Suchergebnisse

L'intégration des logiques paysannes dans les projets de développement durable est devenue une requête incontournable ces dernières années. Or les savoirs paysans sont mal connus et mal répertoriés. Cet article présente les resultats d'une approche méthodologique opérationnelle, élaborée dans une région aride du Maroc, dans l'objectif d'apporter des renseignements permettant à la fois, la caractérisation des principaux indicateurs qui expliquent l'usage de la ressource naturelle en milieu aride, et la spatialisation de l'appréciation des potentialités des terroirs par les pasteurs. Deux exemples de cartes sont proposés à titre d'illustration : la végétation saisonnière, qui reste l'un des indicateurs fondamentaux pour l'exploitation des espaces ces par les nomades, et l'aspect de la surface des sols, qui est aussi déterminant dans la répartition de l'utilisation des terroirs en fonction des races animales. Cette représentation rend le regard porté par les paysans sur les ressources naturelles accessible aux différents acteurs du développement. Il peut ainsi être plus facilement évalué, critiqué, valorisé, complété, exploité et diffusé.

Der Beitrag stellt ein qualitatives methodisches Verfahren vor, mit dem in gewissen Grenzen auch vorsprachliche Erfahrungsbilder darstellbar und kommunizierbar werden. Das Verfahren besteht aus einer offenen und unstandardisierten Datenerhebungsmethode, mit der innerhalb einer Personengruppe Erfahrungen mit bestimmten Orten oder räumlichen Situationen sichtbar gemacht werden. Die Datenerhebung erfolgt im Zusammenhang mit bildstellenden Spielszenen, deren Konstellationen zusammen mit sprachlichen Erinnerungsbildern protokolliert werden. Auf Grundlage dieser szenischen Protokolle werden in der "spielenden" Gruppe Assoziationen und Zusammenhänge zu anderen Erfahrungen zusammengetragen, segmentweise analysiert und daraus schließlich gemeinsame Lesarten des gewählten Ortes bzw. Raumes als Interpretation entwickelt. Die Autorin nennt dieses Verfahren "Szenische Rekonstruktion". Im Beitrag verweist sie auf beispielhafte Durchführungen dieses Verfahrens im Rahmen von universitären Lehrveranstaltungen oder Tagungen/Workshops. Weiter werden Vorgängermethoden, die aus verschiedenen wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen stammen, vorgestellt und die Relevanz des daraus neu entwickelten raumanalysierenden Verfahrens für die Planungspraxis diskutiert.

Aus jugoslawischer Sicht

On the evening of March 15, 1968, members of the Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, were briefed by their commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina, on a planned operation the next day in an area of Quang Ngai Province, South Vietnam that they knew as "Pinkville." As unit member Harry Stanley recalled, Medina "ordered us to 'kill everything in the village.'" Infantryman Salvatore LaMartina remembered Medina's words only slightly differently: they were to "kill everything that breathed." What stuck in artillery forward observer James Flynn's mind was a question one of the other soldiers asked: "Are we supposed to kill women and children?" And Medina's reply: "Kill everything that moves."The next morning, the troops clambered aboard helicopters and were airlifted into what they thought would be a "hot LZ"— a landing zone where they'd be under hostile fire. As it happened, the Americans entering My Lai encountered only civilians: women, children, and old men. Nevertheless, the soldiers of Charlie Company carried out Medina's orders with horrifying precision.Over four hours, members of Charlie Company methodically slaughtered more than five hundred unarmed victims, killing some in ones and twos, others in small groups, and collecting many more in a drainage ditch that would become an infamous killing ground. They faced no opposition. They even took a quiet break to eat lunch amid the carnage.An Army inquiry into the killings eventually determined that thirty individuals were involved in criminal misconduct during the massacre or its cover-up. Twenty- eight of them were officers, including two generals, and the investigation concluded they had committed a total of 224 serious offenses. Only one man was ever convicted of any wrongdoing: Charlie Company's Lieutenant William Laws Calley Jr., who died on April 28 in hospice in Gainesville, Fla, according to Social Security Administration records. He was 80.It took one year and the herculean efforts of a whistleblowing 22-year-old Vietnam veteran named Ron Ridenhour and the painstaking investigative reporting of Seymour Hersh, who published newspaper articles about the slaughter, to expose the My Lai massacre.The Pentagon, for its part, consistently fought to minimize what had happened, claiming that reports by Vietnamese survivors were wildly exaggerated. At the same time, the military focused its attention on Calley, the lowest ranking officer who could conceivably shoulder the blame for the massacre.Calley was sentenced to life in prison for the premeditated murder of not less than twenty- two civilians, but President Richard Nixon freed him from prison and allowed him to remain under house arrest. Calley was eventually paroled after serving just forty months, most of it in the comfort of his own quarters. He then