FOREIGN Affairs Secretary Alan Peter S. Cayetano said he will relinquish his post to his incoming replacement, the country’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York Teodoro L. Locsin Jr., on Wednesday.
For the remaining two days at the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), Cayetano said he would brief him about the foreign-policy thrust of the Duterte administration.
“One of the things I’ll be briefing Secretary [Teodoro] Locsin about is the ‘friends to all, enemy to none’ policy and about our new friends compared to old allies and friends,” Cayetano said.
Cayetano’s reference to “new friends” apparently refers to China, with which the Philippine government, particularly the DFA, had chilly relations from 2013 until 2016, after China occupied Scarborough Shoal, the traditional fishing grounds
of Filipinos.
The Philippines subsequently haled China before the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, which ruled in 2016 that China’s nine-dash line—the main basis of its sweeping claims of possession, by historical right, across nearly the entire South China Sea, is illegal.
The “old allies and friends” Cayetano was referring to is primarily the United States, the former colonizer and its partner in the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty.
When President Duterte declared his pivot to China following his election in 2016, the icy relations between Manila and Beijing immediately thawed.
Dutrete’s first foreign foray was to Beijing, instead of to Washington, D.C., as was the usual gesture of previous presidents.
Duterte and President Xi Jinping had an immediate liking for each other and the former Davao mayor was rewarded with pledges of multimillion-peso soft loans to finance his “Build, Build, Build” infrastructure program.
Cayetano, meanwhile, said he will also apprise Locsin of the pending agreements between the Philippines and China regarding the possible joint exploration of hydrocarbon deposits in the West Philippine Sea/South China Sea.
“There are many agreements that we’ve been working on and one of this is the joint exploration but it shouldn’t be taken by itself,” said the DFA chief.
“We are also discussing the coast guard-to-coast guard agreement, the marine environment protection agreement, so we’re finding ways to make the SCS and WPS as an area of cooperation of peace rather than an area of confrontation and
conflict,” he added.
Cayetano said he will discuss these issues with Locsin over lunch on Tuesday.
“I can say it’s looking good from [the] legal, moral, standpoint of protecting territorial rights and economic rights,” he said of the potential joint exploration agreement with China.
Chinese Ambassador Zhao Jianhua, interviewed recently by BusinessMirror, said that both sides have realized that “first and foremost is the stability in the South China Sea.”
“In the meantime, it is in our common interests to explore the possibility of joint exploration which will be mutually acceptable,” he said at the 69th Founding Anniversary of The People’s Republic of China in Makati
Zhao said both sides haven’t come to a conclusion yet, “but both sides are serious in the possibility [of] joint exploration.”