Opinion

Coastguard drills with Philippines, Japan the latest sign of US-driven security cooperation

The South China Sea exercises presage the renaissance of the US-led Asia-Pacific alliance system, this time featuring not only the traditional hub-and-spoke system but also spoke-to-spoke arrangements

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Members of the Philippine Coast Guard take part in a joint maritime exercise with coastguards from Japan and the US off the coast of Mariveles, Bataan province, in the Philippines, on June 6. Photo: Bloomberg

Lucio Blanco Pitlo III is president of the Philippine Association for Chinese Studies and research fellow at the Asia-Pacific Pathways to Progress Foundation.

Published: 4:30pm, 12 Jun 2023

As defence chiefs and security experts from the Asia-Pacific and beyond gathered in Singapore for the Shangri-La Dialogue, coastguards from the Philippines, the United States and Japan held their first joint drills in the disputed South China Sea last week. The move was part of a growing web of minilateral security groupings emerging in response to shared security concerns.

In a way, they presage the renaissance of the US-led alliance system in the region, this time featuring not only the traditional hub-and-spoke system but also spoke-to-spoke arrangements. Such ad hoc clusters can serve as precursors for more institutionalised frameworks for security cooperation in the future. Plans to set up an “Asian Nato” might see such minilateral groupings as potential building blocks.

The trilateral exercises took place in waters off Mariveles, a town in Bataan province on the main island of Luzon. They featured manoeuvres, photo exercises, maritime law enforcement training, search and rescue and passing exercises.