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Hi, everyone! I’m Lora Kelley, and I am a new writer for the Daily. I’m thrilled to be working with Tom Nichols and the team to bring you the newsletter. I joined The Atlantic in an interesting week for the economy—after two years of runaway inflation, which led the Federal Reserve to crank up interest rates, the government announced on Wednesday that it would be pressing pause on its hikes for now. Today I explore a question that’s dividing economists: Whose fault is inflation, anyway—and why does it matter?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The fake poor bride

Car-rental companies are ruining EVs.

The choice the Philippines didn’t want to make

America can take a breath: Inflation is finally cooling off. It’s now hovering at about 4 percent, according to Consumer Price Index (CPI) data released earlier this week, down from the 9.1 percent peak in June of last year. But the Fed is saying that it would like inflation to be closer to 2 percent, and that it may raise interest rates again in the future to try to get the country there. Now that inflation has abated (for the moment), discussions have turned to how we got here.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell recently said that rising wages were not the principal driver of inflation. As economists, the media, and laypeople alike try to figure out whom to blame instead, fingers are pointing at the consumers who started spending large amounts of saved dollars and stimulus checks in 2020; at the corporations that have seen juicy profit margins after raising their prices; and, in Sweden, even at … Beyoncé?

Trying to understand the factors that fueled inflation is important, because whom we blame for inflation also shapes what we do about it. If inflation is caused primarily by overheated consumer demand, then it makes sense for the Fed to quell spending by hiking interest rates. But if corporations, rather than consumers, are driving inflation by raising their prices, then other tools may make more sense.

One conventional explanation is that widespread consumer spending started in 2020 and persisted in the years that followed, causing demand to explode and prices to spike. Some economists have called the influx of post-lockdown spending on goods and travel “revenge spending,” and recent data show that it is receding after two years.

The Fed has consistently raised interest rates in its past 10 meetings in part to get consumers to stop spending money—and so far, the hikes seem to be working. “The Fed has done the thing you would expect the Fed to do,” Chris Conlon, an economist at NYU, told me. “Right now, it looks like raising rates is starting to cool demand and temper expectations.” (Pulling this lever is imprecise, however, and can cause pain: High interest rates have triggered layoffs, especially in tech, and made it harder for a lot of people to afford big-ticket purchases such as houses and cars.)

Although CPI data show clear patterns in consumer spending and demand, another explanation, that corporations are fueling inflation by raising prices in order to increase profits, has been gaining steam in recent months. Some economists are taking a closer look at the idea that corporations’ profit margins could be playing a role in keeping inflation high—especially after recent earnings calls in which corporations reported that profits are up even as they are selling fewer goods.

Isabella Weber, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, argues that a host of geopolitical factors have provided “cover” for firms to raise prices. Weber refers to the phenomenon as “sellers’ inflation,” but others call this “greedflation,” “excuseflation,” and “profit-led inflation.” Companies wrestled back pricing power earlier in the pandemic—and consumers, seeing high prices at the gas station and everywhere else, came to expect higher prices. Now, some ask, are companies doing more than simply responding to costs, and instead just ramping up prices to pad their margins—and in the process, feeding inflation like a pandemic baker feeding sourdough starter?

“If you believe that big corporations are the ones who are pushing up prices,” Rakeen Mabud, the chief economist at the progressive nonprofit Groundwork Collaborative, told me, “then there are a lot more tools in our toolbox” to address the issue. “We can go way beyond the Fed,” she added. Those tools, she told me, include tax policies that target excess profits or incentivize productive investment in firms. “We’re really seeing a big rethink of some orthodox understandings of inflation and its causes,” she said.

Conlon, however, is interested in possible factors beyond greed that may be pushing companies to raise prices. “Strong demand will also generate rising prices, rising profits, higher output,” he told me. He and his colleagues recently published a paper that found that, from 2018 to 2022, there was no correlation between the companies whose markups have risen the most and the industries in which prices have risen the quickest.

The exact causes and dynamics of our current inflationary moment may take time to unravel—Conlon predicted that in a few years, we may have more information about how companies behaved these past few years. These data will be worth a close look, especially if shocks to the economy continue apace in years to come. It’s become a bit of a cliché to say that we are living in unprecedented times. But a rash of recent, intersecting crises—supply-chain snarls, the war in Ukraine, elevated gas prices, bird flu—did scramble consumer spending, leading companies to raise prices over the past few years. Things may stay strange. Understanding what happened could inform how we respond to future shocks.

I will leave you with some good news, after all this talk of disaster: Global inflation is not all Beyoncé’s fault, though Swedish economists said this week that her Renaissance tour in Stockholm caused a surge in local prices—“It’s quite astonishing for a single event,” one economist told the Financial Times. One person, even an amazing one, can’t single-handedly cause inflation. But her music can probably alleviate some of the pain of thinking through all of this.

