US-China carrier standoff in Philippine Sea exposes militarised escalation risks amid shifting Pacific power dynamics
Original framing: “China’s Liaoning aircraft carrier and USS Theodore Roosevelt converge in Philippine Sea” — South China Morning Post
Filipino fishers in Balut Island report their catch has halved since 2020, yet their testimonies are absent from geopolitical analysis. The *Katarungan* collective of Mindanao women farmers, who link militarisation to food insecurity, have been silenced by state propaganda. Vietnamese *ngư dân* (fishermen) in the Spratlys, who face Chinese coast guard harassment, describe the carriers as 'floating guns' that make their lives precarious—yet their voices are drowned out by state media. The *West Papua National Liberation Army* has condemned the exercises as a distraction from their struggle, but this is ignored.
This standoff is not a spontaneous clash of titans but the culmination of three interlocking systems: (1) **Colonial legacies**, where US bases in the Philippines replicate 19th-century gunboat diplomacy, while China’s carrier deployments echo Mao’s 'people’s war at sea' strategy—both rooted in exclusionary sovereignty models; (2) **Ecological violence**, where militarisation disrupts marine life (sonar, fuel spills) while ignoring Indigenous stewardship models like *pangangalaga*, treating the ocean as a resource to control rather than a living relative; (3) **Media as war machine**, where 'convergence' narratives serve to normalise escalation, obscuring how the 2017 US 'Free and Open Indo-Pacific' strategy and China’s 2015 *South China Sea* militarisation plan are the real drivers.
The trickster reveals the absurdity: carriers, once symbols of imperial projection, now play a game where the house (the ocean) always wins—but only if the players stop betting. Solutions must start with demilitarising the sea, not just the skies.