Sawt Falasteen - US starts week of courting Asian partners after Taiwan flare-up

The Philippines, Vietnam and Japan all have longstanding territorial disputes with China that have grown more intense in recent years as Beijing flexes its muscle.

Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will meet jointly in Washington with their Philippine counterparts in the first such joint talks in seven years between the United States and its former colony.

Last week, the Philippines announced four more military bases that US forces will be able to use, including one on the northern Luzon island, just 400 kilometers (250 miles) from Taiwan -- a stark shift from a previous push by Manila to improve ties with China.

After condemnation from Beijing, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos said that Manila would not take "any offensive actions" from the four bases, as well from five others agreed to with Washington in a 2014 agreement.

"If no one is attacking us, they need not worry because we will not fight them," Marcos told reporters Monday.

Months earlier, the United States reached a separate agreement with Japan, a fellow ally on the other side of Taiwan, to disperse US forces across the southern island of Okinawa, another move seen as preparing for a potential Chinese move on Taiwan.

- Show of force, moderated -

Beijing on Monday completed three days of military exercises said to simulate sealing Taiwan, a self-governing democracy it considers part of its territory.

The show of force came after Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen met in California with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who is second in line to the US presidency, in defiance of Beijing's warnings.

The United States called for restraint by China but privately some officials were relieved the reaction was more muted than in August 2022, when Beijing fired projectiles around and over Taiwan after McCarthy's predecessor, Nancy Pelosi, flew to Taipei.

"It's not what it was in August and this could, hopefully, pave the way, let's say, to calming the situation a bit on the Straits between China and the United States," Philippine Foreign Secretary Enrique Manalo said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies ahead of Tuesday's talks.

Marcos last year succeeded president Rodrigo Duterte, who early in his tenure sought closer ties with China.

But experts say the Philippines has increasingly realized that the approach has not brought any progress with China, which has ignored a 2016 international court ruling in favor of Manila over Beijing's sweeping claims in the South China Sea.

Manila is also "aware that if an armed conflict between Beijing and Taipei erupts and intensifies over the Taiwan Strait, there is little chance the country will escape the adverse consequences," Renato Cruz De Castro, an expert at De La Salle University in the Philippines, wrote in a recent essay for the Brookings Institution.

Repercussions could include "massive refugee flows, the rapid return of Filipino overseas workers based in Taiwan and the actual spread of the conflict to the Luzon Straits and even northern Luzon," he wrote.

Vietnam, where Blinken will head later this week before traveling to a Group of Seven meeting in Japan, has also sought closer defense cooperation with the Unite States despite bitter war memories.

"Washington and Hanoi are almost completely aligned on the kind of Indo-Pacific we want to see," said Daniel Kritenbrink, the top US diplomat for East Asia, "where large countries don't bully small countries."

The leader of another key US ally, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, pays a state visit to Washington on April 26.

The US effort to rally Asian allies comes after French President Emmanuel Macron raised eyebrows following a state visit to Beijing by saying that European allies of the United States should not get caught between Beijing and Washington in the standoff over Taiwan.

President Joe Biden's administration and France played down the remarks but Representative Mike Gallagher, a Republican active on China, called them a "massive propaganda victory" for Beijing.

X.Habash--SF-PST