Biden Hosts First Summit With Leaders of Japan, Philippines as China Threat Looms

WASHINGTON—President Joe Biden on April 11 hosted the first-ever trilateral summit meeting between Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the White House.

The primary goal of the summit was to strengthen defense ties between the United States, Japan, and the Philippines in the face of China’s more aggressive behavior in the Indo-Pacific.

President Biden called the meeting a “new era of partnership” and said that ”a great deal of history in our world will be written in the Indo-Pacific in the coming years.”

At the trilateral summit, all three states committed to closer coordination and engagement in the South China Sea. The three leaders also announced new steps to strengthen energy security, economic and maritime cooperation, technological and cybersecurity partnerships, and joint investments in critical infrastructure.

“In the midst of the compound crisis faced by the global community, multi-layered cooperation between allies and like-minded countries is essential if we are to maintain and bolster a free and open international order based on the rule of law,” Mr. Kishida said during the summit.

Coast Guard cooperation, humanitarian aid, and disaster relief, as well as military cooperation and capacity building, were also among the day’s deliverables.

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China has recently increased its pressure on the Philippines in an area of the South China Sea known as the Second Thomas Shoal, which the international community and the United States recognize as being within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone.

“We meet today as friends and partners bound by a shared vision and pursuit of a peaceful, stable, and prosperous Indo-Pacific,” Mr. Marcos said during the summit. “It is a partnership born not out of convenience, nor of expediency, but as a natural progression of a deepening relation and robust cooperation amongst our three countries.”

The Philippines and China have had on-water confrontations, the most recent of which involved China’s firing of water cannons on a Philippine ship on March 23. Three Philippine Navy sailors were hurt in the incident, and the event heightened tensions between Manila and Beijing over the Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea.

During the summit, President Biden talked about deepening maritime and security ties.

“I want to be clear that the United States defense commitments to Japan and to the Philippines are ironclad. They are ironclad. Any attack on Philippine aircraft, vessels, or armed forces in the South China Sea would invoke our mutual defense treaty,” he said.

During a press call on April 10, a senior administration official emphasized the importance of the trilateral summit, saying that as President Marcos faces pressure from China’s aggressive tactics, the summit is a clear demonstration of “support and resolve from both President Biden and Prime Minister Kishida that we stand shoulder to shoulder with Marcos, ready to support and work with the Philippines at every turn.”

Senior administration officials said more trilateral military exercises could be announced as well, as the United States and Japan work closely with the Philippine government to boost cooperative capacity in line with the vision of a coordinated effort that better integrates ballistic missile and air defense capabilities around the Indo-Pacific and ensures they have what they need to uphold international law.

The main point of these exercises, another official said, is to help “the military modernization of the Philippines” and increase coordination and interoperability with other militaries, as well as “help facilitate monitoring assistance and disaster response.”

Joint Coast Guard activity is also expected to take place in the coming year, and the U.S. Coast Guard will welcome members of the Philippine and Japanese coast guards onto their vessels in the Indo-Pacific for training and to synchronize their work together.

During the summit, the leaders agreed to expedite investment in infrastructure projects, including ports, rail, clean energy, semiconductor supply chains, and other types of connectivity in the Philippines.

The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation is expected to announce a new office in the Philippines, and both the U.S. and Japanese governments and industries are expected to announce millions of dollars in funding for open radio access network (O-RAN) field trials, as well as an Asia O-RAN Academy in Manila, enabling future commercial deployment of the technology.

Regarding trilateral humanitarian assistance and disaster response, the United States will launch new initiatives, including a partnership between the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Defense to pre-position humanitarian relief commodities for the Philippine civilian disaster response authority.

The United States recently added four new sites under the current enhanced cooperation defense agreement and provided an additional $100 million in foreign military financing.

The meeting between the leaders comes at an active time for those countries affected by the Chinese Communist Party asserting territorial claims in the South China Sea, East China Sea, and Taiwan Strait.

“As Indo-Pacific nations, the U.S., Japan, and the Philippines share a joint vision for the future of the region, and with this first-ever leader-level trilateral summit, we are continuing to innovate the groupings with whom we’re working closely, adding to the fit-for-purpose latticework that we are using throughout the Indo-Pacific,” Mira Rapp-Hooper, NSC senior director for East Asia and Oceania, told reporters on April 9 during a news briefing.