worked as a jeweler in Georgia for many years and refused to comment about the massacre. In 2009, he finally offered an apology. "I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families," he said before a Kiwanis Club, in Columbus. "I am very sorry."By the 2000s, the My Lai massacre had mostly been forgotten and whatever public memory existed had been colored by official efforts to shift responsibility for the crime to Calley. Decades after the massacre, Ridenhour would sum it up this way:At the end of it, if you ask people what happened at My Lai, they would say: "Oh yeah, isn't that where Lieutenant Calley went crazy and killed all those people?" No, that was not what happened. Lieutenant Calley was one of the people who went crazy and killed a lot of people at My Lai, but this was an operation, not an aberration."To deprive their Vietnamese enemies of food, recruits, intelligence, and other support, American command policy turned large swathes of rural South Vietnam into "free fire zones," subject to intense bombing and artillery shelling, that was expressly designed to "generate" refugees, driving people from their homes in the name of "pacification." Houses were set ablaze, whole villages were bulldozed, and people were forced into squalid refugee camps and filthy urban slums short of water, food, and shelter. The amount of killing was immense.Far south of My Lai, in South Vietnam's heavily populated Mekong Delta, Operation Speedy Express was one such nightmare for civilians. An investigation by Newsweek reporters Kevin Buckley and Alexander Shimkin found that during the operation, which lasted from December 1968 to May 1969, the U.S. 9th Infantry Division reported killing 10,899 enemy troops but recovered only 748 weapons. (By comparison, South Vietnamese forces fighting alongside the 9th—long disparaged for their lack of combat prowess — had captured more than 10 times as many weapons.) A whistleblower from the 9th Infantry Division explained that many of those enemy dead were actually civilians. "A battalion would kill maybe 15 to 20 a day. With 4 battalions in the Brigade that would be maybe 40 to 50 a day or 1200 to 1500 a month, easy," he wrote in a letter to top Army brass. "If I am only 10% right, and believe me its lots more, then I am trying to tell you about 120–150 murders, or a My Lai each month for over a year."Perhaps the clearest evidence that the My Lai massacre was a product of command policy and not merely the poor leadership of Calley; "an operation, not an aberration" as Ridenhour put it, was a mission which was conducted by a completely different unit on the same day as the My Lai massacre, at the same time, and not very far away.While members of Charlie Company were herding terrified villagers into the infamous drainage ditch, the men of Bravo Company, 4th Battalion, 3rd Infantry, were sent to the nearby coastal hamlet of My Khe. Like the soldiers who entered My Lai, Company B encountered no enemy forces as they approached and saw only civilians — mostly women, children, and old men. Nevertheless, Lieutenant Thomas Willingham had his two machine gunners pour preparatory fire into the enclave. When the machine guns stopped, the Americans entered the hamlet. As Willingham's radioman, Mario Fernandez was in a position to see everything his commander did. According to Army documents, Fernandez said that the first men into the hamlet indiscriminately sprayed the area with rifle fire. Then the rest of the unit entered the village and Willingham gave orders to destroy it.Infantryman Homer Hall said that they moved through the village grenading bunkers without checking to see if civilians were sheltering inside. "They just threw it in there without calling them out," agreed unit member Jimmie Jenkins. According to Fernandez, when Vietnamese did come out from the bunkers, they were shot. "Some guys picked out a woman and two childs, two kids," Jenkins recalled. "They squatted down and I watched two guys cut them down." Other villagers were gunned down while attempting to run to safety. Infantryman Donald Hooton, according to an Army report, "killed an unidentified Vietnamese boy by shooting him in the head with, presumably, a .45 caliber pistol." An American who kept count said that 155 people died at My Khe, and an official U.S. Army investigation found "no reliable evidence to support the claim that the persons killed were in fact VC [enemy forces]."William Calley was a key participant in the My Lai massacre but had nothing to do with the slaughter that same day in My Khe nor later that year during Speedy Express. A 2008 study by researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, suggested that 3.8 million Vietnamese, combatant and civilian, were killed during the conflict. The findings lend credence to an official 1995 Vietnamese government estimate of more than 3 million deaths in total – including 2 million civilians. Calley played a role in only a small fraction of these deaths. And while in 2009 he stressed that he was only following orders — a defense which the military jury rejected at his court martial — William Calley did offer an apology (albeit late) for his crimes. It's far more than the Pentagon has done for all suffering and death it unleashed during the Vietnam War.

