With the world focused on Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon—and now violent factional fighting in Syria—relatively little attention is being paid to yet another potentially explosive hotspot: the South China Sea.

Six countries have competing claims to the 3.5 million-sq-km body of water: China, Taiwan, Brunei, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. About 5% of the world’s maritime shipping flows through this disputed corner of the Pacific, which is believed to contain valuable oil and gas deposits as well as commercial fishing resources.

Yet an alarming spike in territorial confrontations—especially between Chinese and Philippine coast guard and naval forces—is starting to worry the Pentagon.

In the latest incident, the Philippine military deployed a navy ship and air force planes to shadow a Russian submarine off the country’s western coast, AP reported on Dec. 2. Philippine President Bongbong Marcos called the intrusion “very worrisome” and “just another one” of a series of dangerous faceoffs that have brought Washington and Manila closer together in recent years.

Back in June, a Chinese vessel and a Philippine fishing boat collided near the disputed Spratly Islands, in an incident each country blamed on the other. It followed China’s publication of a 10-dash-line on official maps delineating what it claims is its territory.

“This claim is totally unacceptable,” said Philippine Ambassador José Manuel Romualdez. “The bottom line is that our United Nations arbitration award given to the Philippines in 2016 is the basis of our claim, which they don’t recognize.”

Overall, though, Romualdez says his country’s relations with the United States are much better now than they were under Marcos’s predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte.

“The fact is, we’ve had our ups and downs,” he told us during a recent interview at the Philippine Embassy. “This past administration felt the US was taking us for granted. But now with this new interest in the Indo-Pacific region, the Philippines plays a key role. And President Marcos sees that as an opportunity to renew our ties with the United States and make them much stronger.”

US, Philippines sign landmark defense agreement

From the 1898 Spanish-American War until the end of World War II, the Philippines was a US colony. But in 1946, the country won its independence, and five years later, Washington and Manila signed a mutual defense treaty. Today, that treaty is the basis for strong bilateral security ties, said Romualdez.

“As China continues to be aggressive, more and more countries see they have no intention of resolving this issue,” he said. “We will do whatever it takes to defend our sovereign territory, and we’re spending about 1-2% of our GDP to bring our armed forces up to speed.”

In fact, the Philippines will spend $35 billion over the next 10 years to overhaul its military. In mid-November, the US and Philippine governments formalized a defense accord that had been two years in the making. The General Security of Military Information Agreement, or GSOMIA, “enforces a basic set of standards for how the two countries handle classified information, making it easier for America to share such data in times of need,” according to Defense News.

Since the election of Marcos in 2022, it reported, “Manila has granted the US military access to new sites in the country’s north, expanded their yearly exercises and agreed to host equipment like Typhon, a missile launcher that’s caught the attention, and ire, of China.”

In return, the Pentagon has provided $500 million in long-term military aid to the Philippines, noted Romualdez.

“President Marcos has been clear about what the Chinese are doing,” he said. “At the ASEAN Summit in Laos, he called on other countries to start speaking up on the aggression coming from China. Vietnam has on many occasions complained. They’ve been harassed too; Indonesia as well. We’re reaching out to countries that have overlapping claims.”

ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, is a 10-member trade bloc formed in 1967 at a summit in Bangkok. Based in Jakarta, ASEAN today represents 680 million people and a combined GDP of over $10 trillion. With 115 million inhabitants, the Philippines ranks as the world’s 14th most populous country and the second most populous in ASEAN, after Indonesia.

“The US has a strong interest in protecting the ASEAN region,” said the ambassador, noting that despite its maritime dispute with Beijing, China remains the Philippines’ leading trade partner, followed by the United States and then Japan.

Duterte now focus of ICC probe for ‘crimes against humanity’

Romualdez, 77, is a Manila media executive who never held political office. A former president of the Manila Overseas Press Club and vice-president of the Rotary Club of Manila, Romualdez is also his country’s third ambassador to the United States with that surname.

