By Dean de la Paz
FOR more than half a century, especially since the millennial crossover, two of the most aggressive geopolitical forces have been disrupting lives across the planet. Their indomitable goal is substantial world domination.
The first is the expansion of a radical religious ethos evident in Europe where borders remain porous, virtually open to a non-assimilative religious counterculture. It is a train wreck in slow motion. While Islam is one of the oldest, highly revered and one of the most respected among the world’s major religions, there are those who have radicalized it and turned it militant. Openly declaring a global overthrow, its militants have painted their religion as aggressively invasive. Their goal is to reinstall an anachronistic world order not necessarily based on economic merit, modernization, piety and the prospects of harmony and peaceful coexistence as Islam teaches but based on their fiery rhetoric, on convoluted concepts employing inflammatory pseudo-theocratic shibboleths.
Look no further than The Big Apple. This January 2026, the installation of a smooth-talking yet avowed radical and militant Shia Islamist in New York City, the United States’s center of free enterprise and capitalism has been hailed by Liberals as a bellwether for similarly governed American constituencies such as Minneapolis that hosts the largest population of non-citizen Suni Muslim Somalis outside Somalia itself.
In the Philippines, in resource-rich Mindanao, in 2008, the government attempted to divide and sell-off a huge part of sovereign territory from Tawi-Tawi to Palawan to secessionist control. Quickly declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, it exposed the extent of betrayal that some of our highest leaders employ. This is the same strain of duplicity we will see in the West Philippine Sea or WPS.
In the WPS, the threat of co-opting foreign subjugation comes in the form of the Chinese control of our aquatic resources, from fishing grounds to seabed manganese deposits, submarine oil and gas reserves, to the erection of military platforms on artificial islands to strategically hinder our freedom of navigation and install fully-armed offensive fortresses.
The resurrection of communism and its hybrid diluted predicate, socialism, is the second of those global expansionist forces.
Historically spread not by its economic allure but more by overwhelming military force and aggression, despite its continuing economic failures in contrast to Western Capitalism, its Russian and Chinese autocracies continue to foment instability in the European and Asian hemispheres as part of its overthrow strategy.
Simply analyze communism’s requisite command economy and its attendant militarism that seeks to control all means of production and market behavior. From its inception to its modern-day iterations, focus on its dramatic historical counterpoints and the kind of iron-fisted power its unelected leaders wield to assert dominance.
Read their personal histories from Joseph Stalin to Mao Zedong and Kim Il-Sung, through the various tribal chieftains in the African continent and the monarchical militants in the Middle East. See where there is shared megalomania among Iran’s Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
Analyze the history of subjugation from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall. Recall the 1991 dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; the perpetual protracted conflict and wars of the Red Army and its facsimiles all over Asia, the communist despotism in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), the rise of Boko Haram and the constant warring of factions and jihad in Africa that continuously ravage a mineral rich continent.
On that last aspect of caustic conflict amid wealth, segue the abundance of resources to an analysis of betrayal in the WPS.
As reference, for ethnic Filipinos in the Marianas and the South Pacific the latent geopolitical aberrations inflicted by the Chinese from over 5,050 kilometers away on neighboring Tonga, Samoa and the Federation of States of Micronesia serve as ominous foreboding.
The exponential rise in Tongan and Samoan Chinese-initiated debt over GDP reeks of external subjugation despite unproductivity and sets the stage for an eventual debt trap. Past is prologue. China’s debt trap diplomacy that left Sri Langka’s critical assets at the mercy of China should have been warning enough.
Analize also the foreclosures on strategic livelihood infrastructure to the Chinese who click baited economic riches despite onerous consequences hidden inside China’s controversial Belt and Road initiatives — a tragic simile akin to the hollow belly of a cliché Trojan Horse.
Over the previous Philippine administrations starting from 2001, did not our highest executive attempt to place our national broadband service that links all government facilities and the armed forces under the control of Zhongxing Telecommunications Equipment Corporation, a Communist Chinese Party state-owned corporation?
In 2007, did not the Chinese-funded Laiwa Dam within protected tribal lands at the Sierra Madre mirror critical Chinese-built and funded infrastructure in Micronesia, Tonga, and Samoa?
