By Joshua Kurlantzick
A strategic partnership will be formalized in the coming weeks, according to local media.
Until the past five years, the Philippines and Vietnam had minimal strategic ties other than working together, through ASEAN initiatives, on a range of nontraditional security issues. The two countries had very different styles of leadership—the Philippines is a vibrant democracy with one of the freest media markets in the world, while Vietnam remains run by a highly opaque Party—and Hanoi remained wary of diverging from its strategy of hedging close ties with China with increasingly close relations with the United States. By contrast, the Philippines, despite a very mixed historical relationship with the United States, was (and is) a U.S. treaty ally and one of Washington’s closest partners in Southeast Asia. Vietnam and the Philippines did not hold joint military exercises, rarely had high-level bilateral interactions between senior political and military leaders, and also had only modest two-way trade.
But since 2010, as China’s posture in the South China Sea has become increasingly assertive, and Vietnam and the Philippines have pushed back harder against Beijing than any other Southeast Asian nations, the two ASEAN countries have moved much closer together. At first, the closeness was informal—Philippine and Vietnamese sailors mingling on disputed rocks in the South China Sea to drink beers and play sports, top leaders from the two countries holding unannounced bilateral meetings on the sidelines of ASEAN meetings to discuss possible joint responses to Chinese actions like dredging and reported Chinese building of what appears to be a military-use airstrip on an atoll in the Spratly Islands.
Read the full story at The Diplomat