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The Philippines should enhance its three-way cooperation with the United States and Japan to “reestablish its credibility on the world stage,” analysts said.

Dr. Charmaine Misalucha-Willoughby, associate professor of International Studies at De La Salle University, said trilateral cooperation would be advantageous for the Philippines as it entails a convergence of interests among the three countries to push back against China’s “increasing assertiveness” in the South China Sea.

“In that sense, trilateral cooperation serves to reestablish Philippine credibility on the world stage,” she added.

The general direction of the country’s foreign policy under President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. is focused primarily on strengthening defense and economic cooperation with allies.

Top security advisers of the Philippines, United States, and Japan discussed plans to improve “trilateral cooperation” during their first meeting in Tokyo on June 16.

Misalucha-Willoughby said the Philippines should diversify its international relations, noting that forging these alliances is still part of pursuing an independent foreign policy.

“It’s okay to form partnerships, alliances, whatever kind of special arrangements with Japan, the United States, and any country. That would still be part or a function of our pursuit of an independent foreign policy if it would serve our national interests,” she added.

Gregory Poling, director of the Southeast Asia Program and Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he is anticipating progress on a reciprocal access agreement (RAA) between the Philippines and Japan, which is a military deal similar to the Philippines and the United States Visiting Forces Agreement as part of efforts to boost security in the Indo-Pacific region.

Poling also noted that Japan had modified its overseas development assistance guidelines to allow it to engage in strategic investments, which would be focused on maritime security, adding that the Philippines would be at the “top of that list.”

He said all these engagements, whether trilateral, bilateral, or quadrilateral, have to go beyond just the military sphere to boost the “Philippine capabilities to confront Chinese gray zone coercion.”

“If the US and Japan can both make good on the diplomatic and people-to-people economic promises that we made, then we’re going to see that amplified–the effect of our security cooperation,” he added.

For his part, Keio University professor Ken Jimbo said if the legal constraints will be waived between Japan and the Philippines through the negotiation of the reciprocal access agreement, then it creates many opportunities for wider regional cooperation.

“Trilateral cooperation among United States, Japan, and the Philippines, and also the Philippine-Japan leg of cooperation, are developing in tandem with slightly different focuses, and I think Japan is ready to increase our robust cooperation with the Philippines with the shared goal that we will increase our regional deterrence and also to create better capacity for our three partners with each other,” he said.

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