Today’s News

After a multiyear investigation into George Floyd’s murder, the Justice Department released a report finding frequent instances of excessive force by Minneapolis police officers, and unlawful discrimination against Black and Native American people.

The gunman who killed 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 was convicted by a federal jury.

Several federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Energy, were affected by a global hacking campaign, according to officials.

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P.S.

I know I cannot compete with Tom Nichols when it comes to 1980s movie references. For everyone’s sake, I will not try. But I did happen to watch a film from 1987 during my time off between jobs that I liked very much. The Éric Rohmer movie, whose title translates from French to Boyfriends and Girlfriends, is a New Wave romantic comedy about, yes, boyfriends and girlfriends. But to my pleasant surprise, it was also about jobs, and how a new class of suburban young people was fitting work into their lives. Against a backdrop of pools and excellent outfits, the characters discuss bureaucracy, commuting into Paris, and having or not having a boss. I think a lot about “the future of work,” so it was fun to dip into the past of work too.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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Seven African leaders have paid their respects in Bucha, a town near Kyiv where hundreds of dead bodies were uncovered after Russian forces retreated.

A 28-year-old Ukrainian medic, Helena Popova, traveled from Lutsk to Kherson last Friday to help victims of the flood caused by the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam. She went “just to stay sane,” she told me. Across the Dnipro River, in her hometown of Oleshky, thousands of people, including her parents, younger sister, and grandfather, urgently needed food, evacuation, and medical attention.

There Oleshky was, less than ten miles away from her, across an expanse of river and floodwater. The Dnipro was the front line, and Oleshky sat on the Russian-controlled side. When Ukrainian boats tried to ferry help from the right bank to the left, the Russians opened fire. After a day of work in the Ukrainian-controlled area, Popova was soaking wet in her shorts and T-shirt. Now she stood in the rain, looking desolately across the water to where her loved ones lay beyond reach.

That Ukrainians can’t get help to their friends and family in the Russian-held flood zone is tragic but not surprising. Less explicable is the failure of international aid organizations, including the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which have been conspicuously absent from the Dnipro’s left bank. A little more than a week ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed his dismay at the agencies’ nonappearance: “They aren’t here; we have not had a response.”

[Anne Applebaum: The true purpose of Ukraine’s counteroffensive]

The trouble, as volunteers like Popova know, is that crossing the Dnipro is manifestly dangerous. On Tuesday, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs explained that Russia had “yet to provide the safety guarantees we need to cross the front line to the left bank of the Dnipro, including to Oleshky.” As a UN representative, Saviano Abreu, said to me, “Our priority is to keep negotiating.” But assurances from Russia are not forthcoming.

For Ukrainian volunteers who have been delivering food and rescuing people and animals for the past week, the UN’s timidity is maddening. Unsafe conditions have not stopped local efforts, at a cost in lives: On Sunday, Russia fired on a Ukrainian rescue boat, killing three people. In the Ukrainian-controlled part of the Kherson region, volunteers supply water and food and have evacuated thousands of victims; still, at least 10 people have died and 40 are missing. Kherson victims told volunteers that their houses filled with water in mere minutes.

At the pace the UN and the ICRC are moving, “it will be too late to rescue people soon,” says Roman Timofeyev, the manager of the Ukrainian Rescue Now foundation, whose 56 social workers and more than 100 volunteers help war victims.

The Russian-controlled side of the river has likely fared worse than the Ukrainian-controlled side. Popova has kept a haunting recording of the last phone call she had with her parents and 12-year-old sister, Vika, on June 6, the day the dam exploded. The family was walking through chest-deep water, and Vika screamed into the phone: “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to sink!” Her 70-year-old grandfather was trapped on an upper floor of a house whose first floor was entirely underwater. Popova’s mother told her: “People were on their roofs, screaming ‘Help, help!’ but nobody came.”

The Khutorishe neighborhood of Oleshky saw water levels rise above 16 feet and completely submerge the roofs of some single-story houses. One witness I spoke with on Saturday said that the current in her street was too powerful for even good swimmers to fight. She saw a neighbor die. Those who have made it out of the flood zone have taken their places in endless lines to collect humanitarian aid, Yulia Gorbunova, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, told me on Tuesday. There is not nearly enough to go around. “It is a catastrophe,” Gorbunova told me. “Nobody evacuates these poor people.”

[David Patrikarakos: Inside Ukraine’s nonviolent resistance: chatbots, yellow paint, and payoffs]

The slow work and scant presence of deep-pocketed international aid organizations has become the subject of bitter commentary in Ukraine. In one popular meme, the word useless is superimposed on a photograph of UN SUVs parked in Kyiv. Oleksandr Mosiako, the head of communications for the Ukrainian Rapid Response Group, sent me photographs he had taken himself of six UN SUVs. “These vehicles are prepared to drive in water more than a meter deep. But they have been parked for several months in the center of Kyiv, near a five-star hotel,” he told me. “They are useless.”

