Diskarte as PHL power vs. China: A review of 'Rock Solid' by Marites Dañguilan Vitug

The Philippines never had a navy that could defend territory in the South China Sea, or so it thought.

That was before the Navy mobilized a decrepit old ship destined for the junkyard. In a somewhat laughable but ultimately effective defensive maneuver, the ramshackle BRP Sierra Madre was intentionally grounded into a Philippine shoal that China had long been eyeing, and became a legally recognized marker of sovereignty.

As Marites Dañguilan Vitug tells the story in her new book “Rock Solid,” a Philippine admiral had the ingenious idea in 1999 to turn the seagoing jalopy into one of the more bizarre enterprises in naval history. Not only did the BRP Sierra Madre – which hosted a squad of Philippine Marines that subsisted on regular deliveries of rations from the mainland – maintain a flag in Ayungin Shoal, it posed a possible public relations nightmare for China. Attacking a pathetic wreck of a military camp would not have been the best optics for a rising China that wanted to be taken seriously as a global power.

For China, the unique defense was a source of irritation. For the Philippines, it was a demonstration of nerve-wracking diskarte, the quality of creative resourcefulness that the country would apply all the way to The Hague and its historic 2016 victory over China in an international court of law.

In her sprawling narrative spanning decades and the globe, Vitug takes readers from courtroom dramas to breath-taking chases on the high seas in a modern-day David-and-Goliath tale.

After three books on the Supreme Court, Marites Vitug has entered new journalistic territory worthy of her zeal for investigation. But in “Rock Solid,” she employs her signature technique of making dry legal cases come alive through colorful anecdotes and the force of personality of the main players in an international drama.

She dove into a trove of newly released secret memos that were annexes to the Philippines’ case against China in the international arbitration tribunal, which ultimately ruled in favor of the Philippines in July 2016. These documents provide a thread of little known incidents and dialogue in the story of a poor island nation’s struggle for sovereign control against an ancient and powerful adversary, an authentic parable for our times yet also a cautionary tale marked by creativity and cleverness, but also betrayal and incompetence. Or in Filipino, talino and abilidad, pagtaksil and kapalpakan.

Desperate improvisation

In foreign relations, there’s what the wonks call hard power – brute coercion through military action or economic pressure – and soft power, not weakness by any means but the achievement of strategic goals through the non-violent, often cerebral ways of diplomacy, international law, and even pop culture.

Then there are those clever tricks in between like using a naval shipwreck as a military base to protect a shoal: hard-power hardware used in an unlikely soft-power operation. It was the proverbial David using his wits and mobilizing public sympathy to ward off a behemoth, a display of Filipino improvisation borne out of desperation.

In a way, that sums up the Philippine strategy in asserting its rights in the international tribunal that culminated in its 2016 triumph over China in The Hague, which was hailed as a victory for rule of law and for underdogs everywhere.

The euphoria was short-lived, as in only hours, as the new Duterte administration immediately, and mysteriously, made clear that the favorable decision was not something to celebrate. Aquino administration officials had a detailed plan in place to mobilize international support in case a favorable verdict was handed down, the first step in a long-term strategy to ensure Chinese compliance and regain Scarborough Shoal that China had brazenly grabbed.

But in one of those bitter twists in history, Aquino administration officials had just vacated their offices when the tribunal released its decision. “We missed it by days,” rued then-Foreign Secretary Rene Almendras, who watched in disbelief as his successor Perfecto Yasay, President Rodrigo Duterte’s appointee, did not show “a hint of joy.”

The reasons for the Duerte administration’s indifference may still be playing out, and could be the subject of an investigative sequel.

In the meantime, we have more than enough to chew on in “Rock Solid,” where Vitug walks readers through the intricate path toward the tribunal victory, reaching back into history when President Ferdinand Marcos foresaw the threat from China even when it was still a cloistered country deep in the shadows of America.

The Philippines in the 1960s began stationing small encampments of soldiers on remote islets in anticipation of this current era. Vitug plumbs the recollections of military veterans like the late Roilo Golez to recall those years of secret sorties to supply the marines. They knew it was just a matter of time before a resurgent China would start reclaiming what it saw as its ancient backwater, and competing with America for supremacy in the South China Sea.

