Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell held a meeting with the Philippine Undersecretary of Foreign Policy Maria Theresa Lazaeo reaffirming total U.S. intention to push the Philippines into a war with China. He reiterated the claim that the 1951 United States Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty includes a U.S. response to any Chinese “armed attack on Philippine ships in the South China Sea.” Matthew Miller, the spokesman for the State Department, repeated the pledge and the claim about the Treaty.
The comments referred to an incident in the South China Sea on June 16 in which the Chinese Coast Guard stopped Philippine Coast Guard ships from delivering goods to the grounded military ship on a shoal which has Philippine military onboard. China had worked out an agreement with the Philippine military on how to provide humanitarian aid to the soldiers, but the Marcos regime chose to break the agreement, with U.S. direction.
Meanwhile, the Biden Administration held an event with Japan on June 13-14 at the Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming called “Extended Deterrence Dialogue,” an annual event which began in 2010. The focus was explicitly nuclear weapons. The participants were deputy assistant level reps from State and Defense Departments, and their equivalents from Japan. Declaring the targets to be the “D.P.R.K.’s continued development of its nuclear and ballistic missile program and its growing military cooperation with Russia, as well as the P.R.C.’s accelerating build-up of its nuclear arsenal without transparency,” which is “undermining regional and global peace and security.”
The State Department read-out said that the meeting “advanced efforts to review Alliance conventional and U.S. nuclear capabilities contributing to regional deterrence,” and to “deepen Alliance political, diplomatic, and defense cooperation and further prepare the Alliance to defend against potential attacks and deter nuclear use.”
They also conducted a tabletop exercise, without saying who was targeted, although it certainly was both North Korea and China, “to increase mutual understanding of potential courses of action to enhance deterrence and cooperation in a specific crisis scenario.”