For the first time in history, a nuclear power plant (NPP) has become a military objective in the front line of a war. While previous military operations at the Iraqi Osirak reactor (1981), the Iranian Bushehr NPP (1987) and the Slovenian Krško NPP (1991) were somewhat ad hoc, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant continues to be disputed as a military target in the frontline of the war in Ukraine, a new and unprecedented situation for which the international community was unprepared. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP) was seized militarily on 4 March 2022 by Russia that decreed its ownership on 5 October 2022. Its six Russian-designed VVER-1000/320 reactors produced 27% of Ukrainian electricity before the war, but after September 2022 are in shutdown condition. Its location would be crucial for the electricity supply to Crimea and the Donbas region. The plant is under the command of the Russian state-owned Rosatom plus the regulator Rostekhnadzor. A new operating organization was implemented in October 2022 with part of previous Ukrainian Energoatom staff having signed contracts with Rosatom and lastly adopted Russian citizenship, together with additionally arrived Russian operators of Rosenergoatom. With the takeover of the plant, many Ukrainian personnel left the plant. In February 2024, Zaporizhzhia had about 4,500 employees compared to 11,500 before the war. Therefore, there are doubts on the present capacity to fully carry out maintenance and in-service inspection programmes due to strong reduction in staff, external contractors and shortage of spare parts. Attacks to energy infrastructures make the Ukrainian electricity grid fragile and unstable, and ZNPP depends on its ten power lines to feed electricity to safety systems and to cool irradiated fuel. In the event of a complete external power outage, the plant must rely on emergency diesel generators as last defence, what has occurred for the first time in the plant lifetime already eight times representing a huge reduction of safety margins in the plant. That risk is not exclusive of the Zaporizhzhia plant, since a complete loss of off-site power occurred simultaneously to all four Ukrainian NPPs in November 2022. Moreover, the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in June 2023 represents a massive loss of water reservoir available to cool the plant. Eleven groundwater wells were drilled within the perimeter of the site, but this is not a sustainable solution, especially if reactors should turn into operation. The dispute over the plant with military activity in the region, detonations, mines placed between the site's internal and external perimeter barriers, firing of rockets close to the plant, and even possible sabotage or terrorist actions, clearly increase the risk of accident. All these elements make the situation at ZNPP precarious and unsustainable in the medium term. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant needs to be protected since its gradual reduction in safety levels and margins is brewing a potential nuclear accident to the frustration of the international community. Although a Chernobyl-type accident cannot occur for physical and technological reasons, if specific essential systems were to be affected, there would be risk of fuel meltdown scenarios with release of radioactive products, i.e. level 4 or higher on the international nuclear event scale (INES). Such release of radioactive elements could have, depending on its magnitude, a transboundary and indiscriminate impact affecting public health and environment in various countries. The world's reaction would have to be seen, but such a scenario would alter the course of the conflict, leading to possible outside humanitarian interventions and escalating the dimension of the war. Without a ratified treaty on non-aggression to nuclear facilities The actual situation at ZNPP exceed nuclear safety and security aspects and address issues of global concern. The 1949 Geneva Conventions were extended by the 1977 Additional Protocol I referring to international armed conflicts. Its article 56 addresses protection of facilities with potential impact to population. The Russian Federation revoked in 2019 its previous ratification in 1989 of that Protocol. And among other