By Richard Javad Heydarian
Manila is investing too much in its legal approach at its own expense. This was not always so.
After more than 15 years, the Philippines has finally decided to repair its ragtag outpost on the Second Thomas Shoal, located about 100 nautical miles away from the Philippines’ westernmost province of Palawan. The Sierra Madre ship – a 100-meter-long tank landing vessel, operated by the U.S. Navy back in the Second World War – has served as a tenuous expression of Manila’s sovereignty claim over the contested feature in the South China Sea.
For long, it has also served as an embarrassing reminder of how little the Philippines has invested in concretely defending its claims in a heavily-contested area. To paraphrase a Western journalist who visited the site in recent years, the Philippine outpost from afar is an abominable site amid a beautiful maritime wilderness; surrounded by reefs and a vast blue ocean, Sierra Madre looks even more awful up close.
Since 1999, the rusty, grounded vessel has hosted – on a rotational basis – a handful of marooned and resilient troops, who have repeatedly resisted siege and other forms of intimidation tactics deployed by the far better equipped Chinese coast guard forces, which sometimes are even better armed than the Philippine Navy.
Meanwhile, under the Aquino administration, the Philippines has heavily invested in its legal strategy against China, initiating a costly arbitration procedure to address the South China Sea disputes. On the ground, China has been rapidly consolidating its grip on a whole host of contested features, building a sprawling network of military and civilian bases, and creating the skeleton of an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ). In many ways, the Philippines South China Sea strategy seems to be driven by an army of lawyers rather than tangible defense of its fortifications on the ground.
Read the full story at The Diplomat