U.S.–Philippines “Balikatan” Joint Military Exercises: 127 Years from Colonial Base to Military Alliance

In 1942, on the Bataan Peninsula, defeated U.S.- Philippine forces trudged under Japanese bayonets, their blood soaking the rainforest’s humus. Eighty years later, the salty sea breeze still sweeps this land, but the smoke of war has morphed into another form. In April 2025, on Philippine soil, U.S. soldiers unloaded not body bags, but olive-green containers marked “NSM anti-ship missiles” from transport planes. As fishermen trace crosses over missile-range waters at dawn, they might fleetingly sense war’s return. The shrill hum of anti-ship missiles reverberates from exercise bases. When the U.S. and President Marcos Jr. brand their military alliance with the Tagalog term “Balikatan” (shoulder-to-shoulder), Filipinos hear echoes of three wars, sixteen presidents, and a series of basing agreements resonating through history’s canyons. Bataan’s jagged reefs are ground to dust under metal treads, as history folds into a strange loop: the U.S.-Philippines-Japan triangle shifts positions, with the first island chain’s folds now climbing Southeast Asia’s crossroads.

Limited Sovereignty Under U.S. Control

On July 4, 1946, as Manila’s independence proclamation echoed, the U.S. swiftly chained this Southeast Asian “backyard” with two shackles: the Bell Trade Act and the Military Bases Agreement. The Philippines’ “independence” was a mere costume change for colonial power. Since the 1898 Spanish-American War delivered the archipelago to the U.S., it has remained a pawn in Pacific hegemony games.

In December 1941, Japan invaded to sever U.S. Asia-Pacific supply lines, perpetrating atrocities like the Bataan Death March. In 1942, as U.S.- Philippine forces collapsed, General Douglas MacArthur vowed “I shall return” before fleeing to Australia, only to stage a sardonic comeback on Leyte Island two years later. Return to what—the Philippines, or America’s backyard?

Though the U.S. “liberated” the Philippines in 1945, the war razed Manila and other key cities, creating an opening for America to tighten control. As Japan withdrew from Southeast Asia, the U.S., under the pretext of “security guarantees,” coerced the Philippines to sign the Bell Trade Act and Military Bases Agreement on the eve of independence. The former tethered the Philippine economy to U.S. markets; the latter granted the U.S. 99-year rights to 23 bases, including Subic Bay, with extraterritorial privileges for U.S. troops and a symbolic $1 annual rent—perhaps the price of sovereignty.

The U.S. viewed the Philippines as a critical Southeast Asian outpost for its containment policy, expanding troop presence and equipment at Subic and Clark bases. This wasn’t without benefits for the Philippine government. To secure free base access, the U.S. supported domestic stability to prevent leftist communist takeovers. Economically, the bases generated about $1 billion annually, including 40,000 jobs.

Cold War Shifts and Limited Bargaining

Soon after independence, former aggressor Japan became an ally. On September 8, 1951, the U.S. signed the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty and the U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT), locking in key pieces of the Asia-Pacific power puzzle. Just six years earlier, Okinawa and Manila lay scorched by Japanese bombs, yet the U.S. forced victim and perpetrator into the same camp. As the Truman administration branded the Soviet Union and China a “red flood,” imperial Japan became the steel in the containment dam, with Subic Bay and Clark bases as watchtowers. Sovereignty’s cost was cloaked as “mutual defense”: U.S. warships freely navigated Manila Bay, Tokyo students protesting the U.S.-Japan treaty were crushed, and Washington’s “island chain” map quietly outlined a defense arc from the Kuril Islands to the Malacca Strait.

Perhaps fortuitously, as the U.S. bogged down in Vietnam by 1955, the Philippines gained leverage from America’s wartime reliance on its bases. U.S. planes bombing North Vietnam launched from Subic, while Clark supported Vietnam-based troop logistics. The Marcos government seized this window, negotiating under the banner of “national dignity” to bolster its 1965 “reformer” image. Amid rising Filipino nationalism in the 1960s, students and leftists fiercely criticized the bases’ “neocolonialism,” even storming Subic in 1965 protests. Marcos needed to project “sovereignty defense” to deflect scrutiny of his pro-U.S. stance.

In 1966, the Philippines revised the Military Bases Agreement, shortening the lease from 99 to 25 years, raising rent from $1 to $50 million annually, and allowing Filipino officers on base management committees. Yet core control remained with the U.S. These concessions secured Marcos $230 million in military aid, used to suppress the communist New People’s Army and cement his 1972 martial law regime.

