Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. met with President Biden at the White House on Monday, kicking off a week’s worth of high-level engagements that mark a sharp turnaround in a relationship that has emerged from the deep freeze in a surprisingly short time.
Marcos’s predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, by contrast, had pledged to distance Manila from Washington and align more closely with Beijing, threatened to end an agreement that gave legal protections to the U.S. military in the country, and snubbed President Donald Trump’s offer to visit the White House. By the end of his presidency last year, Duterte’s dalliance with Beijing having failed to produce results, he was edging back toward Washington.
Marcos and his wife, Louise Araneta-Marcos, on Monday arrived at the White House, where they were greeted by Biden and first lady Jill Biden. They were escorted into the White House and the two presidents met in the Oval Office.
“Welcome back to the White House. We were talking on the way over — it’s been awhile since you’ve been here,” Biden said, noting that Marcos had told him he had once visited the White House with his father. “We welcome you back.”
The two leaders issued a statement after their meeting outlining areas for cooperation, including climate change and economic development, as well as new trade and investment missions.
Biden said the military ties between the countries would stay strong. “The United States also remains ironclad in our commitment to the defense of the Philippines, including the South China Sea, and we will continue to support the Philippines’s military modernization,” Biden said.
Marcos cited the long-standing relationship between the two countries, saying their bond was critical in a volatile part of the world.
“The region where the Philippines is [is] possibly the most complicated geopolitical situation in the world right now,” Marcos said. “So it is only natural that the Philippines look to its sole treaty partner in the world to strengthen, to redefine, the relationship that we have and the roles that we play in the face of those rising tensions that we see now around the South China Sea and Asia Pacific.”
Since becoming president in July, Marcos has witnessed Beijing’s increasingly coercive actions in the region, from ongoing harassment of Philippine fishermen in their territorial waters to the use of lasers to temporarily blind a Philippine coast guard crew. Last week, a Chinese coast guard vessel cut off a Philippine vessel and nearly caused a collision.
Now Marcos is bent on enhancing security ties with the United States, building on a 70-year-old mutual defense treaty. “We’ve gone from talking about how much damage is being done to the relationship to how much progress is being made,” said Zack Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Biden, for his part, has been working to strengthen alliances with countries in China’s neighborhood. He recently welcomed South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol to the White House, and this month he will visit Japan and Australia.
But while progress in U.S.-Philippine military cooperation has been notable, the broader economic relationship between the two countries is lagging, analysts say, and Marcos needs to show improvement there if he wants to sustain domestic political support for a deeper security partnership with the United States.
“The alliance cannot work if the United States doesn’t provide more assistance to the Philippines for economic development, food security and energy security,” said Gregory Poling, director of the Southeast Asia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Those are the top priorities of every Filipino. Marcos needs to be able to make the case at home that there are tangible benefits with a closer relationship.”
To that end, the Biden administration this week is unveiling some high-level meetings and initiatives. They include sending a presidential trade and investment mission to the Philippines that will be led by a top Commerce Department official. On Wednesday, Marcos and his economic minister and aides are meeting with executives from at least a dozen American firms in the energy, banking, health-care, retail, insurance and digital technology industries.
One senior administration official said that Marcos, whose family has historical ties to China dating back to his father’s visit with Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1974, has “a strong desire to work closely with” both the United States and China and is “not seeking to position himself in some in-between role.” China is the largest trading partner of the Philippines.
Still, the leaders’ joint statement said they “underscore their unwavering commitment to freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea” and “welcome cooperation with partners that share the United States’ and the Philippines’ commitment to international law and mutual respect.” It added that “the United States and the Philippines will remain the closest of allies.”
Some American business representatives are bullish on prospects for stronger economic ties. “The actions of the last nine months have made it crystal clear that the Philippines wants a greater relationship with us — not just in security, but a deeper economic relationship,” said Ted Osius, president and CEO of the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council. “I see an enormous amount of energy in this relationship right now that did not exist a year ago.”
But the significance of the security relationship cannot be overstated, analysts say. The countries are negotiating new bilateral defense guidelines — not as splashy as expanded access to military sites, but equally if not more consequential. They lay out in advance an understanding of who does what in a conflict. “If China shoots at a Filipino vessel, what do we do to make this mutual defense functional?” Poling said by way of explanation.
The United States has adopted defense guidelines with other allies such as Japan. But after the Philippines in the early 1990s closed U.S. military bases in the country and the Soviet Union dissolved, the military alliance stagnated, Poling said.
“The rise of Chinese coercion in the South China Sea changed this and has made the Philippines understand for the first time in a long time that they face an external threat and that the mutual defense treaty is worth implementing,” he said. “For its part, the United States seems to realize that unlike during the Cold War, they need to make the treaty actually mutual. The Philippines has to be a partner, not just a place whose bases we can use.”
In general, residents of the Philippines, once a U.S. colony, view the alliance positively, analysts say. The public has a sense that a mutual defense treaty with the United States is the “go-to policy” when it comes to the South China Sea, said Herman Kraft, a political science professor at the University of the Philippines.
An open issue, however, is whether the U.S. commitment to come to Manila’s defense kicks in when actions, while coercive, do not rise to the level of an act of war. “Part of what I think we’re asking for is whether the Americans are willing to actually counter these ‘gray zone’ tactics by China when, to a large extent, they fall short of armed conflict,” Kraft said.
Philippine policymakers, Kraft said, are more circumspect about the implications of expanded access to military sites. Three, for instance, are in northern Luzon, which could be of strategic value to the United States in defending Taiwan in a conflict with China. U.S. officials have declined to say whether they would seek to use base access in that way.
In the Philippines, Kraft said, “there’s a sense that basically we don’t want to be dragged into a conflict with China because of Taiwan.”
He added, “It’s actually a dilemma as far as Manila is concerned — asking for clear guarantees as to when U.S. security commitments will be triggered, but at the same time not wanting to be involved in other U.S. security commitments.”
Administration officials said dialogue is ongoing. “There have always been gray areas in the security treaty between the U.S. and the Philippines,” such as what constitutes Philippine territory, one official said. “The goal here is to narrow these definitional issues and to present a united front to the Chinese.”
Matt Viser contributed to this report.