Michael Bociurkiw, a Ukraine analyst at the Atlantic Council, says that the international organizations’ response betrays “shameful indifference.” That there has been no rescue mission to the occupied territory in the full week since the dam attack is bad enough; in addition, he told me, “some world players do not dare to come out even with clear and strong statements that would condemn this new Russian war crime.”

Many Ukrainians distrusted the UN and ICRC even before this disaster. They see the agencies as adopting a posture of neutrality that prizes dialogue with Russia over the protection of Ukrainians. In April, UN Secretary General António Guterres visited Moscow to discuss humanitarian concerns in Ukraine with Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The visit played very poorly with the Ukrainian public, as did Lavrov’s subsequent visit to UN headquarters in New York City. Peter Maurer, the president of the ICRC, traveled to Moscow in the midst of the battle for Kyiv last year as a “neutral, impartial humanitarian actor.” Many Ukrainians rejected the suggestion that a humanitarian actor could be impartial in a conflict where one side had invaded its neighbor and was shelling civilians.

[Read: How Can Individual People Most Help Ukraine?]

The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement has autonomous naitonal organizations across the globe and involves the work of more than 10 million people. The Russian Red Cross, established in 1867, is one such society that could be rescuing victims in flooded areas of the Kherson region. But if it has done so, it has kept its efforts quiet; its website reports no such operation, and its representatives have not responded to requests for comment. A Human Rights Watch report released this week said that Russian authorities started conducting “sporadic evacuations” from Oleshky almost a week after the catastrophe.   

The Ukrainian Red Cross Society has been active in relief efforts since the start of the war, having distributed 8,800,656 kits of humanitarian aid and evacuated 308,338 civilians. But its members often find that ordinary Ukrainians confuse them with the ICRC and misdirect their outrage.

With regard to the flood victims, Anton Dubovyk, a coordinator’s assistant at the Mykolaiv branch of the Ukrainian Red Cross Society, does not think that the criticism of the ICRC’s slow reaction is entirely fair. “The ICRC has no access to Oleshky,” he told me. “They cannot hire tanks, helicopters, or armored boats to storm into Oleshky and rescue people.” His organization is doing what can be done, he said: “We have been providing medical care, humanitarian aid, and transportation for hundreds of evacuees of the Kherson region on this side of the river.”

According to Ukrainian reports, Oleshky, a town of 25,000 people, is currently 90 percent underwater. Other low-lying settlements in the Kherson region are in a similar situation. Every day now, Popova boards rubber boats, or aluminum motorboats that foreign NGOs have provided, and helps dress the wounds of flood victims, many of them farmers.

As the days go by without word from her family, she grows mystified by the purpose of international aid groups that seem so easily stymied by the conditions of war.

“This is a painful matter,” she told me. “Here we all count only on each other.”

An estimated 700,000 people are in need of clean water around the Nova Kakhovka dam as Kyiv speaks of ‘ecocide’.

On September 16, 1991, Senator Wigberto Tañada gave a soaring speech on the floor of the Philippine senate. The country’s president, Corazon Aquino, was proposing to sign a new military-base treaty with the United States. As the treaty came before the senate, lawmakers had “the awesome task of severing the last remaining shackles of colonialism in our motherland, the U.S. military bases,” Tañada said. “The sight of the last American warplane flying out of our skies, the last American battleship disappearing from our horizon, and the last American soldier being airlifted from our soil should inspire us to greater heights of achievement.”

Twelve senators voted against the treaty, dooming it by a single ballot. Socorro Diokno, an activist who led the Anti-Bases Coalition at the time, told me that she was astonished by the outcome. “This was a fight that was begun by my great-grandfather,” she said, “and I was lucky enough to be part of it and in the thick of it when it finally ended, when we finally won.”

The United States had maintained a military presence in the Philippines since 1898. But by the time of the senate vote, Manila and Washington were squabbling over payments for the bases, whose usefulness was in question as the Cold War waned and President George H. W. Bush sought to deepen relations with China. In the Philippines, a popular uprising had ousted the American-backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos just five years earlier, and nationalist sentiment was still high.

“From the American end, it was a withdrawal,” Walden Bellow, an academic and a former congressman in the Philippines, told me. “From the Philippines’ end, it was that we kicked them out.”

Thirty-two years later, there is no talk of reestablishing U.S. bases, but more American troops have returned to Philippine soil. On a scorching stretch of beach along the South China Sea in April, U.S. military reservists from Mississippi hunted target drones out of the air with Stinger missiles and heavy machine guns. Artillery fire pounded a warship floating offshore in a mock attack. Farther north, on a far-flung island just over 100 miles from Taiwan, hundreds of U.S. troops simulated securing control of what would be a key maritime transit point in the case of a conflict with Beijing.