That moment came in 1995, when China shocked the Philippines by occupying Mischief Reef, which had long been considered by the Philippine government as part of its exclusive economic zone.

Thus began two decades of diplomatic wrangling, confrontations in the high seas, and plain bullying by China, at various times thwarting Philippine research missions and commercial exploration, in addition to harassing countless fishing boats. While China acted as a tyrant at sea, its officials were flatly denying any wrongdoing, refusing to compromise, and rejecting any attempt by ASEAN to raise the issues as a group. (Disclosure: my father, Rodolfo Severino, is featured in the book as one of the Philippine diplomats who engaged China during the 1990s disputes.)

In what could be seen as an interregnum in testy Philippine-Chinese relations, the Arroyo administration in the 2000s is described by Vitug as a “golden age” in the relationship, but in retrospect could be the precursor of the appeasement toward China by President Duterte, a staunch Arroyo ally.

The Arroyo government had gone over the heads of its ASEAN brethren to forge a bilateral agreement with China to do joint oil exploration in the contested seas, a deal that was later joined by Vietnam after the latter protested vociferously. But China dominated the exploration and provided the vessel for the survey. When the agreement expired, Philippine officials were left scratching their heads at the “inconclusive and blurred” data that their Chinese counterparts shared with them.

When the Aquino government rejected such joint deals, another collision course was set, until the Chinese takeover of Scarborough Shoal in 2012.

Pushed against the wall, the Philippines saw the international tribunal as its last resort, but even that option was hotly debated, with its risk of defeat and further antagonzing China. President Noynoy Aquino finally decided in favor of the legal challenge, overriding the objections of one of his closest lieutenants, Executive Secretary Jojo Ochoa. The 2016 victory in The Hague appears now even sweeter with this knowledge that it was a major gamble that the Philippines almost did not take.

Vitug fleshes out the drama with revealing portraits of some of the main players, with Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonio Carpio perhaps having the most crucial role, the heroic figure in the story brainstorming with whoever cared to listen the option of taking China to court, and passionately arguing his case before any audience. While Carpio convinced the country’s leadership that international arbitration was the only chance it had to protect territory, senior officials in the executive branch such as Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario made the right call in choosing the Foley Hoag law firm to represent the country in court. Their lawyers proved to have the gravitas, savvy and even theatrical skills to persuade the judges in The Hague.

As the Philippine team built its case, it grappled with treacherous intramurals within its own ranks. Vitug does not tackle how these contemporary events fit into larger historical patterns, but students of history might find familiar the collisions of high-minded patriotic aims with the careerism and suspicious agendas of certain government insiders. It’s a tension that existed at the time of Bonifacio and Aguinaldo, America’s compadre colonialism, Japanese war-time collaboration with Filipino politicians, and all the way to the present balimbing era of expedient political party switching.

The same tension between idealism and cynicism animates Vitug’s reportage of how the men (and the players were nearly all men) around President Aquino conducted themselves. She describes a mysteriously motivated faction in the PNoy administration led by Ochoa, who opposed filing the case at the tribunal in the first place, and in one instance purportedly prevented the government’s foreign lawyers from seeing President Aquino. He is portrayed as a one-man cordon sanitaire in Malacañang that served what Vitug strongly hints at were Chinese interests. Ochoa refused to be interviewed by Vitug, so his side is glaringly absent in the book.

The conflict within Aquino’s team came to a head over an obscure maritime feature in the South China Sea called Itu Aba, claimed by China, Taiwan and the Philippines. On one side was Carpio, del Rosario and the country’s foreign lawyers who wanted the tribunal to rule on whether it was a rock or an island. Deciding that Itu Aba was an island would be unfavorable to the Philippines as it would give the Taiwanese occupiers, and claimant China, reason to extend their control over a 200-mile exclusive economic zone to cover other Philippine claims.

On the other side of this debate were Solicitor General Francis Jardeleza and behind the scenes, Jojo Ochoa. Jardeleza claimed that he was worried that the Philippines would lose the case over Itu Aba, hence argued that it be excluded from the Philippines’ filings in court. In the end, Jardeleza’s side lost the debate, and the Philippines won the Itu Aba argument in The Hague (which ruled it was a mere rock), along with nearly everything else at stake. But the Itu Aba issue had consequences that would play themselves out in domestic politics. When Jardeleza was nominated to the Supreme Court, he was opposed by then-Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, who accused him of “disloyalty to the country.”

