Neither neutral nor benign, Balikatan is a contemporary expression of U.S. military power in the Philippines, rooted in a relationship that stretches back to the 1898 invasion and the Treaty of Paris that transferred the archipelago from Spain to the United States.
Today, however, this relationship is no longer justified in openly imperial terms. Instead, it is framed through the language of humanitarian cooperation, disaster response, resilience, economic security, and regional stability. This shift makes military power appear acceptable, even necessary, as it becomes absorbed into everyday common sense.
The origins of this arrangement lie in the violent consolidation of U.S. colonial rule. Under the rhetoric of “benevolent assimilation,” the United States hijacked the victorious 1896 Katipunan Revolution, suppressed the First Philippine Republic and reorganized the archipelago into a colonial military outpost in Asia. Military domination was never presented as conquest alone, but as instruction, civilization, and later development. That grammar persists, only now translated into the vocabulary of “partnership”and “capacity-building”.
The formation of the Armed Forces of the Philippines under U.S. tutelage, particularly under Douglas MacArthur’s institutional influence, extended this dependency beyond formal independence. Doctrine, training, logistics, and intelligence remained deeply shaped by U.S. military structures. The Mutual Defense Treaty, followed by the Visiting Forces Agreement and the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, formalized this continuity. What once required permanent bases is now sustained through “rotational presence,” “agreed locations,” and “interoperability.” The terms change, but the structure stays the same.
Balikatan and Salaknib: spectacle and infrastructure
Balikatan, launched in 2001, is the most visible expression of this arrangement. It is presented as humanitarian preparedness and disaster response in a country marked by recurring crises. Yet beneath this framing are amphibious assaults, missile systems, and coordinated war simulations aligned with U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy. “Resilience” becomes the language through which war rehearsals are rendered ordinary.
Salaknib, initiated in 2016, operates in the background, steadily embedding U.S. doctrine and systems within the Philippine Army throughout the year.
Balikatan functions as the public-facing display of readiness, while Salaknib carries out the slower work of integration inside military institutions. One projects preparedness, the other produces it through routine training and coordination. Together, they form a continuous system in which escalation is performed publicly while alignment is built internally through everyday military practice.
Permanent infrastructure and economic reconfiguration
What appears as episodic military exercises is now underpinned by a growing permanent infrastructure. Fuel storage facilities, logistics hubs, repair sites, and prepositioned equipment point to long-term operational capacity rather than temporary cooperation. Framed as modernization of the alliance, these developments function as the material conditions for sustained U.S. military presence in Philippine territory.
This infrastructure is increasingly mirrored in so-called economic security initiatives such as industrial corridors and semiconductor hubs, including the Luzon Economic Corridor. These projects are presented as development pathways, but they are increasingly tied to U.S.-secured supply chains for semiconductors, artificial intelligence systems, and critical minerals. Economic development is being reorganized around strategic demand rather than national industrialization. This reconfiguration also carries significant environmental costs, as expanded logistics corridors, industrial estates, and energy-intensive facilities intensify land conversion, resource extraction, and carbon-intensive production across already vulnerable ecosystems.
Even civilian transport and port systems are absorbed into this arrangement. Roll-on/roll-off (ro-ro)shipping routes, warehouses, and inter-island logistics are increasingly used for military mobility, blurring the boundary between commercial circulation and military deployment.
Consolidation of alliance and geopolitical positioning
These developments mark what is often described as a more consolidated phase of the alliance—less episodic, more embedded. The question this raises is not simply how deep the integration has become, but what it is being prepared for.
As Philippine territory is increasingly configured as a forward operating platform, it becomes entangled in tensions over the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. The language of collective defense obscures the asymmetry: the Philippines is not simply defending territory, but being positioned within a wider architecture of U.S. strategic projection.
It is within this context that opposition to Balikatan and the broader and rebranded U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy—formerly dubbed the “Pivot to Asia”, the framework for U.S. geopolitical expansion in the region—must be understood. China and the Philippine national-democratic left both oppose these developments, but not on the same analytical grounds. China’s position is primarily state-based and geopolitical: it reads Balikatan as part of U.S. containment and strategic encirclement, responding within the framework of inter-state rivalry and balance of power.