Within that same decade did not the government subsequently surrender the largest single equity block of our nation-wide electrical transmission grid to the State Grid Corporation of China, another entity under the Chinese Communist Party?
Off our coasts allow us to cite specific threats in the WPS engineered by Philippine officials and executives of government owned and controlled corporations who insidiously co-opt albeit openly declare their actuations as “para sa inang bayan” (for the motherland).
Through at least three episodes of betrayal in the WPS, note the lurking omnipresence of the Chinese Communist Party and its strategic avatar, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation or CNOOC.
In 2005, under the same presidency that actively negotiated for the Chinese takeover of the Philippine government’s national broadband network, the president and chief executive officer of the Philippine National Oil Corporation or PNOC signed a Joint Marine Seismic Undertaking where large parts of oil and gas-rich areas of the WPS would be opened up to unsupervised exploration and its results shared with CNOOC.
Other than China, the JMSU likewise involved the Vietnam National Industry-Energy Group (PetroVietnam) which was fully under the Communist Party of Vietnam.
Now remember that China and Vietnam claim the Recto Bank in the WPS as theirs.
Given the overwhelming technical and financial superiority of CNOOC over PNOC it does not take an Einstein to figure out who benefits first from the JMSU.
Fortunately, the Philippine Supreme Court ruled as unconstitutional the lopsided wheeling-dealing. Wholly owned foreign corporations whose principals have hostile designs cannot explore Philippine natural resources without legal bootstraps and safeguards. The Supreme Court ruled that JMSU’s ownership provision ceded full control.
Unfortunately, attempts to compromise Philippine territory in the WPS did not end with that initial episode. Like a bad penny CNOOC would reprise its invasive role repeatedly.
Following a policy pivot towards China and a visit by Xi Jinping, the Duterte government mirrored essentially the same discredited and unconstitutional attempt by the former PNOC executive in 2005.
A Memorandum of Understanding between the Duterte administration and China set the terms for oil and gas development including joint exploitation in Philippine maritime areas. Not only would the generic term “maritime areas” cover the entirety of the WPS, but it would likewise include the Malampaya-Camago gas fields since the MOU encompassed both disputed and undisputed areas and allowed for separate customized cooperative arrangements and farm-outs on technical and commercial revenue-earning ventures.
Reprising the 2005 episode when the PNOC president negotiated to unconstitutionally cede to CNOOC, under the Duterte MOU, the CNOOC was again nominated as China’s representative to a prospective working group established to operationalize the joint exploration and exploitation of Philippine marine resources.
Now covering over two decades, the repeated attempts to rope-in CNOOC by Filipino government factotum is shamelessly relentless, unabashed and leads to economic sabotage.
One, both the 2005 PNOC-signed agreement and the Duterte MOU effectively surrender WPS resources to CNOOC thereby locking out and denying any entity including Filipino-owned corporations with the financial and technical capacity from developing Philippine resources.
Two, both attempts to place the WPS resources under Chinese control outrightly nullify the hard-fought victory of the Philippines at the Hague Tribunal with respect to our exclusive economic zone and continental shelf.
Three, both violate the Philippine Constitution and the Supreme Court’s ruling that demands “sole control and supervision by the State” of patrimonial assets.
Another attempt that could have allowed CNOOC a third opportunity to control the WPS gas resources was in 2019 when an inexperienced start-up incorporated overseas was allowed under the Duterte administration to gain significant control of the service contract covering the Malampaya Gas Fields.
Gas when liquefied is Liquefied Natural Gas. In 2018, the parent company of the Malampaya start-up had negotiated a $2 billion joint venture with CNOOC to develop LNG projects. None had come to fruition.
Across the United States and in the Asia-Pacific region, China is viewed as the greatest threat to world peace. Three decades of betrayal in the WPS attest to that.
Dean de la Paz is a former investment banker and a managing director of a New Jersey-based power company operating in the Philippines. He is the chairman of the board of a renewable energy company and is a retired Business Policy, Finance and Mathematics professor.
