Of all the flashpoints facing the Trump administration on Jan. 20, 2025, China’s campaign of intimidation and maritime occupation in the South China Sea may prove the most concerning for U.S. interests and preventing war in the Indo-Pacific. Beijing has spent decades occupying, building, and militarizing islands in those resource-rich waters through which trillions of dollars of trade pass annually. China’s incessant maritime incursions have ignored the sovereignty of its neighbors, violated international law, and given it strategic footholds for exercising political, economic, and military leverage. The aggressiveness of China’s expansionism has spiked in the last 18 months, with the Philippines as the focal point of its ire. Beijing’s timing is not coincidental. The Philippines, a mutual defense treaty ally of the United States, is entering a pivotal 12-month period in which a convergence of critical issues promises seismic implications for not only its national security, defense, and foreign policy trajectory but also its internal stability. As Beijing has pushed the region to the brink, it has dragged the Philippines to center stage.
For its part, the Philippines has adopted an assertive posture to manage China’s aggression as it prepares for a multigenerational campaign to protect regional peace. With highly capable and respected current and former generals overseeing national security, the armed forces, and internal peace efforts, President Ferdinand Marcos’ administration has prioritized internal stability and a transformative foreign policy agenda as the foundation for and complement to a much-needed military modernization and reposturing for territorial defense. Successive administrations have also worked to build a legal architecture against Beijing’s “might is right” bullying. On Nov. 8, 2024, the Philippines passed the Philippines Maritime Zones Act and the Archipelagic Sea Lanes Act. Together, these laws define Philippines maritime possessions in line with the constitution, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and the 2016 arbitral award, and designate sea and air routes through its archipelago. The same week, the Philippines military conducted joint island seizure and defense exercises. Just as China ignores international law and acts accordingly, the Philippines appreciates the existential need to exercise its legal rights. Beijing responded with typical vitriol.
The Philippines government has embarked upon an ambitious national security, defense, and foreign policy agenda that has delivered a more stable internal security environment and growing regional influence. That progress will be tested in the coming year. In 2025, a peace process that has brought unprecedented stability to its historically restive south enters its endgame as the Bangsamoro autonomous region prepares for its first elections. Simultaneous local and national elections will test the security sector’s responsiveness to election-related violence and foreign interference. The elections will also serve as a litmus test for the national government’s policies. Amidst all this, the Philippines will need to forge ahead with its military modernization program as Beijing inevitably cranks up its coercive actions. For the Trump administration, maturing and elevating the long-standing U.S.-Philippines alliance will be vital for managing China’s aggression, championing U.S. interests, and upholding the conditions for peace in the Indo-Pacific.
Philippines Rising
The Philippines is a fulcrum of the U.S.-Chinese strategic competition in Asia. Based on its geography alone, the Philippines is arguably Southeast Asia’s most important country. Its southernmost island sits in a tri-border region with Indonesia and Malaysia, while its northernmost island is a mere 90 miles from Taiwan. The northern islands of Luzon are part of the First Island Chain, with the Second Island Chain marking the maritime boundary of the Philippine Sea’s eastern reaches. For 200 nautical miles off its west coast stretches the West Philippine Sea and, beyond that, the broader South China Sea. As then-President Trump has said of the Philippines: “It is a strategic location — the most strategic location. … The most prime piece of real estate from a military standpoint.” Yet, the story of the Philippines is one of unmet potential. Historically, the country has been dogged by political instability, economic mismanagement, and internal security threats. For too long, the Philippines has been a nation swept up by the geostrategic currents of its neighborhood rather than a shaper of them. That has started to change.
There is perhaps no better evidence of the Philippines’ rise on the global stage than the unprecedented trilateral summit between the United States, Japan, and the Philippines in April 2024. The meeting signaled not just a shift in Asia’s security architecture but the Philippines’ emerging role in those dynamics. Since 2022, the Philippines has rejuvenated and deepened bilateral relationships with the United States and Japan, respectively, built a web of broader economic and security partnerships across the Indo-Pacific and beyond, and begun a military modernization pivot from internal security operations to territorial defense. The strengthening of U.S.-Philippines relations has seen confidence renewed in the Mutual Defense Treaty and the Visiting Forces Agreement, the establishment of Bilateral Defense Guidelines to “modernize alliance cooperation,” and increased U.S. access to Philippines military bases. The Philippines has similar status of forces agreements with Australia and, most recently, Japan. In just the last year, the Philippines has struck security partnerships with the likes of Singapore, Vietnam, India, and Germany amidst a regional surge in defense spending and a flurry of security arrangements across Asia.
Out of necessity, the Philippines has led the region in adopting a more forward-leaning approach to dealing with Beijing’s decades-long “slow boil” strategy to flip the Indo-Pacific’s power balance. In the West Philippine Sea, China has conducted aggressive air and sea maneuvers, attacked Philippines servicemembers with water cannon and military grade lasers, deployed “swarming” tactics to intimidate and prevent the movement of Philippines vessels, all the while flooding the information environment with manipulative rhetoric. For the Philippines, the West Philippine Sea is a dual domain contest. On the sea, the Philippines has lost the strategic advantage against a materially superior adversary. In the information domain, however, the Philippines sees opportunities to claw back momentum. To do so, it has deployed an “assertive transparency” strategy to expose China’s aggressive tactics by publicly releasing evidence that is then amplified by both media coverage and government-led strategic communications. Philippines government messaging has sought to focus attention on Beijing’s “say-do” gaps, called for peaceful dispute resolutions and respect for international law, highlighted the country’s efforts to tactically de-escalate during incidents at sea, while emphasizing that the nation will never yield to China’s bullying. As the Philippines has gained momentum in the information domain, national resolve has solidified, global awareness has grown thanks to high-profile media embeds, and neighboring countries have become more supportive of Manila.
