Asserting a Philippine foreign policy of cooperative peace for the Southeast Asian Sea

It is incumbent upon the Philippines to urgently promote amity, concord and a common security arrangement for Maritime Southeast Asia. But why is this the case? And how can this be achieved? The ensuing correlated answers to these two basic questions can essentially form the basis of a much-needed paradigm shift for Philippine foreign policy going forward.

As its regional strategic environment further deteriorates, the Philippines now faces eminent challenges in response to its external affairs agenda. This is substantially due to the menacing effects induced by an acutely changing world order, at least throughout the past five years. The country must begin to pursue a new foreign policy direction to address freshly emergent international concerns.

The Philippines needs to awaken to the momentous impacts of today’s shifting international environment by securing a favourable external space of manoeuvre for itself and its broader region. The country has to decisively forge a “strategic space of non-alignment” to guarantee its freely sovereign pathway ahead. This authentically independent course of action should foster a collaboratively peaceful regional agenda and setting, one that is autonomous from great powers. It is imperative for Manila to actively advance a progressive Philippine foreign policy framework and track whose goals align with the principles of cooperative peace.

Why cooperative peace?

Before proceeding any further, let us briefly outline and review some of the key approaches and ways of thinking related to peace and security. The concept of peace basically focuses on the state of relations between and among nation-states in the international arena. In contrast, the concept of security generally concentrates on the threat perceptions of the many actors (both state and non-state) in the field of international politics. In practice, these two concepts are interrelated and applied in various peace/security-oriented theories for the study of international relations.

Among the key security concepts that inform, define and guide their normative applications in the area of foreign policy and world affairs are: a) collective defence; b) collective security; c) common security; d) comprehensive security; and e) cooperative security.

Collective defence (tending to look outward) commits all states, bound by treaty, to aid in each other’s defence should any member state be threatened or come under military attack by a state or states outside the treaty area. Likewise, collective security (tending to look inward) relates to mutual defence arrangements that principally commit each party to come to the aid of any of its other fellow members should the latter come under attack. Additionally, common security pertains to a commitment for joint survival and the preservation of security with others, and not against them, on the basis of cooperation, diplomacy and a broader emphasis on conflict resolution. Furthermore, comprehensive security asserts a multi-dimensional non-military approach as a must in the process of promoting peace and security, especially for human development purposes. Cooperative security maintains features similar to collective defence, but upholds aspects of consultation, prevention and interdependence, while being inclined toward military interventions beyond its treaty area.

On the other hand, cooperative peace favours pursuing initiatives for building mutual confidence. By undertaking cooperative activities with others, it not only maintains stability, but advances and promotes development-friendly environments conducive to sustaining relative peace and security in the long run. In view of this particular security framework, the scope and thrust of cooperative peace assuredly melds well with, and complements, the essential aspects of both common security and comprehensive security. Moreover, in advancing world peace and security, the main principles and processes of cooperative peace and common security are very much compatible with those of attaining sovereign neutrality and non-alignment in international affairs.

The preceding theoretical premises, which guide the leading peace and security concepts that clarify international relations, are among the fundamental issues and concerns that continue to spark the major discourses and debates shaping global affairs at this conjunctural moment in world history.

Additionally, linked to this understanding is the need of progressive social forces — the global working-class movement, including the international revolutionary socialist left — for anti-capitalist change to accelerate their struggles toward a successful normative application of harmonious endeavors for world peace and security. In the volatile setting of Maritime Southeast Asia, all efforts seeking to coherently fuse the rational elements of cooperative peace with common security should be the prime focus. It is this principled agenda to help bring about a peaceful regional atmosphere of amity and comity that can contribute to degrading the many growing strains and tensions worldwide.

Southeast Asia amid the imperialist world system

The world situation is swiftly and permanently evolving. This objective condition is continually shaped by dynamics underpinned by geographic, economic and political factors. Although the prevailing capitalist world system is limited by the realities of uneven and combined development, it remains dominated by a core of imperialist powers — principally the United States and China. Both are now gripped in an escalating 21st century great power competition that is largely characterised by a sharpening geostrategic contest between Washington and Beijing.

This imperialist world system faces many inherent contradictions. The latter negations are systemically manifested as a globalised polycrisis. These precarious phenomena range across multiple domains: economic, social, political, diplomatic, security, technology, climate and health. Their fallouts unfailingly spill into the bounds of the global economy.

In a general manner, the capitalist world economy persists with sluggish growth rates. This is presently shown by weak investment flows, depressed productivity levels, continuing trade frictions, high debt-servicing strains and a historically low rate of global unemployment (5% since 1991). Additionally, the social cohesion of many countries of the global periphery are consistently threatened by relatively high inflationary pressures. Correspondingly, recurring inflationary spikes are largely caused by aftershocks and tensions connected to various regional conflicts and wars of imperialist-led aggression worldwide.

