The Philippines is joining the United States, Japan and Australia in setting up a new Indo-Pacific defense council, the latest move to push back against Beijing’s growing aggression in the South China Sea.
Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. met with his counterparts from the three countries on November 1 in Kuala Lumpur, where they “expressed support for the framework to establish” the Indo-Pacific Chiefs of Defense Cooperation Council.
The body, according to a joint readout, will help the four militaries work together more smoothly amid China’s “destabilizing actions” in the East and South China Sea.
In their joint statement, Teodoro, Australian Minister for Defense Richard Marles, Japanese Minister of Defense Koizumi Shinjiro and United States Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said they had ‘serious concern regarding China’s destabilizing actions in the East China Sea and the South China Sea.”
They also said they opposed ‘any unilateral attempts to change the status quo by force or coercion.’ They reaffirmed that the 2016 South China Sea arbitral ruling ‘is final and legally binding.”
The Kuala Lumpur meeting, the fifth among the four countries in three years, marked a tightening of security ties as regional flashpoints, including the dispute in the South China Sea, continue to multiply. The defense officials agreed to focus joint efforts on ‘deterrence and operational readiness’ and to ‘enhance coordinated defense cooperation activities,’ including expanded information-sharing and joint training.
They also welcomed the Reciprocal Access Agreement between Japan and the Philippines, which allows troops from both nations to operate on each other’s soil – a deal that officials said strengthens ‘bilateral and multilateral’ defense readiness.
Next year’s Balikatan exercises in the Philippines will include troops from all four nations, the statement read.
Manila has been dealing with increasingly brazen harassment by Chinese vessels in the West Philippine Sea – the part of the South China Sea that falls within its exclusive economic zone.
In October, the Philippine Coast Guard reported multiple incidents of harassment while escorting fishermen near Scarborough and Sabina Shoals. In the same month, a China Coast Guard vessel rammed and water-cannoned a Philippine fisheries-support ship near Pag-asa Island, which the Philippines considers part of its territory through the Kalayaan Island Group.
Last week, Chinese Defense Ministry spokesperson Zhang Xiaogang said Beijing ‘would never allow any provocation and trouble-making to work, nor would we leave any room for blackmailing the big by the small,’ in comments directed at Manila.
Teodoro reacted to that yesterday by saying it was these comments that made him shun any contact with his Chinese counterpart during the ASEAN summit, on top of the absence of any “line of communication” between them.
“Would you talk to, would you offer to talk to somebody who slammed your country that way? Of course not,” Teodoro said yesterday, November 2. “I would be willing to talk if there was a semblance of good faith”