looks like the US has the state capacity to fix it. Consequently, the likelihood of a conflict over Taiwan that goes badly for the US and leaves the region in control of China is higher than it used to be. Moreover, while the US can pack its bags and go back to Guam, the Philippines will forever be stuck less than 200 miles off the coast of mainland China.
Second, and much more recent, there’s the shift towards a more erratic and transactional foreign policy by the US. While US bases in the Philippines are of mutual benefit for now, it’s not inconceivable to imagine a rug-pull exercise whereby the US pulls its forces out in exchange for a concession from China. Likewise, it’s questionable whether the old ideals of loyalty would mean the US would help with reconstruction if the Philippines got hit hard by Chinese missile strikes in a Taiwan conflict. Additionally, many of the soft-power inducements provided by USAID projects in the Philippines have now been cancelled. I don’t want to turn this into a discussion of the Trump administration per se, but the reality is that US foreign strategy has undergone a colossal shift in the last two months, and that changes the incentives for its partners.
Third, while China wants its extravagant claims to islands in the West Philippine Sea to be recognised, and probably wants economic and political influence in the Philippines itself, there’s zero indication or historical precedent to suggest that China wants to annex any of the major islands in the Philippines. Consequently, it’s really not clear to me that the security advantages provided by US forces are significant enough to justify the very real and kinetic risks associated with hosting US forces. I’m particularly concerned about nuclear risks, where in a rapidly spiralling conflict China might judge nuclear strikes on US military targets in the Philippines to be less likely to escalate to all-out strategic nuclear warfare than eg attacks on US bases in Guam or Japan.
Fourth and finally, the current presence of US bases in the Philippines does offer them a bargaining chip. It seems to me that the Philippines could basically offer a “Finlandization” deal to China where it would commit to total neutrality in any conflict in the region and withdraw from Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement with the US. Probably to sweeten the package it would have to make some painful concessions to China on disputed islands like Scarborough Shoal, but it could potential walk away with robust guarantees of long-term functional autonomy and non-interference, conditional on remaining neutral.
I’d be interested to hear others’ thoughts, though! Am I being too bleak, or missing some upsides to the alliance for the Philippines?
Why do you expect that nuclear bombs would be the weapon of choice if China wanted to knock out US bases in the Philippines? The comparatively short distance from the mainland, relatively difficult setting for air defense against numerous low-flying targets and likelihood that China would consider its immediate neighbours to be soft-power targets to some extent all point to it being a good use case for their rapidly evolving drone technology. I'm also not sure if nuking a base in the Philippines would be seen as safer than nuking Guam - American servicemen would die all the same, and my sense was that most of the world, America included, does not even think of Guam as an area with a civilian population. If the US leadership at that point is at all concerned with the opinion of the peanut gallery, nuking a US (directly involved belligerent) base and large numbers of hapless civilians of a third country that happened to be in the way will surely be seen as giving the US more of a moral mandate to nuke back than just nuking a US base?
(Remind the world that the Guamese exist? Might take too long on global thermonuclear war time if done afterwards, and inspires questions about colonialism that nobody particularly wants to deal with. Grant it statehood? Altering the hair's-breadth equilibrium of US politics in such a fundamental way is usually not seen as worth the political capital it would cost.)
(edit:
What do you see about that sub? The substance seems essentially indistinguishable from /r/worldnews or the long-degraded /r/geopolitics, except everyone is LARPing as an FP writer.)
To be clear, I don’t think a nuclear strike on the Philippines is intrinsically likely, but conditional on the war going nuclear, the Philippines might well be prioritised over Guam as a first target primarily because it wouldn’t set the precedent of targeting American soil.
For example, imagine the US loses a carrier, and decides to respond with an SLCM-N strike on a Chinese command vessel. China decides it needs a symbolic strike to respond, but doesn’t want to move too far up the escalation ladder too fast, so it hits an isolated but operationally significant US base in the Philippines. Civilian casualties might be comparatively low; if you hit Fort Magsaysay Airfield for example civilisation casualties might be in the low thousands, similar to what you’d get from hitting Guam.