The Philippine national-democratic position advances a broader and more layered critique. It foregrounds not only geopolitics but also class relations. Imperialism is understood as a global system of accumulation that structures unequal relations between imperialist centers and colonies and semi-colonies. From this standpoint, the Philippines is not merely caught between powers, but incorporated into a hierarchy of production and control in which labor, land, and resources are subordinated to US imperialist interests.
The burden of this subordination is unevenly distributed. Workers are absorbed into low-wage export production systems tied to foreign supply chains. Peasants and fisherfolk are displaced by infrastructure, mining, and militarized zones. Indigenous communities face intensified encroachment through extractive and strategic projects. What is framed as development translates into dispossession and insecurity at the level of everyday life.
Militarization, internal war, and counterinsurgency
External military integration cannot be separated from internal conflict. The conditions that enable the Philippines to function as a strategic platform also sustain prolonged internal war.
Imperialist war is driven by the expansion of markets, control of resources, and geopolitical positioning. It depends on centralized command and technological superiority, with smaller countries functioning as sites of projection and support. In this configuration, the Philippines is not a sovereign military actor but a supporting terrain. The scale and frequency of Balikatan compared to other Southeast Asian countries underscores this exceptional positioning within U.S. strategy.
At the same time, internal armed conflict takes shape through people’s protracted war, led by the New People’s Army under the Communist Party of the Philippines. It emerges from landlessness, inequality, foreign domination, and state violence. It is oriented not toward expansion but toward national liberation and social transformation, grounded in mass participation and the assertion of sovereignty and self-determination.
The connection between these formations is structural. The same bureaucratic and militarized state apparatus that enables foreign military access also conducts counterinsurgency operations internally. Military training, intelligence systems, and civil-military coordination developed under “disaster response” frameworks are repurposed for surveillance and combat in rural and indigenous areas.
Communities near military sites and training areas experience displacement, restricted mobility, and intensified surveillance. Civilian infrastructure is increasingly integrated into military logistics, making the distinction between civilian life and military space increasingly unstable in practice.
Peace and development as the language of war: from Pax Americana to Pax Silica
Balikatan and Salaknib are part of a broader restructuring in which economic planning is drawn into the orbit of military strategy.
Initiatives such as Pax Silica extend this logic into the economic sphere. Framed as industrial modernization centered on semiconductors and critical technologies, it links mineral extraction, electronics production, and assembly into U.S.-aligned supply chains. These materials are essential to modern warfare—embedded in surveillance systems, missile guidance, drones, and communications infrastructure. Their extraction and processing also carry significant environmental costs, intensifying land conversion, water stress, and ecosystem degradation in mining and industrial zones tasked with supplying global technology and military supply chains.
This must be situated within the historical frame of Pax Americana, the postwar imperial order that presented itself as “peace” while structuring a global system of war-making, intervention, debt dependency, and unequal exchange. Under Pax Americana, stability was maintained through military alliances, base networks, and economic discipline imposed on postcolonial states. It was a form of peace grounded in permanent war and structural extraction.
Pax Silica reproduces this logic in contemporary form. It extends Pax Americana into technological supply chains, positioning the Philippines as a site for extraction, assembly, and logistical support within a U.S.-centered system of production and security. Both operate through the language of order, development, and security, while masking the underlying militarization of economies and the extraction of value from the Global South. Pax Americana and Pax Silica are not separate logics but successive forms of the same imperial structure.
For the Philippine national democratic movement, these developments expose a central contradiction: the language of aid, security, and development is being used to deepen war, dependency, and structural subordination. The struggle is not only against foreign military presence, but against the system that enables it—where imperialism and bureaucratic capitalism converge.
To resist being drawn into imperialist war requires confronting the internal conditions that make such alignment possible. Sovereignty cannot be reduced to foreign policy orientation; it requires transforming the social order that continues to bind the Philippines to U.S. imperialism. #
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