countries, the United States never ratified that Protocol and explicitly rejects that Article 56 in its Law of War Manual of the US Department of Defence. Nor does the 1979 Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material and Nuclear Facilities of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) focused on illicit trafficking and sabotage of nuclear materials and facilities but not covering military attacks to such facilities. These rules are ambiguous and confer a certain legal vacuum, which may formally mean that attacking a nuclear facility may not be illegal. Therefore, it is urgent to ratify a specific global convention or treaty on non-aggression against nuclear facilities to prevent them from being used as military targets. Even if in the madness of a war some country did not abide by such a norm, the very existence of ratified international rules should prevent the normalization of other potential attacks and delegitimize the possibility of justifying warlike actions against nuclear facilities in other crisis and regions of the world. Attempts addressing the need to prohibit armed attacks on nuclear facilities failed in recent IAEA General Conferences and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference. If conventional nuclear fission power should continue producing electricity for the world, the international community must ensure that its facilities remain strictly outside any armed conflict. Absence of international nuclear safety standards for armed conflicts In the same way that the Chernobyl catastrophe accelerated further development of IAEA nuclear safety standards, and the Fukushima accident triggered several nuclear safety action plans under IAEA and Euratom, this war should legitimise the IAEA to establish nuclear standards for armed conflicts, presently not included in its mandate from the United Nations. After the outbreak of the war, the International Atomic Energy Agency established seven pillars of nuclear safety and security to assess risks in wartime contexts. When the IAEA —sent by the UN Security Council— arrived in Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in September 2022 concluded that all those pillars were compromised, recommended specific actions plus the establishment of a safety protection zone without military equipment around the plant and established shifts of nuclear safety inspectors. Since that demilitarised safety protection zone was not achieved, the UN Security Council further endorsed in May 2023 five concrete principles established by the IAEA, essential for averting a catastrophic incident at ZNPP. Even though the drone detonations to the ZNPP site on 7 April did not damage safety systems, they represent a clear violation of the referred essential principles and increase the risk of severe accident. Moreover, a full unrestricted access of IAEA inspectors to all equipment is not granted, which also limits the ability of IAEA to confirm the compliance of those five principles, being one of them that ZNPP cannot be used as storage or seating for heavy weaponry or military personnel. It is considered that the mandate of the IAEA, should be rethought and adapted to fully develop safety and security standards for armed conflict environments. In this regard, the IAEA Safety Standards Commission is assessing the progress of a working group established in July 2022 analysing that issue. The IAEA continues seeking greater engagement and commitment from the international community. In theory, nobody wants a nuclear accident, but both contenders accuse each other of misinformation and of even preparing sabotage or terrorist actions. With several safety margins decreasing, the International Atomic Energy Agency stated that the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is in a kind of grace period that is not infinite, and that there is no place for complacency or to believe that everything is stabilized. Time is playing against nuclear safety, so that a possible slow-motion accident cannot be excluded and the international community must be able to act before it happens.Keywords: Ukraine, Zaporizhzhia, nuclear, conflict, IAEA, Chernobyl, safetyAll the publications express the opinions of their individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of CIDOB as an institution.

