More friends – with security benefits

MANILA, Philippines — Foreign policy and national security did not take much space compared to other national concerns in President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s State of the Nation Address (Sona) last year. These topics, after all, are not top-of-mind for most Filipinos who, based on surveys, are more interested in gut issues such inflation, unemployment and poverty.

And yet in the months that followed, some of the most major decisions of his administration were seen as responses to Beijing’s increasingly aggressive behavior in the West Philippine Sea. Almost all were geared toward gaining wider international support for Manila’s assertion of its sovereign rights in waters being claimed by China.

In his first Sona delivered in 2022, Marcos’ declarations related to the maritime dispute—that the country will be “friend to all and enemy to none” while allowing no foreign power to “take even one square inch of our sovereign territory”—set the tone of how his administration would handle the issue.

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