The posture adopted by the Philippines is testimony to a growing national confidence. Since the end of World War II, Philippines armed forces have almost entirely focused on domestic threats, namely communist insurgencies across the archipelago and Moro separatist groups in Mindanao. On both issues, pivotal breakthroughs have been made in recent years. Communist insurgencies have been weakened, and the national government has explored peace negotiations to finally quell that threat. However, it is the peace process in Mindanao, which has ended decades of conflict between the Philippines government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and led to the establishment of the Bangsamoro autonomous region, that has been the breakthrough for internal stability. As domestic security has improved, the Philippines has experienced a period of post-pandemic economic growth, seeing it become one of Asia’s most promising emerging markets. All these gains will be sharply tested in the coming year.
A Nation at the Crossroads
The closing months of 2024 have showcased the volatility that often characterizes the Philippines’ domestic context. In November, a supreme court decision cast further uncertainty over the conduct of upcoming elections in Mindanao, the senate restored cuts made by the lower house to a 2025 defense budget that was already insufficient to meet modernization benchmarks, and six typhoons slammed the archipelago. Yet public attention was gripped by the escalating feud between the families of President Marcos and Vice President Sara Duterte, daughter of former president Rodrigo Duterte. Philippines government agencies are well-versed in managing volatility, but they certainly don’t need further distractions given the year ahead.
Over the next 12 months, the Philippines must manage a convergence of critical issues. First and foremost, the Bangsamoro peace process enters its endgame in 2025. After decades of cyclical peace failures followed by spikes in conflict, the most promising peace process in living memory has seen the signing of the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro in 2014 and the establishment of an autonomous region with a presidentially appointed transition authority in 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic delayed progress on the political, legal, and former combatant decommissioning requirements of the peace agreement, resulting in an originally three-year transition period being extended by another three years. This, in turn, pushed the autonomous region’s first elections to May 2025. The resilience of the peace gains will continue to be tested as violent peace spoilers, particularly Islamic State–affiliated factions of local rebel groups, seek to derail what remains a very promising but fragile peace.
Yet the greatest vulnerabilities for peace in the Bangsamoro remain self-inflicted. While the political and legal requirements of the peace process are largely on track, the decommissioning and disarming of former combatants are behind schedule and plagued with implementation problems. There is also a sense, especially in the impoverished rural communities most impacted by conflict, that peace dividends have not been delivered. That the most vulnerable communities are also where many disgruntled former combatants and their families live hints at the precariousness of the security situation in some parts of the autonomous region and the potential for violence to erupt if problems remain unresolved. More broadly, an expectation management problem persists. Not enough has been done to manage the local population’s expectations to avoid the sense of crisis that flourishes when hope does not meet reality. Having spent years working in those hot-spot communities implementing ground-level programs to uphold peace and ceasefire agreements and build community resilience to the lures of violent peace spoilers, the people’s hopes are typically for their most rudimentary needs to be addressed: consistent meals for their kids, access to education and health services, basic infrastructure, and a stable security environment. These issues inevitably converge on the ground in a street-by-street and house-by-house struggle: the daily grind that is the real work of delivering and maintaining peace. It is a job too often left to the tireless and often heroic efforts of a stretched security sector and underresourced civil society.
It is difficult to overstate how important maintaining peace and stability in the Bangsamoro is for the Philippines to hold its economic, national security, and foreign policy course. Certainly, any hopes of the country’s armed forces focusing on territorial defense will require the freeing up of the estimated 40 percent of its battalions deployed there. In preparation for upcoming elections, the military presence has surged to put violent rebel groups on the back foot and to maintain security and stability during this critical time. While the Bangsamoro’s first elections were originally scheduled for May 12, 2025, to coincide with local and national elections, the supreme court decision removing Sulu province from the autonomous region could cause a brief postponement. Either way, the challenges facing the security sector’s management of election-related violence, especially in the south, will be compounded by an expected torrent of election interference activities.
Despite a complicated year ahead, the Philippines does not have the luxury of delaying or deviating from the course it has set. After all, China’s incursions in the West Philippine Sea are just the crudest tip of a diverse spectrum of activities that are dominated by an intensifying and broadening interference campaign across the archipelago. Beijing’s efforts may appear ineffectual given China’s low trust and popularity amongst Filipinos. This is a red herring. Authoritarian regimes are not particularly concerned with popularity abroad but rather use malign influence to erode a trinity of trusts — social trust, trust in authorities and expertise, and trust in democratic institutions — to fuel polarization and unrest. This is the logic of anti-democratic malign influence, and the Philippines operates on the frontlines of this struggle in the Indo-Pacific.