The first was the brother of the current envoy’s father (at the same time another brother was speaker of the House of Representatives). The second was a cousin of his father. Romualdez took over in November 2017 from his predecessor, the highly respected José L. Cuisía Jr.

Romualdez was appointed by Duterte, who was elected president of the Philippines in 2016 with 38.5% of the vote. Duterte raised eyebrows from the moment he moved into Manila’s Malacañang Palace when he compared himself to Adolf Hitler, boasting that “Hitler massacred three million Jews. We have three million drug addicts. I’d be happy to slaughter them.”

That same month, he called President Barack Obama a “son of a whore” for criticizing Duterte’s violent anti-drug campaign—then said later that Obama could “go to hell.” The former mayor of Davao also bragged about once tossing a Chinese rape and murder suspect from a helicopter and publicly suggested that journalists “are not exempted from assassination.”

Marcos, son of longtime Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos—who died in 1989—was then elected by a landslide in 2022, with 59% of the vote. By that point, Romualdez had already been ambassador here for five years.

“I was all packed up to go home in 2022 when President Marcos told me he was considering me to be the secretary of foreign affairs,” he said. “But after he won, I had lunch with him and he asked me to stay here another year.”

Marcos, 67, and his predecessor could not be more different in temperament. For example, said the ambassador, “Duterte was all about ‘kill, kill, kill.’ Marcos is more about finding the root cause, going after drug lords instead of the addict.”

In a bizarre twist, the country’s vice president, Sara Duterte—daughter of the former president—threatened on Nov. 24 to hire an assassin to kill the president, his wife and the speaker of the House of Representatives in the event she herself is killed. Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court continues to investigate Duterte for “crimes against humanity,” specifically the killing of more than 6,000 people in anti-drug operations during his presidency.

US policy toward Philippines unlikely to change under Trump

Whether he’ll ever be brought to justice, though, is doubtful, said Romualdez.

“There’s a strong clamor for that. But the Marcos administration has made it clear that if there’s going to be any trial, it has to be done in the Philippines,” the ambassador said. “We withdrew from the ICC, but many legal luminaries argue that you don’t have to be a member. He’s 79 years old and he’s getting frail. He may never see the light of day at the Hague, if ever.”

Meanwhile, Romualdez says he’s studying China’s threat to the region under Xi Jinping, who as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party has led his country since 2012.

“The only thing Xi understands is power, and right now they see that power is not strong enough for him to invade Taiwan,” he said. “All like-minded countries should band together and signal to China that this is unacceptable. We’re hoping that every day, when Xi wakes up, he’ll say ‘today’s not the day.’”

Romauldez says there are 4.3 million Americans of Filipino descent, roughly 1.5 million of whom live in California; another 800,000 reside in the Northeast. Hawaii alone has 209,000 Filipinos, comprising 14% of the state’s population—and nearly half its foreign-born population.

The ambassador, who oversees 70 embassy staffers, said the Philippines has seven US consulates; besides Washington DC, they’re located in Chicago, Honolulu, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Guam, a US possession in the Pacific. Consulates will also open soon in Anchorage and Seattle.

“We have very good relations with both Republicans and Democrats. The interests of the United States are aligned with ours,” he said. “I have spoken with many of those who continue to be around President Trump. They have more or less reassured me that our policies toward the Indo-Pacific region—particularly the Philippines—will remain the same.”

As for those Filipinos, including many living in the United States, who have protested against the son and namesake of their country’s longtime dictator, Romualdez had this to say: “They’ve been singing the same tune for so many years. Marcos was voted in by 31 million people, the largest majority ever. The bottom line is, he’s taken it upon himself to bring the country peace and prosperity. He is not changing history, he’s making history. So let him be judged by what he does today, and not by what his father did in the past.”

He added: “History is written by those who win, and right now, President Marcos is the winner.”