When oil enters diplomacy, coherency often exits.
Leaders of China and member-countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations eased tension over the South China Sea May 18 when they announced agreement on a draft framework for a regional code of conduct.
The next day, one of the ASEAN leaders said he’d been threatened with war.
Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte said in a speech that at the China-ASEAN summit in Guiyang, Chinese President Xi Jingping offered a warning.
“If you force the issue, we’ll go to war,” Duterte said he was told.
The issue is a 2016 ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague upholding Philippine rejection of territorial claims by China.
“We intend to drill oil there,” Duterte said Xi told him, according to Reuters. “If it’s yours, well, that’s your view. But my view is I can drill the oil if there is some inside the bowels of the earth because it is ours.”
Earlier, Duterte had suggested joint oil and gas exploration by his country, China, and Vietnam. He also had indicated he wouldn’t rush implementation of the arbitration ruling and welcomed Chinese commitments for infrastructure investments in his country.
Duterte’s statement alleging a Chinese threat of war, repeated in a television interview after his speech in Davao, cannot have been welcome in Beijing.
And he made it the same day representatives of the Philippines and China held the first of what are to be twice-yearly bilateral meetings addressing South China Sea disputes.
Duterte might have taken his poke at Beijing to appease critics who dislike his approach to China. He’s been more conciliatory than his predecessor, Benigno Aquino.
The undiplomatic disclosure does balance a gesture Duterte made this month with joint exercises by the Philippines and US navies.
That annual show of force had been held in waters coveted by China after Aquino cautiously revived military relations with the US.
This year, the forces practiced war off the other side of Luzon.
(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted May 19, 2017; author’s e-mail: [email protected])