EURASIA REVIEW

APLN member Rajaram Panda wrote on Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s visit to Vietnam and the Philippines, noting that Japan, facing an increasingly volatile regional security environment, is actively diversifying its security partnerships – particularly with India, Australia, Vietnam, and the Philippines – to strengthen its strategic position.

In the East China Sea, China routinely sends coast guard vessels and planes into waters and airspace that surround islands to harass Japanese vessels. That has prompted Japan at times to scramble jets in response. While in Manila, Ishiba in an obvious reprimand of China without naming the country remarked that Japan opposes any attempt to unilaterally change the status quo through force or coercion in the East and South China Seas.

The changed security environment thus drove Japan and the Philippines to negotiate the defence pact called the Acquisition and Cross-servicing Agreement, which would allow the provision of food, fuel and other necessities when Japanese forces visit the Philippines for joint training under a major defence accord that was signed in 2024 and is expected to be ratified by the Japanese legislature.

The other proposed agreement involved the security of highly confidential defence and military information that both could share. The US and the Philippines signed such an agreement in November 2024 to secure the exchange of highly confidential military intelligence and technology in key weapons that the US would provide to Manila. Not unexpectedly, therefore, Ishiba and Marcos Jr. reaffirmed the importance of their trilateral alliance with the US. Despite Trump’s tariff impositions on Japan and the Philippines, among other countries worldwide, that have sparked an awkward dilemma among the close security allies, the US has repeatedly warned China over its escalating acts of aggression in the disputed waters against Japan and the Philippines, which are among Washington’s staunchest treaty allies in Asia.

Beijing ought to realise that it is on notice and that its aggression and expansionist design in the East and South China Seas would not remain unchecked. It is desirable in the interest of larger regional goal that Beijing abjures its aggressive behaviour and learns to respect regional and global rules to realise common regional prosperity.

Read the article here.

Image: Wikimedia Commons