Vice President of America Kamala Harris visited the Philippines on Monday and said during her official visit that the United States will glorify a 1951 bilateral defense treaty and will also protect Filipino ships against Chinese outrage in the South China Sea.
The matter has become very crucial as the Philippines blamed China for using force to restore wreckage from a rocket near the debated Spratly Islands.
Kamala Harris met Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr at Malacanang, the presidential palace in Manila. After the meeting, she said, “In particular, as it relates to the Philippines, I will say that we must always reiterate that we stand with you in defense of international rules and norms as it relates to the South China Sea.”
Further, she said that “An armed attack on the Philippines, armed forces, public vessels or aircraft in the South China Sea would invoke U.S. Mutual Defense commitments. And that is an unwavering commitment that we have to the Philippines.”
Marcos said that he appraised the mutual defense treaty and pointed at aspiring stronger relations with the U.S. than his ancestors.
He said, “I have said many times: I do not see a future for the Philippines that doesn’t include the United States. And that really comes from the very long relationship that we have had with the U.S.”
In the year 1951, the United States signed a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines, which is one of the oldest treaties and is still being used in the modern world. However, the treaty has not done much to deter China from continuously tyrannizing the Philippines in disputed waters. One of the reasons behind it could be that former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte wanted to outrun himself from Washington and support Beijing.
At the time of the treaty, the Philippines was in the process of making an intimidating military, but it was rooted away from abandonment to a handful of patrol ships. Philippine officials talked about redrafting or leaving the treaty last year. In response to this, the Chinese reportedly told them to let it as it was because Beijing apparently prefers the unmoving agreement as it is.
Harris reached Manila on Monday, and Vice Admiral Alberto Carlos of the Philippine navy alleged a Chinese coast guard vessel was obstructing the way of a Filipino rubber boat that was hauling an “unidentified floating object” near the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.
According to Carlos, the object emerged as waste from a Chinese rocket that fell into waters claimed by the Philippines in the early days of November. The Chinese ship placed an inexplicable boat that “forcefully retrieved said floating object by cutting the towing line attached to the rubber boat.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry asserted the incident was a little misapprehension and said the Filipinos willingly “returned the floating object to the Chinese side” after a “friendly consultation on the spot.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry said, “The Chinese side expressed gratitude to the Philippine side. There was no so-called blocking of the course of a Philippine Navy boat and forcefully retrieving the object at the scene.”
Kamala Harris was criticized for “fanning the flames of the South China Sea issue.”
By planning a tour to the front lines of the Chinese-Philippines territorial disputation. The Global Times maintained to bully the Philippines even while asserting that China doesn’t want anything but only peaceful relations, and it also warned Marcocs not to let Biden’s administration “forcibly put the fuse of conflict in the South China Sea” into his own hands and steer him into evoking China.
“To be honest, this move is not so kind,” the Chinese Communist paper looked acutely.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin held his first in-person meeting with Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe on Tuesday since U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in April; it was a visit that enraged Beijing and elicited weeks of intimidating military auger near Taiwan.
During the 90-minute meeting with Wei in Cambodia, the U.S. secretary expressed his views about “the increasingly dangerous behavior demonstrated by PLA aircraft in the Indo-Pacific region that increases the risk of an accident.”
The Australian Defense Ministry said that the PLA fighter in question not only asked for an unsafe distance but also liberated a package of radar-deflecting hulls that had got sucked into the Australian plane’s engine.
Also read: US-Philippine sparked a protest against Kamala Harris.
