Author: Reuben F. Johnson

From Kuala Lumpur

Todays near standoff between the Philippines and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the Scarborough Shoal is a reminder that over time foreign policy mistakes only expand in their complexity and negative implications.  They tensions connected to them rarely, if ever, dissipate or relax of their own accord.

As of today, satellite imagery obtained by the Reuters news agency show a massing of PRC naval power and deployment of a barrier restricting access to the entrance of the South China Sea.  It is a textbook example of how bad agreements between nations almost always turn into crises far larger than the initial disagreement was supposed to resolve.  Scarborough is one of Asia’s increasingly disputed maritime sites with diplomats and military analysts projecting the slowly escalating frictions between the Philippines and the PRC will eventually lead to an armed conflict.

As the late, famous US baseball personality Yogi Berra was fond of saying, “it’s Déjà Vu all over again.”

An uninformed decision by an American President in 1979 led to the founding of a radical, terrorist-backing Islamic theocracy in Iran.  It has now spawned the largest military conflict in the Middle East in more than three decades.  According to the Russia Director on his own National Security Council, Barack Obama’s “too slow and too incremental” response to Russia’s 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea and his refusal to provide critical defensive weapon systems to Ukraine at the time is today assessed as having convinced Moscow that it could get away with the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.  The there is no finite timeline from the date of a bad decision appeasing a predatory foreign adversary turning into an all-out shooting war.  Forty-plus years, a dozen months, a few weeks or a matter of hours – take your pick.  A war can happen at any time, and it once it begins those culpable disingenuously begin their lament on the situation with the words “if only back then we had realised.”

Events today in Scarborough are following this unhappy script.  According to a commentary from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the PRC’s actions “move beyond routine harassment to more direct restrictions on access.  They reflect a broader pattern: Beijing is using gray-zone tactics to assert operational control over contested waters while staying below the threshold for armed conflict and limiting the risk of a direct US response.  These incremental steps, while individually limited, cumulatively shift the status quo in Beijing’s favour without triggering a kinetic response.”

How We Got Here

Former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell, who was Obama’s key architect of US Asia policy, led the brokering of the 2012 agreement on the Scarborough Shoal standoff between the PRC and the Philippines.  The deal he crafted between the two nations was supposed to de-escalate the conflict.  Instead, it has gradually facilitated the PRC achieving de facto control over the shoal – now a major potential flash point in the South China Sea.

In retrospect, Washington mistakenly believed the agreement would prevent what was judged in the White House and Foggy Bottom to be a minor incident from escalating into an all-out conflict.  But most of those on the scene at the time view the US role as having pressured the Philippines into vacating a crucial fishing area and eventually ceding control to Beijing.  The fatal flaw in that assumption, tell US intelligence officials who were on duty at the time but are now retired, is the PRC never viewed the Philippines’ claims to the Shoal as legitimate.

Recounting the events nearly a decade and a half later, retired US Navy Captain James Fanell, who was Director of Intelligence and Information Operations at the US Pacific Fleet in Honolulu at the time, describes the sequence of events as a “complete screw-up by the Obama team” with more than one undesirable aftereffect.

“The PRC dispatched a flotilla of ships that are not attached to the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PL:AN) but were assigned to one of Beijing’s maritime law enforcement agencies – a group of entities that the Chinese refer to colloquially as ‘the Five Dragons.’  They were sent in response to the Philippines boarding Chinese ‘commercial’ vessels that were illegally fishing or extracting other resources from the Shoal.  The Philippines, operating an older, used but unarmed US Coast Guard cutter we had donated to them, had performed the same mission that our own US Navy ships are doing today in the Strait of Hormuz.  Intercepting suspect vessels, asking to see that ship’s official registration paperwork and conducting inspections.  They caught the Chinese commercial ships red-handed in numerous acts of looting the Philippines of natural resources and videotaped what they found hidden in the hoods of these ships.  Selected footage released afterwards seriously embarrassed the Chinese, which is when the Five Dragons were sent to the Shoal.”

The Philippines were coerced into to withdrawing their ships from an area that was internationally recognized as their territory and inside of their Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).  The Chinese were also required to withdraw but then claimed the agreement only required them to remove “military” vessels from the Shoal.  In DC, said Fanell, the decision was made to let an ally down and justify it by saying “the Philippines are trying to get us to go to bat for them and use our military to defend their sovereignty over a crisis they created – and we should not get involved.”

Scarborough is only 140 miles from Manila and only 120 nautical miles from closest point in Luzon, which puts it clearly inside the Philippines EEZ.  On those grounds Manila went to the International Arbitration Court in the Hague in 2013. The court’s 550-page ruling in 2016 – despite presenting the appearance of bending over backwards to accommodate Beijing – still called out the PRC as being in the wrong.  The court found that Beijing has no legal claims to sovereignty of any territory based on Scarborough lying within the confines of the PRC’s “9-dash line” and has no right to steal resources within another nation’s EEZ.

In the end, Fanell explains, “this episode has only created worse tensions in the region that the 2012 agreement was supposed to curtail.  Domestically, the failure of Washington to stand up to Beijing was a major factor in the election of Rodrgio Duterte to the Philippine presidency.”  His election was assessed in a 2016 CNN analysis as a long-term setback for US interests.  Washington choosing to defer from clarifying whether the Mutual Defense Treaty with Manila would trigger an American military response to Beijing’s occupation of Philippine territory – like other foreign policy blunders of its kind – has only served to set the stage for a more series crisis later.  Another one of these “gifts that keeps on giving.”

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Select Passage: “Beijing is using gray-zone tactics to assert operational control over contested waters while staying below the threshold for armed conflict and limiting the risk of a direct US response.  These incremental steps, while individually limited, cumulatively shift the status quo in Beijing’s favour without triggering a kinetic response.” – FDD Commentary

Bullet points

• A renewal and worsening of the tensions over the Scarborough Shoal demonstrate the appeasing of Beijing in 2012 on the issue has only led to bigger problems later.
• Satellite imagery shows the PLAN attempting to now expand its presence to block entry into the South China Sea.
• The scenario of a dispute of this nature becoming worse over time if not dealt with decisively initially follows similar previous US foreign policy missteps like the 1979 Iran Revolution and Crimea in 2014.
• The PRC is now moving “beyond routine harassment to more direct restrictions on access” and is attempting to “cumulatively shift the status quo in Beijing’s favour without triggering a kinetic response.”
• Both international legal precedent and court rulings show no legitimacy to the PRC claims to this piece of Philippine territory, but Beijing true to form is flaunting its refusal to acknowledge the illegality of its actions.

Sources:

1.  “Exclusive: China moves to block entrance to disputed South China Sea shoal, images show”, Reuters, 15 April 2026.
2. “What is the Scarborough Shoal and what is China planning there?”, Reuters,16 September 2025.
3. “Here’s What DOD’s International Security Nominee Learned from Russia’s 2014 Seizure of Crimea,” Defense One, 13 January 2022.
4. Craig Singleton, “China Restricts Access and Expands Reach in the South China Sea,” Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, 16 April 2026.
5.  Gregory B. Poling, “Judgment Day: The South China Sea Tribunal Issues Its Ruling,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2 July 2016.
6. “Will the US Defend the Philippines If China Attacks?”, ABS-CBN, 25 July 2012.