The current global situation reflects a profound realignment of international and regional powers since the COVID-19 pandemic struck half a decade ago. The geopolitical flux dangerously stirs the post-2024 global regime’s balance of power. On a world scale, this destabilised atmosphere, with its imbricated antagonisms, is materially generated by a modernised international division of labour expressed through unequal exchange.

It is this turbulent world stage that Manila has to engage with.

However, the Philippine state’s bourgeois political leadership lingers in a “stoned shit high” Cold War daze. Manila remains trapped in a harmful trance invoked by a late-20th century foreign policy mindset. In clear terms, the central dynamics that animated last century’s Cold War are significantly absent in the present-day international context. Doubtless, Manila’s strategic thinking has to urgently update itself to profoundly grasp the major implications being unleashed by the intensely changing international circumstances.

The imperialist world system permanently suffers from intrinsic ruptures. As it endlessly hurls socioeconomic quandaries and geopolitical perils into the global arena, capitalism’s protectors constantly hope that the system’s organic logic will self-correct its own crises conditions. Consequently, authentic alternatives to the capitalist system will consequently and substantially emanate from global humanity’s working-class movement as the historically leading social force for change, not from the bourgeois rulers of the global interstate system.

That is why the geostrategic rivalry between the US and China sharply rages on throughout the Eastern Hemisphere. This intensifying situation impinges on the littoral states around the Southeast Asian Sea (also known as the South China Sea), as it patently roils this maritime zone without abating. Nevertheless, the real nature of this inter-imperialist contestation is to primarily secure an uber-hegemony for their ruling classes in this vital realm of the world. Even so, both Washington and Beijing’s wider national goals are greatly focused on expanding their respective spheres of influence and dominance into other global zones to extract even more superprofits.

In targeting Southeast Asia, the US and Chinese onslaughts aim to guarantee their economic control over the region’s semi-peripheral and peripheral economies for their ceaseless capital accumulation. Washington and Beijing synchronously compete to sway the area’s national governments and ruling classes into anchoring their futures upon great power interests. This pattern regularly heats up as the US and China forcefully employ their contending foreign policy narratives and manoeuvres to influence various state-based regimes. The imperialist powers also typically deploy their prevalent political-diplomatic-military might to conceivably create puppet states for their own spheres.

Given its strategic geographical location, plus its economically subordinate role within the capitalist global periphery — as a maldeveloped, backward, dependent and semi-colonial country — the Philippines remains a perennial magnet for imperialist designs.

Philippine foreign policy’s determinants and alternatives

The Philippines has been partially responsible for the perilous deterioration of Maritime Southeast Asia’s security environment over the past decade. This is an accumulated result of Manila’s penchant to adopt provocative foreign policy stances and schemes that repeatedly capitulate to the US’ belligerent grand strategy agenda. By perpetually aligning and collaborating with US capital, the ruling Filipino capitalist elites eagerly promote US foreign policy interests. This is how the Filipino oligarchy consciously protects its narrow self-interests — as a US-supervised agent provocateur.

As a deplorable consequence, the Philippines endures as one of US imperialism’s vassal states in the Asia-Pacific. In the soaring inter-imperialist competition across the Southeast Asian Sea, the Philippines acts as a militarised regional destabiliser. By now, it has surely become a forward-tripwire state for the US’s heightening security confrontation with China.

It is imperative for Southeast Asian countries to steadfastly pursue genuinely independent foreign policies that are unchained to the designs of the imperialist great powers. In this regard, key elements determining potential Philippine foreign policy trajectories have to be asserted here: a) the globe’s geographical features are immutable; b) the Philippines is geographically fixed in Maritime Southeast Asia — astride China and a hemisphere away from the US mainland; c) the imperialist world system predominates the shifting international order; d) materially-driven dynamics generate great power geopolitics and realignments within the global core; e) the core’s contending alignments are reflected via opposing imperialist blocs; f) semi-peripheral and peripheral countries remain systemically subjugated, economically dependent, militarily weak(er), and readily exploitable by imperialist powers; g) within most nation-states, the capitalist classes — colluding with imperialist powers — exploit their oppressed working classes for profits via surplus extraction; h) acting through internationalist solidarity movements, oppressed nations and peoples can still transform into globally unified non-state forces to universally shape and (re)direct anti-capitalist agendas and policies; and i) through a selective application of international law’s defined precepts, principled tactical compromises can actively serve to transitionally advance strategically progressive foreign policy objectives.