For the first time in history, a nuclear power plant (NPP) has become a military objective in the front line of a war. While previous military operations at the Iraqi Osirak reactor (1981), the Iranian Bushehr NPP (1987) and the Slovenian Krško NPP (1991) were somewhat ad hoc, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant continues to be disputed as a military target in the frontline of the war in Ukraine, a new and unprecedented situation for which the international community was unprepared. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP) was seized militarily on 4 March 2022 by Russia that decreed its ownership on 5 October 2022. Its six Russian-designed VVER-1000/320 reactors produced 27% of Ukrainian electricity before the war, but after September 2022 are in shutdown condition. Its location would be crucial for the electricity supply to Crimea and the Donbas region. The plant is under the command of the Russian state-owned Rosatom plus the regulator Rostekhnadzor. A new operating organization was implemented in October 2022 with part of previous Ukrainian Energoatom staff having signed contracts with Rosatom and lastly adopted Russian citizenship, together with additionally arrived Russian operators of Rosenergoatom. With the takeover of the plant, many Ukrainian personnel left the plant. In February 2024, Zaporizhzhia had about 4,500 employees compared to 11,500 before the war. Therefore, there are doubts on the present capacity to fully carry out maintenance and in-service inspection programmes due to strong reduction in staff, external contractors and shortage of spare parts. Attacks to energy infrastructures make the Ukrainian electricity grid fragile and unstable, and ZNPP depends on its ten power lines to feed electricity to safety systems and to cool irradiated fuel. In the event of a complete external power outage, the plant must rely on emergency diesel generators as last defence, what has occurred for the first time in the plant lifetime already eight times representing a huge reduction of safety margins in the plant. That risk is not exclusive of the Zaporizhzhia plant, since a complete loss of off-site power occurred simultaneously to all four Ukrainian NPPs in November 2022. Moreover, the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in June 2023 represents a massive loss of water reservoir available to cool the plant. Eleven groundwater wells were drilled within the perimeter of the site, but this is not a sustainable solution, especially if reactors should turn into operation. The dispute over the plant with military activity in the region, detonations, mines placed between the site's internal and external perimeter barriers, firing of rockets close to the plant, and even possible sabotage or terrorist actions, clearly increase the risk of accident. All these elements make the situation at ZNPP precarious and unsustainable in the medium term. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant needs to be protected since its gradual reduction in safety levels and margins is brewing a potential nuclear accident to the frustration of the international community. Although a Chernobyl-type accident cannot occur for physical and technological reasons, if specific essential systems were to be affected, there would be risk of fuel meltdown scenarios with release of radioactive products, i.e. level 4 or higher on the international nuclear event scale (INES). Such release of radioactive elements could have, depending on its magnitude, a transboundary and indiscriminate impact affecting public health and environment in various countries. The world's reaction would have to be seen, but such a scenario would alter the course of the conflict, leading to possible outside humanitarian interventions and escalating the dimension of the war. Without a ratified treaty on non-aggression to nuclear facilities The actual situation at ZNPP exceed nuclear safety and security aspects and address issues of global concern. The 1949 Geneva Conventions were extended by the 1977 Additional Protocol I referring to international armed conflicts. Its article 56 addresses protection of facilities with potential impact to population. The Russian Federation revoked in 2019 its previous ratification in 1989 of that Protocol. And among other countries, the United States never ratified that Protocol and explicitly rejects that Article 56 in its Law of War Manual of the US Department of Defence. Nor does the 1979 Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material and Nuclear Facilities of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) focused on illicit trafficking and sabotage of nuclear materials and facilities but not covering military attacks to such facilities. These rules are ambiguous and confer a certain legal vacuum, which may formally mean that attacking a nuclear facility may not be illegal. Therefore, it is urgent to ratify a specific global convention or treaty on non-aggression against nuclear facilities to prevent them from being used as military targets. Even if in the madness of a war some country did not abide by such a norm, the very existence of ratified international rules should prevent the normalization of other potential attacks and delegitimize the possibility of justifying warlike actions against nuclear facilities in other crisis and regions of the world. Attempts addressing the need to prohibit armed attacks on nuclear facilities failed in recent IAEA General Conferences and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference. If conventional nuclear fission power should continue producing electricity for the world, the international community must ensure that its facilities