South China Sea: how Marcos Jnr’s pushback against Beijing turned him into ‘most sought after leader’ in US

“The sooner you make the call, the better for our relationship,” ambassador Jose Manuel Romualdez, a cousin of Marcos recalled in an interview. Biden called from Air Force One two days after the election, holding a friendly 10-minute exchange with Marcos that “really set the tone for our relationship with the United States,” Romualdez said.

The tone, from the US perspective, desperately needed changing. Rodrigo Duterte, who preceded Marcos had tilted away from Washington and repeatedly questioned the Southeast Asian nation’s decades-old alliance with the US.

“Many expected Marcos to shift back towards the Philippines’ traditional close ties with the US,” said Gregory Poling, director of the Southeast Asia Programme at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington DC think tank. “But he has gone much farther, undertaking a generational modernisation of the alliance to defend against Chinese aggression.”

Marcos’ outspoken pushback on China, highlighted by his efforts to publicise confrontations between the two countries in the South China Sea, has turned him into somewhat of a star among the US and its allies.

“I can feel it in DC, you know,” Romualdez said, where he is based. “He’s really the most sought after leader now, worldwide and in the United States,” the envoy said.

Biden’s phone call to Marcos in May 2022 was soon followed by high-profile visits from the US secretaries of state and defence, as his administration made it a priority to revive long-standing alliances in a bid to compete with China. Biden met Marcos on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September of that year, and two months later his vice-president was in Manila.

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