Rebalancing

A year after US troops weighed anchor in Subic Bay, John Negroponte arrived in Manila as America’s ambassador.

Today Negroponte is back, this time as a civilian on a visit to boost business links between the two countries, a year after the Philippine government allowed US troops to use Subic regularly again.

The return of US troops to Subic on a semi-permanent basis (as described by an Australian newspaper) is part of Washington’s shift back to its home region, the Asia-Pacific, from its numerous counterterrorism engagements elsewhere on the planet.

Call it the US pivot, or rebalancing, alongside America’s military drawdown in Iraq, Afghanistan and thereabouts – it’s a shift that Washington is expected to pursue as President Barack Obama embarks on his second term.

Negroponte, America’s first director of national intelligence and a former deputy secretary of state and ambassador to post-Saddam Iraq, thinks reports of the United States’ demise as a world leader are “premature.” He points out, for one, that US defense spending is still larger than the defense budgets of all other countries combined.

But he sees his country in this century increasingly eschewing preemption and unilateralism in promoting its interests overseas. He sees no more large expeditionary forces or costly entanglements in nation-building. Instead he sees more reliance on special operations and intel gathering in counterterrorism, and multilateral approaches where possible.

“I think we’re going to seek to continue a responsible leadership role,” Negroponte told a gathering of local and foreign investors at the Tower Club yesterday.

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Negroponte arrived here ahead of a large, top-level American business delegation for a visit organized by the US-Philippines Society, a non-profit and independent group set up when President Aquino visited Washington last year. Negroponte co-chairs the group together with industrialist Manny Pangilinan.

Also in the delegation are Philippine Ambassador to Washington Joey Cuisia and two other former US ambassadors to Manila, Thomas Hubbard and Richard Murphy.

Negroponte arrived in the Philippines in 1993 when the country had disappeared from US radar screens following the bases shutdown. The Philippine desk at the State Department got downsized and US aid to Manila was drastically cut.

China occupied Panganiban or Mischief Reef off Palawan at around that time.

But the Philippine economy flourished in the 1990s as the Ramos administration implemented liberalization policies, opening several sectors to competition.

Negroponte, a career diplomat for four decades, describes the 1990s as the era of the Asian economic tigers. The Philippines was preparing to join the tigers when the Asian financial crisis struck in 1997.

The years from 2000 he considers the era of emerging markets, and he believes Washington has the same view.

“It’s a particularly good time to deepen our ties with ASEAN,” he said at the Tower Club. “Now is a good time for the US… to put a bit of a spotlight on its own on the relationship between the Philippines and the United States.”

The relationship is currently strained again after a US Navy minesweeper ran aground in Tubbataha Reef, damaging the World Heritage Site. But if handled well by both sides, this is going to be a blip in ties that have generally improved since terrorists struck at the heart of America on Sept. 11, 2001.

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Negroponte sees 9/11 as the start of Washington’s loss of focus on the Asia-Pacific. In the decade after 9/11, as the US became preoccupied with the war on terror and then exit strategies, he said Asia became “a demographic, economic and political center of gravity in the world.”

Obama assumed leadership at the height of a financial crisis in America, as the world was shifting from bipolar to (briefly) unipolar and then to a different post-cold war environment.

Now Obama must face the challenge posed by a China that has the will and growing resources to end 200 years of military weakness.

Negroponte sees Obama’s attitude toward China falling into the same pattern as other US presidents since Richard Nixon in 1972: eventually they all came out in favor of engagement and forming a positive relationship with the Chinese.

As deputy secretary of state, Negroponte had met with Chinese officials and stressed “the importance of China being a responsible stakeholder” in building a peaceful world.

He said US relationship with China must be managed “carefully… assiduously.”

“The overall relationship with China will be a challenge for decades to come, indeed for the next generations,” he said, not just for the US but also for China’s neighbors. “We have to find positive issues with which to work with China.”

Like other US officials, retired or not, Negroponte has been asked what America is prepared to do in case territorial disputes between the Philippines and China deteriorate into armed conflict.

And like other US officials, Negroponte emphasizes that Washington isn’t taking sides in the dispute and prefers only a peaceful settlement through negotiation.

Under the Visiting Forces Agreement, the US is committed to come to our aid in case of attack on Philippine soil by an external threat. But there are disagreements on whether the VFA commitment covers the Philippines’ 200-mile exclusive economic zone, as defined under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

The Obama White House has signed the UNCLOS but the US Congress, leery of UN intervention in US affairs, has not ratified the convention. John Kerry, slated to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, is a supporter of ratification and may give the effort the necessary push.

Negroponte would only say that Obama, with his roots in Hawaii and Indonesia, “has a strong commitment to our Asian alliances... we have to nurture these friendships.”