Philippines Would be Dragged into Any War Over Taiwan, Philippines President Marcos Says
During a recent interview held during his visit to India on August 8, Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos said that if China invaded Taiwan, his country would inevitably be dragged into the conflict. “To be very practical about it, if there is a confrontation over Taiwan between China and the United States, there is no way that the Philippines can stay out of it simply because of our physical geographic location,” the president told India’s Firstpost.
(Screenshot from Philippines Coast Guard footage)
President Marcos elaborated on the geographic, economic and human elements which tie the Philippines to Taiwan and make Philippine involvement, in some form, likely:
“The large city of Kaohsiung in Taiwan is a 40-minute flight away from the capital of my province in northern Philippines in Lag. That’s how close it is. And so, if you if you think about it, if there is an all-out war, then we will be drawn into it and I assure you with the greatest hesitation, but we again will have to defend our territory and our sovereignty. Furthermore, there are many, many Filipino nationals in Taiwan and that would be immediately a humanitarian problem because we will have to get involved because we will have to go in there or find a way to go in there and to find and to bring our people home.”
Throughout the rest of the interview, Marcos also declared that the Philippines will not back down in the South China Sea, where the coast guards of both countries have been trying to assert sovereignty over competing territorial claims. Despite these statements and the recently improving defense ties between the Philippines and states like India, Japan and the US, Marcos rejected the idea of an Asian NATO. Instead, the president highlighted the need to strengthen ASEAN and expressed a belief that China should be engaged rather than ostracized.
(Screenshot from Firstpost interview)
The response from China was fiery and warned the Philippines against “playing with fire”. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said that the issue of Taiwan is an internal Chinese matter, and neither geographical proximity or “a large amount of Filipinos in Taiwan” can be used as excuses to undermine Chinese sovereignty. English-language opinion pieces published in Chinese state-owned media supported this narrative, and tried to frame Marcos’ statement as irresponsibly escalatory, and an attempt to get into Trump’s good graces which is “doomed to fail”.
Marcos fired back on Monday August 11 that his statements were being purposely misrepresented. “We are, I think for propaganda purposes, misinterpreted,” Marcos said. “I’m a little bit perplexed why it would be characterized as such, as playing with fire”.
A recent wargame held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found even if China only enacted a blockade around Taiwan then a wider war scenario often rapidly evolved. Subsequent to Marcos’ statements the Philippine Coast Guard released videos of a Chinese Coast Guard vessel and a PLA Navy destroyer catastrophically colliding while chasing a Philippine Coast Guard cutter in the South China Sea.
The president said that he hopes to avoid war, and that he wanted to primarily highlight the challenge of evacuating Filipino citizens off the island. “War over Taiwan will drag the Philippines kicking and screaming into the conflict. That is what I was trying to say,”