“We are calling on Beijing to cease its provocative and dangerous behavior,” US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said on Saturday, two days before President Joe Biden invited his Filipino counterpart Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to receive in Washington DC. The State Department also warned that an attack on Philippine security forces or other vessels would provoke a US response.
“The United States stands with our Philippine allies in maintaining international maritime order and reaffirms that an armed attack in the Pacific Ocean, including the South China Sea, against Philippine armed forces, public vessels or aircraft, including those of the Coast Guard, invoke U.S. mutual defense obligations,” Miller said in the statement.
Aggressive tactics
The United States was responding to a near miss between Chinese and Philippine vessels off the Spratly Islands, the latest in a long line of shipping incidents between the two countries in the troubled South China Sea. The Philippines accused the Chinese coast guard of “aggressive tactics” on Friday following an incident during a Philippine coast guard patrol near the second Thomas Shoal in Spratly archipelago.
The Second Thomas Shoal is an atoll occupied by Flippins. A small Philippine military contingent lives there aboard a WWII-era American vessel that the Philippines deliberately grounded there in 1999 to buttress the Philippines’ territorial claims in the South China Sea.