The Philippines is working behind the scenes to enhance its defensive cooperation with Taiwan, the Washington Post reported yesterday.
“It would be hiding from the obvious to say that Taiwan’s security will not affect us,” Philippine Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro told the paper in an interview on Thursday last week.
Although there has been no formal change to the Philippine’s diplomatic stance recognizing Taiwan, Manila is increasingly concerned about Chinese encroachment in the South China Sea, the report said.
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The number of Chinese vessels in the Philippines’ nearby seas, Chinese cybersecurity attacks and espionage have increased, the report said, citing information from the Philippine National Security Council.
In response, the country is “entitled” to negotiate its relationship with Taiwan, given that prior attempts to ease tensions with China have so far found no success, the report quotes Teodoro as saying.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, officials told the newspaper that security cooperation is “further along” than publicly disclosed, following a new policy by Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr that reduced restrictions on exchanges between the two countries.
Philippine academics with ties to the nation’s defense establishment earlier this year participated in forums with high-ranking Taiwanese generals to better understand security thinking in the country, the paper said.
The Philippine coast guard and the Coast Guard Administration recently carried joint patrols of the Bashi Channel, it added.
Taiwan also sent observers to a joint US-Philippine-Japan military exercise that took place in the Batanes Islands called Kamandag, it said.
The islands are the Philippine’s northernmost province and are less than 200km south of Taiwan.
Although Philippine officials did not say the exercise targeted China, the report cited analysts that said they were clearly meant to counter Chinese ships.
An anonymous Taiwanese advisor said that although personnel did not participate, the two countries are “closer and closer” in defense matters, the newspaper reported.
In a news release last month, a spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of National Defense said that the Philippines has “tied itself to the US war chariot, and become a coconspirator in destabilizing the region.”
Due to the Philippines’ proximity to Taiwan, Taiwan’s large Philippine population and US defense agreements with the country, one Philippine academic told the paper that “we’d be kidding ourselves not to see the necessity of working with Taiwan.”
The report quotes another professor as saying that “Taiwan is our buffer from an expansionist China.”
The recent visit to Taiwan by two senior Philippine officials and one former official caused “severe diplomatic complications,” Philippine Foreign Secretary Theresa Lazaro said in a letter that the newspaper obtained.
The report also quotes Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Wang Ting-yu (王定宇) as saying that the while the two countries were diplomatically distant before, they have “started to smile at each other.”
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