The Philippines is a former American colony with 175,000 citizens living in Taiwan. The Batanes island chain, in the country's far north, is the closest allied territory to Taiwan. The Philippines sits along what strategists call the first island chain, the long archipelago extending from Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines to Borneo.
Ferdinand Marcos junior is president. He is term-limited and cannot run in the next presidential election in 2028. The Philippines has a dynastic political system: powerful families make up around 80% of Congress, one of the highest shares in the world. Celebrities are often elected, and politicians play up to the crowds on social media and in real life.
His vice-president, Sara Duterte, is likely to be the front-runner for the 2028 presidential election. The House of Representatives impeached her, accusing her of misusing public money and threatening to assassinate the president, but the Supreme Court struck down the impeachment complaints in late July 2025 and the Senate voted not to proceed with a trial. In midterm elections on May 12th 2025, voters denied Marcos the two-thirds majority required to remove her. She has a growing number of allies in Congress and may try to obstruct Mr Marcos, who could become a lame duck.
Sara Duterte is the daughter of Rodrigo Duterte, who as president from 2016 to 2022 limited the Philippines' military co-operation with America and cosied up to China. Rodrigo Duterte is now awaiting trial at The Hague on charges of crimes against humanity committed during a brutal drug war in his presidency.
In late July 2025 Marcos secured a trade deal with America under which Philippine exports face a tariff of 19%—only one percentage point lower than Trump's threat before the agreement, but Marcos billed it as a win. The Pentagon has asked the Philippines to support the deployment of new weapons on its territory; the much poorer Philippines would struggle to meet the 3.5% of GDP defence-spending target that America is pushing on its Asian allies.
The government thinks its cities need 7m more homes. Quality flats in Manila cost 20 times the median household income, according to the Urban Land Institute—a higher multiple than in Mayfair or Manhattan. In 2023 officials admitted they would not meet a goal of building 6m quality homes by 2028 and "recalibrated" the target to around 1m.
According to the World Risk Index compiled by the Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany, the Philippines is the most vulnerable country in the world to natural catastrophe. Its islands are hit by 20-odd typhoons a year, not to mention earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Two storms in early November 2025 killed hundreds and displaced millions. Two ministers resigned amid allegations of corruption over flood-control funds, prompting widespread protests.
Alice Guo, mayor of Bamban, north of Manila, was sentenced to life imprisonment on November 20th 2025 for human trafficking. She had been accused of running a sprawling scam operation with hundreds of trafficked workers. Harry Roque, a former human-rights lawyer and spokesman for president Rodrigo Duterte, fled the country after being accused of links to a scam hub near Manila; he is seeking asylum in the Netherlands.
The average farmer in the Philippines is 56 years old. A 2020 survey of Filipino paddy farmers found around two-thirds did not want their children to follow in their footsteps. The Philippines is part of a broader South-East Asian trend in which a third of all farm workers are 55 or older, up from less than a fifth a decade ago; agriculture in the region employs roughly 30% of all workers.
More than 90% of the Philippines' energy imports come from the Middle East. The country holds only about three weeks' worth of onshore oil supplies, according to analysis from Kpler, a data firm.
America remains popular in the Philippines. The country hosts annual military exercises with the United States. In April 2025 the US Marine Corps deployed the Navy Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS) to Basco, in the Batanes, for the first time. NMESIS is a small, light anti-ship missile system mounted on the back of a remote-controlled Humvee, with a range of 185km. The marines are working on a Tomahawk cruise-missile version that would extend the range to over 1,600km.
Many local officials in the northern Philippines are unhappy about the American military presence, fearing they will get caught in the crossfire of any conflict with China. A Chinese aircraft-carrier strike group sailed within three nautical miles of the Philippines' northernmost islands on April 22nd 2025, in response to the NMESIS deployment.
The Philippines is America's oldest military ally in South-East Asia. China has long sought to press the country into the Chinese orbit, using tactics that blur the line between influence-peddling and espionage. Since January 2025 the Philippines has arrested more than a dozen Chinese nationals and alleged Filipino accomplices on charges of espionage, including scouting military bases used by American troops under the Enhanced Defence Co-operation Agreement (EDCA), flying drones to snoop on the navy, and using an "IMSI-catcher" near the presidential palace and American embassy to intercept thousands of mobile communications.
Gilbert Teodoro junior is the defence secretary. He has noted that the Philippines "is a naturally hospitable country…a trusting country" whose trust has been abused by the Chinese authorities.
China's Communist Party has long sought to shape opinion abroad and gain access to key organisations through its United Front Work Department, a murky entity tasked with building authority overseas, especially among ethnic Chinese. Filipinos of Chinese descent number in the millions.
The provinces of Palawan and Cagayan sit in strategic spots: Palawan faces the South China Sea; Cagayan is less than 100km from Taiwan. Both host EDCA bases, have Chinese sister cities and maintain strong economic links to China. The Cagayan Economic Zone Authority (CEZA) has attracted $140m in foreign capital since 2011, mostly from China. Cagayan's former governor, Manuel Mamba, opposed the opening of new EDCA sites and is critical of President Marcos's hawkish policy towards China.
Scarborough Shoal consists of coral reefs enclosing a large lagoon about 135 nautical miles (250km) west of Manila Bay, within the Philippines' exclusive economic zone; it is the only maritime feature for a good distance. In 2012 China pushed Philippine vessels away and has controlled the area since with a constant presence of coastguard and fishing vessels. Between 2013 and 2015 China built seven military bases in the South China Sea by reclaiming land around specks farther south, three of them large air bases. In 2016 President Barack Obama told Xi Jinping that building a base on the shoal would cross an American red line.
China announced a national marine reserve at the shoal in September 2025. On September 16th 2025 Chinese patrol ships swarmed around it, blasting water cannon and injuring a Philippine coastguard sailor.
On August 11th 2025 a Chinese coastguard vessel accidentally rammed one of its own naval ships while pursuing a Philippine coastguard vessel near the shoal. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies reported that two Chinese coastguards probably lost their lives. Philippine coastguards captured the incident on video, greatly embarrassing China.
The Philippines has sought to get ASEAN to object strongly to China's bullying of its vessels in the South China Sea, but other members care less about distant maritime disputes. In June 2025 China banned Francis Tolentino, who had just stepped down as Senate majority leader, for proposing bills to delineate the country's maritime claims. A year earlier a Chinese coastguard crew armed with staves and axes boarded small Philippine naval boats, severing a Filipino sailor's thumb.
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