Opinion: An Alternative Hypothesis to the West Philippine Sea Dispute

Contrary to what has usually been posited and emphasized, the border skirmishes and tensions across the entire South China Sea have little to do with international law. The answer is both obvious yet often taken for granted. All of these dilemmas in this part of the world boil down to the two major factors that have converged and merged, and turning the Philippines into a crash-test dummy for mutual profit.

It began in 2001. The American neoconservative apparatus, through PNAC or the Project For The New American Century, would spend two decades burning trillions of dollars, yearning to transform tribal warlords from the Levant to the Hindu Kush into Jeffersonian democrats. PNAC is a scheme pitched by a cabal of planners in the Oval Office during the Bush years, which involves the establishment of a series of client regimes from Damascus to Kabul, as a means to permanently guarantee America’s status as the sole superpower and the world’s policeman, and likewise secure the routes for oil, migrants, and drugs that fuels its financialized utopia. Once it began imploding by 2006 onwards, the White House is practically sitting on top of a ticking time bomb. 

While Washington was busy playing Whack-A-Mole with insurgents they originally funded, armed, and sponsored in 1978 via Operation Cyclone, China quietly hacked the global matrix. They joined the WTO, weaponized U.S. Treasuries, and absorbed the entire Western manufacturing base. Thus, when newly elected President Barack Obama reviewed the United States’ standing outside of the Middle East and Europe, they belatedly realized that they have been sleepwalking into irrelevance all this time.

As such, a course correction was sorely needed. The Americans couldn’t afford to be kicked out from the first island chain. Washington needed a cheap, historically compliant unsinkable aircraft carrier, and Manila was the obvious choice for this.

The Chinese economic engine is a hyper-efficient beast, but it has a massive, glaring caveat: the United States Navy essentially holds the power switch, parked comfortably between Indonesia and Malaysia. A blockade there doesn't just hurt China; it starves Shanghai of hydrocarbons and shuts the lights off in a week. The Nine-Dash Line is not merely a territorial flex; it is a desperate attempt to build a buffer zone against a systemic logistical strangulation confrontation with America. The Nine-Dash Line is not a sudden, irrational burst of cartographic greed; it is a desperate, hyper-calculated attempt to push the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet as far away from the carotid artery of Chinese hydrocarbon imports as possible.

From this juncture, China’s BRI or its Belt and Road Initiative is a failsafe mechanism. The logic is simple in its execution. Expand in the Eurasian and African markets, exploit the resentment of the countries against the IMF, and step in as the alternative. 

Unlike the West, Beijing offers to pour concrete, build the tracks, and modernize the highways, at the fraction of the projected costs if they are to outsource it to a Western firm, in exchange for access to raw materials. For nations such as Burkina Faso, Seychelles, and Maldives, this is not a tough sell. Anything but UNICEF and Oxfam.

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What is Taiwan in this equation? Is its importance a matter of protecting its democracy, or its semiconductor manufacturing? For decades, Taipei held the monopoly on the most advanced equipment required for all computers and electronics to function via TSMC or the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. 

This is intentional. By leveraging an integral component of what keeps the global economy, the ROC is able to shore up its position as a flashpoint for any tension through this dead man’s switch. In addition, this resource alone has kept the status quo from overheating, at least for now. 

It is clear as day that if the People’s Liberation Army ever lands its forces on the island, their first objective is to firmly secure the foundries of TSMC. Taipei, of course, will not allow it, and has rigged the facilities with explosives, ready to be unleashed the moment Beijing is able to secure its beachheads. For the Taiwanese, a smoking crater that sends the world’s technology back to the 1990s, is a hundred times better than the Communist Party of China possessing the hardware of the digital machinery that we all live in.

The frantic calls within Capitol Hill to decouple from the Orient is still distant, and it only exists in the minds of think-tank bureaucrats who do not understand basic math. Since Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard in 1971, the American empire has functioned as a massive, heavily armed Ponzi scheme. The only reason the U.S. can print endless trillions of fiat currency without turning into the Weimar Republic is the Petrodollar agreement—forcing the globe to buy its debts at low interest rates, to keep the pump running.

China and the U.S. are currently two men standing in a gasoline-soaked room, pointing flamethrowers at each other. If the U.S. cuts off China's maritime access, China dumps its U.S. Treasuries, instantly vaporizing the dollar's status as the global reserve currency. Washington knows this. Beijing knows this. The "Pax Silica" hype is stumbling because you cannot economically isolate a nation that technically owns your mortgage. 

They are economically Siamese twins; if one stabs the other in the heart, they both bleed out on the floor.

You don’t need to be a China glazer to realize that building high-speed rail is a much sounder investment than constantly bombing children. Internal development looks good on anyone’s resume. It is always much better than the forever wars of the U.S., which often results in their veterans developing PTSD and the hollowing out of what remains of their real economy for the benefit of their Epstein class, who reside in Wall Street and the City of London. 

The Philippine government, for once, is able to grow a spine, and vehemently reject Washington’s demands of exempting their companies from domestic laws once Pax Silica settles in. Since frankly speaking, what can they offer to their partners anymore, except Polymarket, Disney adults, Netflix and OnlyFans subscriptions? If Manila is to have the ball in its court, it must no longer be the Pentagon’s errand boy and a doormat for foreign powers and its neighbors.

To reiterate Henry Kissinger's maxim, to be America's enemy is dangerous, but to be its friend is fatal.