OPINION:
The Philippines and Vietnam are so different in terms of colonial experiences, culture, governance, revolution and protest that it would seem absurd to imagine they would “ally” against China. Like it or not, though, in an environment in which the enemy of my enemy is my friend, they are in this struggle together.
Just as Manila and Washington are historic allies, so, too, is Washington bound to Hanoi, once its mortal enemy. A State Department memorandum and a separate “vision statement” provide the framework under which the U.S. has proffered electronic gear and coast guard cutters for the Vietnamese to patrol their long coastline and see what the Chinese are doing in the South China Sea. As Washington seeks to draw Hanoi from Beijing’s orbit, more aid is sure to come.
For Vietnam, China is no less a menace than it is for the Philippines. From ancient times, the Vietnamese have resented the overbearing Chinese, against whom they fought a bitter border war in early 1979. Thousands were killed before the Chinese withdrew. Vietnam and China coexist as communist powers in an uneasy relationship disturbed by Chinese claims to the entire South China Sea, including mineral deposits, oil and natural gas to which the Vietnamese believe they are entitled.
That’s why Hanoi desperately wants recalcitrant southerners, always mindful of their defeat by the northerners more than 50 years ago, to pay more than lip-service fealty to the regime of the Communist Party of Vietnam. The party’s goal is to instill a sense of common cause among southerners inclined to forget that the ultimate power resides in its central committee. The blue and red Viet Cong flag with the gold star in the middle is almost as ubiquitous in Saigon, the historic name that endures as the heart of sprawling Ho Chi Minh City, as the national flag of Vietnam, solid red with gold star.
Across the South China Sea from Vietnam, another brand of nationalist pride drives the leaders of a regime steeped in its own enduring memories of colonial domination. In the Philippines, President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., son of the thoroughly corrupt dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who was driven out in the People Power revolution of 1986, counts on the Americans to stand up for his country. He needs foreign arms and ammunition to combat Islamic and communist rebels and stand up to Chinese bullies blocking native fishermen from fish-rich shoals where they have been casting their nets for centuries.
There is no doubt, of course, that the Filipinos are no match for the Chinese, whose coast guard cutters routinely drive off the Filipinos with water cannon. Although they haven’t resorted to firing live ammunition, they have injured fishermen and damaged their boats by ramming them.
Just as ominously for Vietnam and the Philippines, the Chinese, dredging the shallow seabed around atolls and islets, have built three airstrips in the Spratly Islands between southern Vietnam and the southwestern Philippine Island of Palawan. The Chinese first built an air base on a reef called Fiery Cross, nearly 2 miles long, perfect for fighter planes, bombers and transports. Moving east across the Spratlys, closer to Palawan, they have almost completed their third strip, which is equally long and perhaps more threatening because of its proximity to Philippine soil.
U.S. fighter planes and Navy vessels periodically challenge the Chinese in the skies and at sea around the Spratlys, provoking warnings to stay away, which the Americans ignore. The biggest American challenge to the Chinese, though, is in the form of annual war games called Balikatan, or “shoulder to shoulder,” in which thousands of American and Filipino forces have just been interacting in the air, at sea and on land. U.S. warships were back in Subic Bay, for years the site of America’s largest overseas naval base, 75 miles west of Manila, before the Philippine Senate refused to renew the bases agreement in 1991.
A ride around the bay in a banca, a flimsy wooden craft, revealed several U.S. Navy ships supporting Marines and Army soldiers in the low-lying mountains near the once brawling port town of Olongapo. On shore, a businessman said the Americans were welcome.
Not that Filipino leaders are in complete agreement on what to do about China or the U.S. Mr. Marcos’ predecessor as president, Rodrigo Duterte, cozied up to Beijing while waging a bloody crusade against widespread drug abuse. Mr. Marcos got rid of him by having him extradited to The Hague to stand trial before the International Criminal Court for the extrajudicial slaughter of about 30,000 alleged addicts and dealers.
Mr. Duterte’s daughter, Vice President Sara Duterte, was impeached by the lower house of the Philippine Congress on charges of corruption and threatening to assassinate the president. She faces trial by the Philippine Senate, which must approve or reject her impeachment. Buoyed by senators on her side, she may run for president three years hence and then face the conundrum of dealing with China while relying on the U.S.
The task of shifting the narrative and returning to tight military relations with the Americans is delicate. Filipino leaders have no illusions about their ability to defend their 8,000 islands against the Chinese, but they would rather not appear totally dependent on American largesse. In Hanoi, the task of rewriting history is still more daunting. They are belatedly glorifying the Viet Cong’s place in official texts to suit their agenda, mythologizing the role of the Viet Nam Cong-san, or Vietnam Communists, the Viet Cong, giving their southern comrades equal if not full credit for “liberation” from the American-supported Saigon regime.
One basic consideration is the need for national unity against Vietnam’s historic frenemy, China. The “North” Vietnamese are well aware they could not have waged the Vietnam War if China had not been pumping in weapons for fighting the U.S. and “South” Vietnam. The Avtomat Kalashnikova, or AK-47, rifle was designed in 1947 by a Russian, Mikhail Kalashnikov, but the Chinese made millions of them for the “NVA,” as the Americans called the North Vietnamese Army. China also provided the machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and much else in North Vietnam’s inventory.
If Viet Cong guerrillas did not “win” the war for Hanoi, they were born again in the imaginations of latter-day propagandists. The message comes through on a visit to the jungle district of Cu Chi on the outer fringe of Ho Chi Minh, about 30 miles northwest of old Saigon. Guides in the olive drab uniforms of the People’s Army of Vietnam extol the mystique of the Viet Cong as they show off the tunnels of Cu Chi. Narrow openings in the earth descend to hideouts beneath grass-covered slabs that swing open, revealing stakes that pierced the feet of unwary American soldiers.
“I’m utterly confused by the whole ‘VC revival,’” said United Press International’s last Saigon bureau chief, Alan Dawson, who chronicled his observations in a book, “55 Days: The Fall of South Vietnam.” “Obviously the tanks and the men aboard them and on the trucks and on the streets were the northern so-called PAVN. Surely we all remember how the conquering heroes shoved the VC aside in their quite incredible rush to declare a unified Vietnam.”
On the streets of Saigon, down crowded back alleys and in flossy new shops and cafes, the safest formula for survival is to stay away from politics and focus on the business at hand, in which Vietnamese from the south are often more proficient than those up north. “We don’t think about them,” said a young Vietnamese at one of the 14 stations served by Saigon’s new Japanese-built metro line No. 1 when asked what she thinks of the powers that be in Hanoi. “The war was too long ago. We need to forget.”
In Hanoi, the myth-makers prefer the Viet Cong in the south. In Manila, Philippine leaders rediscover their kinship with the nation that drove out the Spanish, defeated home-grown revolutionaries and then reigned as colonial overlords (except for three years of harsh Japanese rule in World War II). Like Vietnam, the Philippines has a legacy of suffering and survival. Now, for the first time, both countries face the same expansionist power at their doorsteps.
• Don Kirk is a former Far East correspondent for the Chicago Tribune.