remain strictly outside any armed conflict. Absence of international nuclear safety standards for armed conflicts In the same way that the Chernobyl catastrophe accelerated further development of IAEA nuclear safety standards, and the Fukushima accident triggered several nuclear safety action plans under IAEA and Euratom, this war should legitimise the IAEA to establish nuclear standards for armed conflicts, presently not included in its mandate from the United Nations. After the outbreak of the war, the International Atomic Energy Agency established seven pillars of nuclear safety and security to assess risks in wartime contexts. When the IAEA —sent by the UN Security Council— arrived in Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in September 2022 concluded that all those pillars were compromised, recommended specific actions plus the establishment of a safety protection zone without military equipment around the plant and established shifts of nuclear safety inspectors. Since that demilitarised safety protection zone was not achieved, the UN Security Council further endorsed in May 2023 five concrete principles established by the IAEA, essential for averting a catastrophic incident at ZNPP. Even though the drone detonations to the ZNPP site on 7 April did not damage safety systems, they represent a clear violation of the referred essential principles and increase the risk of severe accident. Moreover, a full unrestricted access of IAEA inspectors to all equipment is not granted, which also limits the ability of IAEA to confirm the compliance of those five principles, being one of them that ZNPP cannot be used as storage or seating for heavy weaponry or military personnel. It is considered that the mandate of the IAEA, should be rethought and adapted to fully develop safety and security standards for armed conflict environments. In this regard, the IAEA Safety Standards Commission is assessing the progress of a working group established in July 2022 analysing that issue. The IAEA continues seeking greater engagement and commitment from the international community. In theory, nobody wants a nuclear accident, but both contenders accuse each other of misinformation and of even preparing sabotage or terrorist actions. With several safety margins decreasing, the International Atomic Energy Agency stated that the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is in a kind of grace period that is not infinite, and that there is no place for complacency or to believe that everything is stabilized. Time is playing against nuclear safety, so that a possible slow-motion accident cannot be excluded and the international community must be able to act before it happens.Keywords: Ukraine, Zaporizhzhia, nuclear, conflict, IAEA, Chernobyl, safetyAll the publications express the opinions of their individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of CIDOB as an institution.

On April 11th, 2024, US President Joseph Biden will host Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and the President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., in Washington, DC for the first US-Japan-Philippines trilateral summit. It aims to reaffirm "the ironclad alliances between the United States and the Philippines, and the United States and Japan." The expectation is that the trilateral will result in several significant announcements relating to AUKUS, the military structure of the US-Japan alliance, trilateral interoperability, and joint patrols in the South China Sea. Yet, above all, this trilateral is strategically significant not only for its policy announcements, but because it demonstrates another high point in the emerging "latticework" security architecture in the Indo-Pacific. US mutual defense treaties in the Indo-Pacific have traditionally been "hub-and-spoke," with each US ally having strong defense ties and alliances with Washington but not each other. This is unlike the collective security approach taken by NATO in Europe, where an attack on one would trigger a response from all. Relatedly, US relations with its two allies in Southeast Asia have experienced a particularly rocky period during the past decade, as US ties to Thailand remain lukewarm and the previous President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, had turned towards China. This compounded a traditional overemphasis in US security architecture and force posture on Northeast Asia, meaning that the United States has faced a strategic gap in Southeast Asia since the end of the Cold War. With Taiwan and the South China Sea as potential hotspots, a weak position in Southeast Asia is strategically challenging.However, under growing multidimensional threats from a revisionist China, the US-Japan-Philippines trilateral signals that the latticework is filling out in Southeast Asia to correct these problems. Importantly, Manila's own embrace of expanding security ties to other US allies and partners drives this development, lending it a "stickiness" that will ensure it can weather any future challenges in US-Philippines relations.The Philippines Under Marcos Jr.The Philippines' recent shift towards the United States and other allies and partners is a crucial strategic development after years of uncertainty. Upon taking office in 2016, former President Rodrigo Duterte immediately began courting China and threatening aspects of the longstanding US-Philippine alliance. The Philippines' turn towards Beijing under President Duterte raised serious concerns for observers in Washington. Yet, Duterte's efforts largely came to naught. China continued to apply pressure on the Philippines despite Duterte's attempts to come to some sort of arrangement in the South China Sea, all while promised Chinese economic investment largely failed to materialize. By 2022, Duterte's efforts to rebalance the Philippines had clearly failed to appease China. Riding on the outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte's domestic popularity, Ferdinand Marcos Jr.