Maybe just read this post again and take a breath. How would this post sound to an objective person?
This is not going to happen anytime soon. The Philippines are not a priority for China. There's not going to be a nuclear war between US and China. Etc.. Etc...
It might be a good time to think about your social media diet.
Counterpoint- if the specter of WW3 with Russia is enough for Trump-aligned parties to want to cut ties with Ukraine to hedge risk and cut potential costs, the specter of WW3 with China is enough for non-Trump aligned parties to want to cut ties with Trump-aligned parties to hedge risk and cut potential costs.
I'm fully open with calling both of them hyperbolic, but hyperbole has a lot of sway in the governing coalition of the current white house, and those who embrace hyperbole on one side of the world don't exactly get to claim that others are being unreasonable for similar framings of concern on the other. The use of the framing as legitimate enough to drive sudden shifts in US policy likewise legitimizes the use of framings by other parties, including in directions against american preferences.
Are they really worried about WW3 or does that just sound better than telling everyone that it's an inherited forever-war that's been unwinnable at any worthwhile cost for over a year and they don't feel like squandering air defense munitions on it indefinitely with China looming?
I have been repeatedly assured that fears of WW3 are sincere and responsible, with all the negative moral accusations or insinuations that skepticism to that thesis entails. I have not seen any particular evidence or compelling reason to believe that Ukraine was/is a forever war, given how the Russian sustainment has been by the very much finite depletion of Cold War stockpiles and generally observable quality issues.
Which air-defense munitions particularly useful against China do you believe were being squandered, given that the Ukrainians weren't exactly being given from the US Navy or indo-pacific stockpiles?
Particularly when the key lesson of the Ukraine War was that the armament production base- not stockpiles- was needed, with support for said conflict being the political/congressional basis for funding expansion of production?
The 'the US can't afford to keep supporting Ukraine' argument has never carried fiscal weight, particularly in the China context. Ukraine had been the bipartisan basis for expanding defense production to overcome a shortage- if that was too much fiscally for the advocates of cutting off Ukraine, there's no particular reason to believe they are willing to fund the much larger, more expensive, and more enduring industrial ramp up needed for a China contingency.
To me, one of the most reliable indicators of a Forever War is attempts to engage in "limited" warfare in pursuit of a nebulous goal. Ukraine certainly seems to be an example of "limited" warfare in pursuit of a nebulous goal, so it trips my Forever War sense.
The expected rejoinder is that the Ukraine conflict has concrete goals: defeat Russia, restore Ukraine's pre-war borders, prevent Russia from trying anything like this again.
Restoring Ukraine's pre-war borders is the most concrete of these, but it's dependent for it's meaning on defeating Russia and preventing Russia from trying anything like this again. As people frequently point out, rolling the borders back does no good if Russia just re-invades next year.
Preventing Russia from trying anything like this again is pretty nebulous. Russia has a lot more leverage on its immediate neighbors than we do, simply due to distance. A functional Russia is a Russia that can do stuff like this again. Maybe if Russia is defeated, though, it might lose sufficient capability to prevent further extraterritorial ambitions?
So that brings us to defeating Russia. What does that look like, concretely? Can you give some recent examples of what "defeating" an enemy looks like? We "defeated" the Taliban, drove them from power, had them hiding in caves and living like hunted men for two decades, we directly killed a large percentage of their leadership and many, many of their rank-and-file. And yet, twenty years later, the Taliban rule Afghanistan. Okay, maybe we didn't use enough firepower. How about Ghaddafi? Ghaddafi was overthrown and sodomized to death with a bayonet on live TV; I think it's fair to say that we "defeated" him. What was gained by that victory? How did the world improve? How about Saddam? We smashed his army, occupied his nation, dragged him out of a rat-hole and hung him. We purged his party from the Iraqi government, hunted those who resisted relentlessly, and took absolute control of their territory. We pretty clearly defeated Saddam. What was gained by that victory? How did the world improve?