These Philippine foreign policy determinants logically provide a synergized basis for any alternative external affairs strategy. So, upon these assertions, this working postulation ensues:

Southeast Asia lies within the Eastern Hemisphere. This hemisphere’s Eurasian great powers, China and Russia, maintain a strategic partnership to preserve their predominance across this domain. Despite this, the US, the preeminent great power of the Western Hemisphere, aggressively fortifies itself throughout the Afro-Eurasia-Indo-Pacific realm to boost its hegemony within the Eastern Hemisphere. This ascending US imperialist offensive is now resisted on multiple fronts by the Sino-Russo duo and their allies. In response to these ominous inter-imperialist maneuvers, the peoples of the Philippines, together with its Southeast Asian neighbours, must collectively initiate an independently peaceful path by actualising themselves into a “Maritime Demilitarised Zone for Southeast Asia” (or MDZ-SEA).

Accordingly, they should principally declare themselves as “Neutral and Non-Aligned States”, a clear principle recognised and warranted under international law. By firmly upholding impartiality, removing all foreign military bases and forces from the region, and abstaining from war or armed conflict, either directly or indirectly, the MDZ-SEA — as a maritime-based buffer zone — can mold itself into a concrete alternative reality for this area under agreed upon obligations. This will ultimately create new facts across Maritime Southeast Asia. The strategic insertion of a forward-looking regional equation may ultimately compel the US and China toward considering mutually relaxed (and therefore, less aggressive) postures for a novel detente in Southeast Asia.

By pursuing this independent track, Southeast Asian countries will foster a conjoint external policy of cooperative peace to benefit all. This progressive regional agenda can concurrently buy some vital time to eventually and necessarily reshape the character of the area’s economic-political-security architecture and processes to make them more democratic and people-centred in the future. Such a consequential task requires foreign policy measures that are integrally autonomous, internationalist, anti-imperialist, neutral and non-aligned in scope. This thrust can help to negate dangerous regional trends in the long run. In absolute terms, this would further enhance the future wellbeing of the region’s social majority — its working-class masses.

As a proposed strategic concept, the MDZ-SEA clearly offers the area a non-aligned external relations direction. As a directional line of march for the region, the MDZ-SEA’s purpose shall be to pursue an active attitude of neutrality in its relations with other states, specially with the US and China. In conducting itself — and standing firm — as an area-wide buffer zone, the MDZ-SEA’s autonomous bearing can keep its participating states concentrated on fostering vigorous forms of peaceful cooperation, instead of recklessly aligning with belligerent imperialist blocs. By advancing this regional project to bolster cooperative peace, the MDZ-SEA can act as a high-principled initiative in East Asia — a positive regional instrument aimed at denying partisan economic, political and military support for the vying great powers. Simultaneously, it should assiduously work to prevent the potentialities of a future imperialist war of aggression from breaking out in Southeast Asia.

Yet, there are some pivotal steps that need to be broadly realised to help reboot Maritime Southeast Asia’s general stability. These measures are of immediate magnitude if this strategic part of the world is to achieve a relative degree of cooperative peace. For the MDZ-SEA to evolve into a positively self-determining regional project, these proactive moves will be of crucial importance. A pressing set of policy shifts to exigently deescalate great power antagonisms have to be introduced to revamp the area’s sweeping balance in favour of peaceful activities and endeavours.

A regional strategic blueprint for Southeast Asia

A more innovative regional strategic blueprint must be launched. This initiative should concentrate on building an aura of friendship, harmony and peaceful cooperation for Southeast Asia to secure shared benefits for its peoples. A foreign policy of cooperative peace should chiefly be developed on the basis of a common security impetus. To carry this out, renovating the area’s security environment will entail necessary foreign policy changes at both the national and regional levels.

In this regard, the following objectives and measures to deepen efforts toward cooperative peace have to be seriously realised:

• Abrogate the MDT. The Philippines must instantly abrogate the 1951 Republic of the Philippines-United States Mutual Defence Treaty (MDT). This is the two countries’ primary bilateral military instrument, which officially imposes a series of subsequent bilateral military agreements between Manila and Washington. This is the principal “legal basis” that “allows” US imperialism to maintain military bases and forces on “sovereign” Philippine territory.
• Terminate other RP-US bilateral military agreements. The Philippines must instantly terminate all of its other bilateral military agreements with the US. These include the MDT’s associated accords: the 1947 RP-US Military Assistance Agreement (MAA), 1998 RP-US Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), 2002 RP-US Mutual Logistics Support Agreement (MLSA), and the 2014 RP-US Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (EDCA). Together, these joint security instruments merely impose and institutionalise US imperialist rule over the reactionary Philippine state.
• Scrap defence-related agreements with other countries. The Philippines must equally scrap its similar defence-related bilateral agreements with other countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Britain, among others. In a cumulative manner, these agreements only boost the Globalised NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) project within the Asia-Pacific region, including its superior role over the Philippine state security apparatus — converting the latter into just another basic military unit directly under US imperialism’s overall command and control.
• Shut down Globalised NATO in the Asia-Pacific region. All Globalised NATO troops must be withdrawn from the Asia-Pacific region; similarly, all of their corresponding military bases must be shut down straight away.
• Shut down FPDA. All other foreign military bases, facilities and networks across the region belonging to the British-led Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA) — in Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Singapore — must be closed down immediately.
• Dismantle the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. Dismantle all imperialist intelligence infrastructure across the Asia-Pacific region. All physical and intelligence interception infrastructure of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, including the Echelon intelligence network, must be promptly dismantled.
• Uphold SEANWFZ. Firmly uphold the 1995 Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone (SEANWFZ) Treaty to urgently demilitarise the area; concurrently advocate and campaign for a broader Asia-Pacific-wide nuclear weapon-free zone treaty and regime.
• Revitalise ZOPFAN. Although ASEAN’s (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) initial attempt at regional neutrality, via its 1971 Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality (ZOPFAN) initiative, attained mixed results, ZOPFAN per se remains an elementary component for deepening Maritime Southeast Asia’s neutrality and non-alignment thrusts. Because of this, the ZOPFAN concept and its inherent principles have to be reviewed and revitalised to enhance regional peace and security.
• Advance a common security policy. Steadily promote and advance progressive regional peace initiatives as building-blocks toward a common security policy to foster a more peaceful and cooperative global order, especially for the Asia-Pacific region.
• Advance non-alignment. Strongly support growing global moves to augment progressive non-alignment policies and endeavours to decrease and deescalate great power contestations across all the regions of the world.
• SRAEC. Popularise and institutionalise the concept of a Shared Regional Area of Economic Commons (SRAEC) with a progressively unifying code of conduct for the Southeast Asian Sea. The SRAEC can become a positive building block and confidence-building mechanism in the context of developing cooperative peace.
• Struggle against fascist regimes. Struggle to dismantle all authoritarian, ultra-rightist and fascist regimes in the Asia-Pacific region. Remove from power reactionary regimes that only serve as national bases of support for imperialism; replace them with working class-led states to advance and build socialism.
• No to US imperialism’s “Axis of Aggression” in the Asia-Pacific region. Openly reject and oppose America’s deepening “Axis of Aggression” throughout the Asia-Pacific area. This directly involves the various US-led economic and security alliances across the region, including the neoliberal IPEF (Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity), AUKUS (Australia-United Kingdom-US) trilateral security alliance, Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), American-Japanese-Korean Trilateral Pact, and the JAPHUS (Japan-Philippines-US) trilateral security alliance.
• Support working-class solidarity and internationalism. Bolster militant working-class solidarity and internationalism (especially in supporting oppressed nations and peoples) to undermine, weaken, resist and defeat the rising global manoeuvres of imperialism. Likewise, aid all efforts to boost anti-imperialist movements and anti-fascist united fronts so as to intensify revolutionary mass struggles at the national-regional-international levels.

To be able to accomplish these progressive objectives for Southeast Asia’s long-term peace and security, its revolutionary working-class movements will need to propel a reorientation of — and a struggle to counter-think — their own societies’ predominantly backward mindsets.

Shifting the Philippines and Southeast Asia towards cooperative peace

This form of counter-hegemonic struggle is required to overcome mainstream bourgeois-reactionary foreign policy thinking, concepts and frameworks. Such a prerequisite is needed to urgently counteract the mainly national-chauvinist external relations schemes of the region’s states, and in particular their catastrophic geopolitical approaches and similarly destructive strategies. In unison, these conventional but adverse foreign policy tacks merely serve to propagate imperialist agendas and programs that uphold the contemporarily oppressive global interstate system along capitalist lines. All of these foreign policy fetters must therefore be repelled and stopped.

While the aforestated preconditions are all crucial and highly desired to conclusively attain alternative foreign policy outcomes over time, there are some transitional reforms that can be promptly implemented — but only if the Philippine state has the political will to do so.

Manila’s top foreign policy echelon is obliged to shift the country’s external affairs agenda forthwith and without delay. It must immediately end its detrimental bias of siding with one great power against another. The Philippines should stop playing the role of “the US’s trigger for a regional war with China”. By strategically changing its course of action toward a cooperatively peaceful mode, the country’s altered direction will chiefly safeguard the welfare of the Philippines, including Southeast Asia’s overall equilibrium.

This outlook and aspiration to attain cooperative peace for the region, while equally pursuing a common security approach, should critically follow a principled foreign policy line and posture: Neither Washington nor Beijing! Cooperative Peace for All in the Southeast Asian Sea now!

Rasti Delizo is a global affairs analyst. He is a member of the Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP), a revolutionary socialist political centre of the Filipino working-class movement.