Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has offered to remove a U.S. missile system from the Philippines if China halts what he called its “aggressive and coercive behavior” in the disputed South China Sea.
Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20250131021333/https://apnews.com/article/china-philippines-us-missile-system-d2d7aeeaeef0ea9d93f105ae6614ab02
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I’m going to give ph a benefit of the doubt. the missile system talked about is a mid range missile and afaik is incapable of delivering nuke payload or even effective if they added some nuke payload in it. they only have 16 of it installed, the rationale i think is that it may give them some ground to ask china to stop harassing fishing vessel without escalating and makes west taiwan looks bad without much compromise to its naval defences.
another angle to look at it is that maybe ph is trying to distance to the us influence and maybe its just a politic talk to get other source of defence system capabilities from other part of the world.
personally, i think south east asia and taiwan need its own harassing system developed and deployed to counter west taiwan harassment. nobody want escalation but they should be able to give same response if provoked.
That’s a terrible idea that we’ve seen play out countless times now.
Here’s how it will go down.
- Fool offers to disarm in exchange for a promise of peace from the aggressor
- Aggressor promises
- Fool disarms
- Aggressor aggresses
- shockedpikachu.jpg
Salt II was a great idea since the USSR collapsed and nobody was getting paid to guard the nukes sitting in cardboard boxes. But then Putin took over, and Luigi missed his cue, and Navalny got executed for returning to Russia.
WMDs are great and all, but the real race is probably towards ICBM warhead / missile shields now that everyone has WMDs.
But yeah, disarming would be a mistake against China.
Do the Philippines get Ukraine there? We have a fantastic example of why you don’t disarm yourself to appease a country like China, Russia, Kiribati, and America.
Seems like a horrible move, like when Ukraine gave up their nukes.
