The Philippines is strengthening defense ties with the United States at a time of escalating US-China rivalry. Manila aims to mitigate power asymmetry, while China’s response to its maritime neighbor reflects a deep distrust of alliances and wary of invaders which came by sea.

The United States has launched a review of the AUKUS pact—a trilateral security arrangement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, signed in 2021. Established behind closed doors and announced with little warning, the agreement abruptly terminated a multi-billion-dollar submarine deal between Australia and France, provoking fury in Paris. France branded the move a “stab in the back,” accusing its allies of deceit.

Peter Hegseth’s inability to name an ASEAN country underscores the Trump administration’s broader indifference to Southeast Asia, favoring trade protectionism, military burden-shifting, and transactional diplomacy over sustained regional engagement.

The United States seeks to widen the technology gap with China as much as possible and thus will create more barriers for Chinese research and development. It may even try to push back some of the technological advancements China has made. China needs to prepare for greater pressure.

America’s actions that are directly detrimental to China’s interests render China’s cooperation in some regions irrelevant. The good news is that China and the U.S. have agreed to strengthen cooperation. But to ensure concrete results, the U.S. needs to do more.

The compromise reached by U.S. Congress on the military spending bill, allowing the sale of nuclear submarines to Australia as part of AUKUS, signals a significant shift in defense dynamics in the Asia-Pacific. While intended to bolster regional security, the pact faces criticism both within Australia and among neighboring nations, raising concerns about arms races and the sidelining of economic cooperation in the region.

The deepening trilateral collaboration of the United States, Japan and the Republic of Korea is undermining stability on the Korean Peninsula, and recent provocative actions, will only serve to escalate tensions further. In addition, harsh rhetoric erodes the fragile trust of nations and could result in a generalized sense of insecurity.

AUKUS has laid out a plan for Australia to acquire its own SSN fleet. While the buildup of subs will take several years, submarine basing access and easing of constraints on the transfer of submarine parts and technologies to allies and partners mean that the program’s impact can be felt sooner in the Indo-Pacific, including on the Taiwan Straits hotspot.

The U.S. and China’s growing rivalry was bound to affect global relationships on multiple levels. Already having established the AUKUS program, the U.S. is also pursuing an adjacent Japan-Philippine-U.S. alliance which will add another security barrier in the Pacific, a difficult fence to raise in a region where many countries rely heavily on China for trade.

America shamelessly uses other countries to further its own agenda, disregarding their needs. It has split the world and kept it in a state of perennial conflict since World War II and is now invoking the nightmarish return of the Cold War.