President Aquino eventually appointed Jardeleza, who became a bitter opponent of Sereno when the latter faced impeachment, even testifying against her in Congress.

While Vitug was circumspect about what motivated Ochoa and Jardeleza, neither of whom agreed to be interviewed for the book, she was more forthright about the careerist ambitions of former Foreign Secretary Domingo Siazon.

Months after occupying Ayungin Shoal with the carcass of a navy ship in 1999, the Philippines had the chance to replicate the tactic in Scarborough Shoal, long before the shoal became a flashpoint.

But when then-Defense Secretary Orlando Mercado and senior navy officers pushed for the shipwreck option, Siazon purportedly blocked the move after receiving calls from Chinese officials. The Philippines under the Estrada administration backed down and chose not to erect any defense of Scarborough Shoal. It was a decision that would later prove fateful as it left the gate open for Chinese vessels to occupy what had been Philippine territory and traditional fishing grounds, leading to the gambit in The Hague.

A decade later, FVR’s national security adviser Jose Almonte would write in his memoirs that Siazon then was more concerned with his chances of becoming Secretary General of the United Nations and not provoking the ire of China which held a key vote. In the end, Siazon did not get the job, but China got Scarborough. Siazon died in 2016, before he could be interviewed for this book.

Trillanes’s back channeling

Another intriguing character in the book, Senator Antonio Trillanes, was assigned by President Aquino to “back channel,” or go on a series of secret missions to China to find a solution for the shoal standoff with China, without the knowledge of the foreign policy establishment, “like trains on two parallel tracks running at the same time,” in Vitug’s words.

It recalls an Aquino habit of secretly entrusting close allies with sensitive missions over the heads of the chain of command, as he did in the Mamasapano fiasco by surreptitiously giving suspended PNP chief Alan Purisima a key role.

Alas, the Trillanes episode is given scant attention by Vitug, and the reader is left with insufficient reporting on it to make a judgment about Trillanes’s motivations and effectiveness. That lost opportunity to shed light on his character has become more significant today as Trillanes is at the center of a titanic confrontation of his own with President Duterte.

By far the greatest omission in a book otherwise packed with richly painted characters is a humanized portrait of China, the gigantic elephant in the room. No one character on the Chinese side is fleshed out the way Filipino leaders come alive through interviews and dialog gleaned from memos and diplomatic notes. Its officials notoriously stingy with interviews, China in the book remains as inscrutable as ever, a monolith of automatons following the Communist Party’s designs. There are no Chinese critics of China policies in these pages, and readers’ curiosity about internal debates in China is unsatisfied.

But enough can be derived from China’s actions and official statements to conclude that this is clearly an imperial power that will not allow legal niceties and public condemnation to block its march toward dominance. Even the United States is proving to be a highly uncertain deterrence and Philippine ally.

America’s much-ballyhooed security pivot toward Asia under Barack Obama now seems to have taken a backseat to domestic issues under Donald Trump, who himself has pivoted the United States away from global cooperation.

“Rock Solid” ends with the Duterte administration’s own pivot toward charming and not offending China, and abandoning any assertion of Philippine rights in the international arena. The posture is often presented as a pragmatic accommodation of the neighborhood toughie. But as with Trump’s still mysterious friendliness toward traditional US adversary Russia, large questions remain about Duterte’s beshie liking of China. Perhaps Vitug or a young enterprising journalist inspired by her will produce the answers in the coming years.

In the meantime, readers can relish the inside story of a rare Philippine triumph on the world stage that has nothing to do with beauty pageants or boxing, and with nothing less than Philippine territory and sovereignty at stake.

One can only hope that the book does not one day become a nostalgic reference point for when rule of law still mattered, political leaders had the nation’s interest at heart, and small countries had a fighting chance against an empire.

The last two years teach us not to get our hopes up. But Marites Dañguilan Vitug has given us magisterial proof that, even in a rambunctious democracy, the country’s political class is capable of getting its act together.

“Rock Solid” by Marites Dañguilan Vitug is published by the Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2018.