Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said the Philippines is stepping up cooperation with the United States and developing stronger mechanisms to defuse disputes with China. The Philippines is now carefully balancing its relationship with the superpowers of the United States and China.
“I learned an African proverb: When elephants fight, the grass loses,” Marcos said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal this week on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “In this situation, we are grass. We don’t want to be trampled on.”
China is the Philippines’ main trading partner, while the United States is the Philippines’ long-standing security ally, which makes the Philippine government reluctant to choose sides. “It’s a very precarious balance,” Marcos said.
The Philippines has been watching nervously as tensions in the Taiwan Strait escalate. Taiwan is a self-governing island backed by the United States that the Chinese government says is part of Chinese territory. In August last year, China conducted a large-scale military exercise around Taiwan for several days in response to the then US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Nancy Pelosi).
