ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how two Philippine presidents approached the evolving geo-strategic competition between the U.S. and China in the Indo-Pacific region. From 2011 to 2016, then President Benigno Aquino III maintained that China’s maritime expansion threatens the Philippines’ territorial rights over its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). In reaction to Chinese maritime expansion, he adopted a balancing policy on China’s maritime expansion in the South China Sea. Which jibed with the Obama Administration is strategic rebalancing to Asia. However, President Rodrigo Duterte unraveled the previous president’s foreign policy agenda. Not wanting to upset Chinese security concerns and jeopardize the Philippines’ economic stakes in the One Belt, One Road Initiative (BRI), he opted initially for a rapprochement policy. Nevertheless, the Duterte Administration eventually adopted the policy of equibalancing the U.S. and China to avid entanglement in great powers’ competition. Overall, the two presidents, in formulating their respective foreign policies, had reckoned with the geostrategic developments in the Indo-Pacific region and the prospects of the Philippines losing either territorial rights or economic gains or autonomy as they designed their respective foreign policies.