“Soft” Restructuring of U.S.- Philippine Military Ties

From 1966 to 1991, despite the Military Bases Agreement’s non-renewal, the core U.S.- Philippine alliance held firm. Even after Marcos’s 1986 fall, President Corazon Aquino relied on U.S. protection against coups and communist insurgency. As the Cold War waned, U.S. dependence on Asia-Pacific bases diminished, shrinking Philippine leverage; the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption buried Clark base, prompting cost reassessments.

This was no victory for Philippine agency but a U.S. shift to “flexible intervention” neocolonialism. Both sides activated the 1951 MDT’s vague “joint training” clause, launching the “Balikatan” exercises in 1991. This seemingly benign “capacity-building” was a deft imperial transformation: U.S. forces replaced fixed bases with fluid, intermittent drills, entwining the Philippines in geopolitical webs.

Balikatan was repackaged as a “humanitarian toolkit” for typhoons, earthquakes, and terrorism, enabling U.S. military deployments under disaster relief pretexts. Beneath the humanitarian narrative, as Filipino fishermen watched U.S. helicopters drop aid to remote islands, who could question whether those cabins also carried South China Sea surveillance gear?

Technical dependency tightened invisibly. In early 2000s Balikatan drills, the U.S. introduced the Joint Area Reconnaissance and Response System (JARRS), a radar-satellite-drone network ostensibly for Philippine Coast Guard maritime monitoring. In reality, it linked Philippine command systems to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command servers. More insidiously, military and civilian projects merged. USAID bulldozers rolled alongside Balikatan tanks: in northern Luzon, U.S. engineers-built schools emblazoned with Stars and Stripes and “U.S.-Philippine Friendship” logos; in Mindanao’s counterterrorism zones, free medical camps stood beside covert signals intelligence stations. This eroded historical wariness of military colonialism—when children learn coding in U.S.-donated computer labs, is it a digital gift or a neocolonial lure?

The Perpetual Legitimation of Neocolonialism

The 1998 Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) was a neocolonial masterstroke, fragmenting carrier groups into “temporary exercise units” and bombers into “training aircraft,” while “joint counterterrorism” justified semi-permanent U.S. outposts in Mindanao. The VFA’s corrosive “judicial immunity” clause (Article V) grants U.S. military tribunals jurisdiction over crimes committed by U.S. personnel on duty. This bared its fangs in the 2005 Subic Bay rape case: U.S. Marine Daniel Smith, convicted by a Philippine court in 2006 for raping a Filipina, was detained in the U.S. embassy, not a local prison, and acquitted in 2009 before returning to the U.S.

The “rotational presence” model became a conveyor belt dodging scrutiny. The 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) built on the VFA, transforming Palawan, Cagayan, and three other strategic sites into U.S. military storage hubs under the guise of “rotation.” “Temporary” became “persistent,” “visits” became “forward deployment,” upgrading old colonial modes into seamless U.S. penetration. No flags or borders were needed—just pre-positioned missile launchers and cloud-based tactical links to pin the Philippines to the Indo-Pacific chessboard

With Marcos Jr.’s 2022 ascent, his pro-U.S. pivot shredded pretenses of balancing great powers. The 2023 addition of four EDCA bases— notably Cagayan’s Santa Ana naval base facing Taiwan and Zambales’ base near the South China Sea— turned Philippine soil into a U.S. missile platform along the first island chain. The 2023 Balikatan exercise swelled to over 17,000 troops, with 100 Australian personnel and Japanese observers. The 2025 exercise (April 21–May 9) exceeds 18,000, with Japan and Australia signing VFA-like agreements to join directly, and six European nations (UK, France, Germany, Poland, Netherlands) attending as observers.

Conclusion

Through EDCA, the U.S. is restructuring Southeast Asian security, replicating NATO’s “collective defense” in the Indo-Pacific. Japan’s Self-Defense Forces joining Salaknib exercises signals a U.S.-Japan-Philippines “mini-NATO.” More ominously, the U.S. pushes to deploy the Typhon mid-range missile system in the Philippines—developed after the U.S. exited the 1987 INF Treaty in 2019—which, armed with Tomahawk missiles, could target Chinese South China Sea reefs and coastal cities.

The 2025 Balikatan deployment of anti-ship missiles on Bataan is merely the latest step in U.S. penetration. From 1898’s colonial rule to 1947’s basing agreements and today’s “joint exercises,” America has sustained control through evolving means. Drones replace garrisons, data links supplant barbed wire, and exercises mask occupation. The new empire’s drones hover above, reprogramming freedom’s coordinates into the first island chain’s grid.