If we kill off the whole Russian army, what happens next? If we successfully sneak a missile into one of Putin's cabinet meetings and wipe out his entire inner circle, what happens next? If we humiliate him badly enough that the Russians rise up and overthrow him, what happens next? How do things shake out? How is the world improved? My guess is that the likely outcome is something like Libya, only significantly worse: all the ambitious bastards whose names we've never heard of because Putin has been sitting on them get to make their play, and we get large-scale chaos, quite possibly with a fun stir-in of loose nukes.
Suppose, for a moment, that Russia collapsing into significant chaos might actually have some bad consequences for the rest of the world. Now you don't just want to defeat Russia, you want to sort of defeat Russia, but without actually compromising its stability too badly. How does that work? I have no idea, but maybe you or someone else can lay it out in a straightforward manner.
In one of our recent conversations, you linked this document as an example of the consensus thinking on our recent wars. One of the first lines:
...Why should I believe that this is true? I mean, I don't particularly disagree, the theory seems sound, but why are we entering this conversation with the assumption that "Ultimate success in COIN" is a thing that we have any understanding of at all? Where would that understanding come from? Which COIN successes are providing the grounds for anyone to speak with any authority at all? And this question seemed directly relevant to every sentence of the entire document. It's pure B-type thinking, outside-looking-in, illusion-of-control.
And so it is here. I do not believe that killing Russian soldiers makes the world a better place in any sort of linear fashion. Certainly the amount we have assisted in killing to date does not seem to have improved things, and I am deeply skeptical that killing more will suddenly begin making a difference. I do not think "defeating" Russia in some weak sense will make the world a better place. I do not think defeating Russia in a strong sense will make the world a better place either. I used to believe that stomping on villains was a straightforward way to improve the world. Then I watched that belief be implemented in a succession of examples, and I watched the results, and I updated my beliefs based on the new evidence.
If we are worried about an aggressive Russia, the proper way to handle that is to pick a line and declare that whatever Russia crosses it with, we will destroy with the full power of our entire empire. Crucially, this line should probably not be on Russia's immediate border, nor should it steadily move closer to Russia's border year after year. Then if Russia wants to cross the line, we drive them straight back, and if they are crazy enough to escalate to tactical nukes, we tactical-nuke them back, and if they decide to initiate doomsday, well, you can't win 'em all. But the key here is predictability and stability: we want things to settle into a static position, and then stay there.
This is not the strategy we've been pursuing; in fact, we have been doing the exact opposite for some decades now. I think this is very foolish, and to the extent that you disagree, I'm curious as to why.
...?
Elaboration- you are all over the place in that, so much so that I don't particularly see any particular place to begin. You certainly aren't describing 'my' position in any meaningful sense, currently or over the last few years of re-giving it, but I also don't think you're particularly interested in it either, given the length you go to not describe it and then raise issues I have repeatedly raised myself in various forms over the years. (To pick one- Gaddafi. My thoughts on the Libya intervention have never exactly been circumspect. I believe the closest I have ever come to a positive word for it was along the lines of 'I understand why some of the European states wanted it.')
So if you're not going to address my position, and just want to raise history with many ?-marks on issues we have been known to agree on, I will go...
...?
...and, for the sake of your final question, point you back to what you quoted.
This has two parts- a position statement (I have seen no particular evidence or compelling reason to believe that Ukraine was/is a forever war), and a justification statement (finite and depleting Cold War stockpiles enabling Russian sustainment of their invasion and large-scale combat operations).
And looking at what you've posted, the most direct response to it was-
-and a variety of paragraphs that ignore the justification statement's premise, which is a shortage of soviet stockpile equipment to sustain the current war indefinitely.
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