MANILA – Vice President Kamala Harris would underscore America’s commitment to defending treaty ally the Philippines with a visit that starts Sunday and involves flying to an island province facing the disputed South China Sea, where Washington has accused China of bullying smaller claimant nations.
After attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Thailand, Harris will fly to Manila Sunday night to meet President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. the next day for talks aimed at reinforcing Washington’s oldest treaty alliance in Asia and strengthening economic ties, a senior U.S. administration official said in an online briefing ahead of the visit.
On Tuesday she’ll fly to Palawan province, which lies along the South China Sea, to meet local fishermen, villagers, officials and the coast guard. She is the highest-ranking U.S. leader so far to visit the frontier island at the forefront of the long-seething territorial disputes involving China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan.
The Philippine coast guard is expected to welcome Harris onboard one of its biggest patrol ships, the BRP Teresa Magbanua, in Palawan, where she would deliver a speech before coast guard, police, military and government officials, according to coast guard spokesperson Commodore Armand Balilo.
Harris will underscore “the importance of international law, unimpeded commerce and freedom of navigation in the South China Sea,” the U.S. official said and added, in response to a question, that Washington was not concerned how Beijing would perceive the visit.
“China can take the message it wants,” the U.S. official said. “The message to the region is that the United States is a member of the Indo-Pacific, we are engaged, we’re committed to the security of our allies in the region.”
Philippine Ambassador to Washington Jose Manuel Romualdez said Harris’s trip to Palawan shows the level of America’s support to an ally and concern over China’s actions in the disputed sea.
“That’s as obvious as you can get, that the message they’re trying to impart to the Chinese is that ‘we support our allies like the Philippines on these disputed islands,’” Romualdez told The Associated Press. “This visit is a significant step in showing how serious the United States views this situation now.”
Washington and Beijing have long been on a collision course in the contested waters. While the U.S. lays no claims to the strategic waterway, where an estimated $5 trillion in global trade transits each year, it has said that freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea is in America’s national interest.
China opposes U.S. Navy and Air Force patrols in the busy waterway, which Beijing claims virtually in its entirety. It has warned Washington not to meddle in what it says is a purely Asian territorial conflict — which has become a delicate frontline in the U.S.-China rivalry in the region and has long been feared as a potential Asian flashpoint.
In July, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called on China to comply with a 2016 arbitration ruling that invalidated Beijing’s vast territorial claims in the South China Sea and warned that Washington is obligated to defend treaty ally Philippines if its forces, vessels or aircraft come under attack in the disputed waters.
China has rejected the 2016 decision by an arbitration tribunal set up in The Hague under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea after the Philippine government complained in 2013 about China’s increasingly aggressive actions in the disputed waters. Beijing did not participate in the arbitration, rejected its ruling as a sham and continues to defy it.
Harris’ visit is the latest sign of the growing rapport between Washington and Manila under Marcos Jr., who took office in June after a landslide electoral victory.
America’s relations with the Philippines entered a difficult period under Marcos’ predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte,…
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