Time to Start Looking

Six months of hard and often bitter negotiations have produced an agreement to increase what the United States pays for its military bases in the Philippines, but the talks left unsettled the question of what happens next to the 41-year-old treaty governing use of the strategic facilities. That treaty expires in 1991. If it isn’t extended Clark Air Force base and Subic naval base, the biggest American military outposts abroad, will have to be vacated. That means other sites would have to be found so that U.S. air and naval operations in the western Pacific and Indian Oceans could be maintained. Political prudence dictates that the search for these alternative bases should begin now in earnest.

Both the far left and right in the Philippines oppose extending the treaty. With some variations in their arguments both say that the American military presence perpetuates old colonial rule and is an insult to national sovereignty. Most Filipinos probably don’t agree. They are thought to want the U.S. presence to continue, recognizing the economic contribution the bases make directly, through compensation payments and the employment they provide thousands of Filipinos, and indirectly, through the off-base spending by 20,000 U.S. military personnel and their families.

The appeals of nationalism might nonetheless prevail over arguments about economic self-interest, not least because approval of any new treaty on the bases can be blocked by only nine members in the 24-member Philippines Senate. Treaty opponents already claim to have eight votes against it. Some of those votes could change if the United States agreed to a major boost in its total Philippines aid package. But there’s little reason to think that U.S. budget constraints two or three years from now would allow significant long-term increases in economic support for the Philippines. Relocating the bases, perhaps 1,500 miles or so east to American-controlled Guam and Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, would cost an estimated $5 billion or so.

Not long ago Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev proposed a swap. He offered to take Soviet forces out of the huge Cam Ranh Bay naval base in Vietnam if the United States pulled out of its Philippines bases. Washington didn’t think much of that offer. The time may be coming when events in Manila force it to think again.