To Review or Not To Review the Mutual Defense Treaty

Photo from The Kahimyang Project

By Chester B Cabalza

Blogger's Notes:
Commentary of an Academic 
(Copyright @ 2019 by Chester B Cabalza. All Rights Reserved).

The debate on whether or not the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) merits a review between the Republic of the Philippines and the United States calls for neither its abrogation nor renegotiation. The MDT is considered the mother of all defense treatises between a former colonizer to its only Asian colony making the two sovereign nations as the oldest treaty ally in the region. The nearly seven-decade old accord was signed at Washington on 30 August 1951 and ratified on 27 August 1952 but recently it resurfaced word war between two gigantic Filipino bureaucrats.

Philippine Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. deems that “in vagueness [of the MDT] lies the best deterrence” that was immediately countered by National Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana as he elucidates that, “too much vagueness lends itself to doubt the firmness of the commitment,” [of the United States] in reference to the antiquated military pact, of which the latter minister originally opened the Pandora’s box for the review of the defense treaty since December last year. 

The iota on the ambiguity or vagueness of the treaty will serve as a deterrent could lead to confusion and chaos during a crisis which may construe the premise surrounding mutual benefits among alliances and building a robust and self-reliant defense posture.

Spontaneous constructive criticisms by two stalwarts of Philippine government might indicate a new direction for the Philippines’ foreign and defense policies, albeit still processing the extent of the design of the country's ‘independent foreign policy’ under Southeast Asia’s strongman President Rodrigo Duterte, as the firebrand leader diversifies warm bilateral relationships separately to Beijing and Moscow, Washington’s apparent biggest rivals for global hegemony.

The opposing remarks came after US Secretary of State’s Mike Pompeo utters that, “we have your back” to the Filipino people, the strongest reassurance the Philippines recently received from its western Big Brother, a promise that would extend a helping hand if the archipelagic country’s territorial integrity and national sovereignty are attacked in the South China Sea while the US warrants command from populist American President Donald Trump to cement its formidable presence in the current ambiguous security architecture heavily interwoven in the newly concocted Indo-Pacific region.

The newfangled promise during Pompeo’s overnight visit to Manila last 1 March 2019 was founded under the mutual defense obligations under Article 4 that clearly says, “each Party recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific area on either of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common dangers in accordance with its constitutional processes,” with archaic provisions constructed under the ambit of the Cold War era where Filipino soldiers fought war with the United States in Korean and Vietnam Wars, respectively.

The MDT was also instrumental for the Philippines’ participation for the US-led War on Terror, a military campaign under the presidency of US president George W. Bush aimed at eliminating international terrorism which began as early as 2001 as the Southeast Asian nation struggled with its own terrorism and violent extremism threats prior to the 9/11 incident. The same instrument helped the Philippines, coming from indirect support of American counterintelligence and counterterrorism efforts to halt the five-month old Marawi siege in 2017 between the Philippine government security forces and Islamic State (IS)-led Maute and Abu Sayyaf Salafi jihadist groups.

However, the United States’ flawed foreign policy on ‘Pivot to Asia’ missed to address certain interventions at the height of Chinese continuous militarization and successful island-building in the contested South China Sea and concealed an unfazed guarantee of military back up against foreign aggressors at that time amidst lawfare with China. In that vulnerable and complex episode, the US is seen as a major power in the region struggling from its rebalancing act to accentuate an Asia-centered security strategy to contain China, making strides to champion freedom of navigation and overflight in the world’s biggest defense flashpoint and economic bottleneck in the South China Sea. This mishap decision became one of the conceivable reasons why the Philippines fled from high hopes down to pragmatism to openly rely from the United States but instead it hopped to a crucial hedging strategy by apparently diversifying defense and security relations to other major powers, setting aside a legal triumph by turning its attention from the lucrative offer of China’s Belt Road Initiative.

The current non-traditional security situations on the ground certainly vary from the traditional security threats during the Cold War era. It has evolved tremendously as the Philippines has to visibly respond to the changing times and new systems of structure. A structure follows a strategy that it necessitates a review of the overall accord which does not necessarily mean a revocation or renegotiation of the mutual defense treaty, but to revisit what has been done before to address new security threats in a much more complex bipolar security construct of the era. More so, a clear cut policy from this debate dwells on the harmonization of all the defense and security pacts of the Philippines with the United States as the archipelagic country has to beef up its own arsenal to correspond to the uncertain security environment of the region.