—the son of an ousted, former dictator—won the Philippines' 2022 election handily. However, his lack of policy details and ambiguous positioning during the race raised questions about how he would govern.Yet, upon taking office, Marcos soon quieted concerns about his foreign policy agenda and reversed the Philippines' course. Facing down continued Chinese gray zone coercion in the South China Sea, he quickly indicated that the Philippines would stand up against China and reembrace its strained alliance with the United States and ties with US allies and partners. Meanwhile, the United States invested heavily in repairing the relationship. This effort resulted in a variety of positive bilateral outcomes, the most significant being the expansion of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) and reaffirmation of the alliance. Building a Latticework Around the PhilippinesImportantly, building US-Philippines security relations is only one part of a larger picture. Although an Asian NATO isn't likely, nor are mutually obligated alliance treaties between US allies and partners, we are seeing the development of a latticework security architecture to replace the "hub-and-spoke" model in the Indo-Pacific, thus ensuring "integrated deterrence."US Indo-Pacific Strategy aims to forge closer relations between US allies and partners, all while encouraging their own efforts to deepen defense ties. A latticework structure enhances deterrence against China because it closes off opportunities for Beijing to buy off or coerce US allies and partners, deepens and institutionalizes government-to-government cooperation, and ensures that China has to think twice about taking aggressive action in the Indo-Pacific due to the size and depth of any potential coalition against it. Importantly, it extends beyond hard power issues into economic security, cyberspace, the information domain, and other policy areas.Over the past few years, the Indo-Pacific has witnessed the rise of a variety of security minilaterals and initiatives dedicated to building this out. From the Quad and AUKUS to the US-Japan-South Korea trilateral summit, the region is integrating across all aspects of national security, including defense industrial capacity, joint military exercises, technology development, and more.Given the Philippines' strategic location within the first island chain just south of Taiwan and its previous president's hostility to the United States, Manila's growing engagement in the latticework is a clear strategic win. Since Marcos began his term, the Philippines and Japan have both pursued the acquisition of long-range ballistic missile capabilities; Manila-New Delhi security relations have improved steadily, as has Manila-Hanoi cooperation; the Philippines and Australia signed a Strategic Partnership in 2023 with clear security implications; and Manila and Tokyo agreed to consider entering a reciprocal access agreement that could enable Japanese troops to operate in the Philippines. Conceptually, these arrangements integrate the Philippines more deeply into Indo-Pacific security architecture and enhance its deterrence against Chinese gray zone coercion. Importantly, this effort is not driven by Washington but by the Philippines own interest in securing itself and ensuring strong relations with a diversity of security partners.The Broader Implications of the US-Japan-Philippines Trilateral SummitThe upcoming US-Japan-Philippines trilateral sends important strategic signals regarding improved US-Philippines ties and Manila's engagement in the latticework security architecture. One, although domestic politics in Manila and its tendency to hedge in its foreign policy mean that Washington and Tokyo should not assume that the Philippines is forever in lockstep with them vis-à-vis China, the trilateral and other initiatives strengthen ties and render them "sticky." This reduces the risk of backsliding in the future back to the poor relationship of the Duterte period. Two, the involvement of Japan elevates the summit beyond what a bilateral presidential meeting would achieve. It's a sign of the latticework working as intended. Tokyo is increasingly committed to a forward-leaning security posture, particularly regarding Taiwan. Of course, Japan's defense policy changes will take time and remain limited given Japanese legal constraints, but Tokyo is taking unprecedented steps to increase its defense capabilities and commitments in the Indo-Pacific.Three, US security architecture and force posture in the Indo-Pacific is no longer as overweighted towards Northeast Asia. Building out the latticework in the Philippines fills crucial strategic gaps in Southeast Asia for the United States and its allies and partners. Crucially, US military access, enhanced logistics, and the prepositioning of equipment and supplies via EDCA, along with Japan's floated reciprocal access agreement, greatly build out US and allied force posture in Southeast Asia. All three of these developments increase deterrence against Chinese aggression in the South China Sea and Taiwan. The past few years have seen the US-Philippines alliance surge to new heights, and the trilateral sends an important signal of deepened resolve in the Indo-Pacific. The views expressed are the author's alone, and do not represent the views of the US Government or the Wilson Center. Copyright 2024, Indo-Pacific Program. All rights reserved.