[Read: The price of being principled in the Philippines]

President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., the son of the ousted dictator, has reinvigorated his country’s alliance with the United States as a buttress against actual and anticipated Chinese aggression. Ships from the Chinese coast guard and navy regularly harass Philippine forces and fishermen, and Beijing has asserted expansive claims in the South China Sea. Unfettered by an international tribunal’s 2016 ruling in Manila’s favor, China is placing military installations on several islands it built in the contested waters.

This year, the United States and the Philippines reached an agreement giving U.S. forces access to four bases in the Philippines in addition to the ones they can already use. The joint military exercises in April, an annual tradition, were the largest in history between the two countries. Two months earlier, Marcos had summoned China’s ambassador to complain about maritime harassment by a Chinese naval vessel, then four days later delivered a warning that the Philippines was facing “heightened geopolitical tensions that do not conform to our ideals of peace” and that the Philippines “will not lose an inch of its territory.”

For the moment, at least, the need for a counterweight against China seems to have overridden the vexed history between the Philippines and the United States—one in which the people of the Philippines have held Washington responsible for colonial oppression, aiding a dictator, and the excesses of its troops.

The United States took control of the Philippines in 1898, as a victor’s bounty in the Spanish-American War, and established military bases there starting in the early 1900s. The colony gained independence after World War II but signed an agreement in 1947 that granted the United States a 99-year lease on a range of military and naval facilities. The countries later signed a mutual-defense treaty that cemented their alliance.

Ferdinand Marcos, a staunch anti-communist and skilled lawyer, was elected president in 1965. He entranced crowds with his rhetorical power and governed democratically at first. But within 10 years he had imposed martial law, and his rule descended into human-rights abuses and kleptocracy.

Still, during the Cold War, Washington viewed Marcos as a bulwark against the spread of communism, and the U.S. bases as essential to keeping the threat at bay.

“There was a belief deeply held in the Reagan administration that we had to stick with our friends, and Marcos was a friend,” Stephen Bosworth, who was the American ambassador to Manila in the late 1980s, said in an oral-history project recounting his post in the Philippines.

Marcos’s chief political rival, Benigno Simeon Aquino Jr., was brazenly assassinated in 1983, but even then, Ronald Reagan insisted that the U.S. should offer constructive criticism of the Philippines’ rulers rather than, as one contemporaneous news story paraphrased the president, “throwing them to the wolves and then facing a communist power in the Pacific.” The position became untenable, however, as the country’s economy staggered and opposition coalesced in response to Aquino’s killing. In February 1986, Aquino’s wife, Corazon, won a presidential election, and mass protests that would come to be known as the People Power Revolution foiled Marcos in his desperate attempt to cling to power.

Bosworth had the task of telling Marcos that he had lost U.S. support. “With that,” Bosworth said, “we had removed the sign of heaven from him, the mandate of heaven. He was done.”

[Read: China could soon be the dominant power in Asia]

The Marcos family and its large entourage of cronies, carrying bags laden with stolen wealth, diamonds tucked into their children’s diapers, lifted off from the U.S.-controlled Clark Air Base on February 26, 1986. They went first to Guam and then to Hawaii, where the fiery orator who had ruled the Philippines for 20 years would die in ignominious exile within four years.  

The movement to eject the U.S. military in 1991 linked the presence of American bases to Marcos’s abusive rule. Diokno and her colleagues at the Anti-Bases Coalition held that without American support, Marcos would never have stayed in power as long as he did. Then the U.S. had allowed him safe passage and a haven abroad, rather than forcing him to face justice in the Philippines. This history had a personal dimension for Diokno. The Marcos administration had imprisoned her father, a former justice secretary and a senator, for nearly two years.

The American military presence was objectionable to many in the Philippines on its own terms as well. A sex trade catering to U.S. servicemen, euphemistically referred to as an '”entertainment industry,” flourished around the bases. In Olongapo, the city near U.S. Naval Base Subic Bay, dozens of bars and thousands of women served young American men. The U.S. military helped create a debaucherous playground for sex tourists—“the bargain hunters, freaks, pedophiles, psychopaths, creeps, and crackpots” who were lured “by brochures that promise ‘anything goes at Olongapo,’” a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune wrote in a 1989 dispatch from the town.

Tens of thousands of children fathered by U.S. servicemen were left behind when the men rotated out of the country. AIDS broke out among sex workers. Horrific incidents of underage prostitution regularly caught the attention of the media. Nearby cities were often violent and lawless. The shootings and frequent base break-ins were startling. “Holy shit,” Lee Badman, who served at Clark Air Base in the late 1980s with the U.S. Air Force, told me he remembered thinking when he arrived. “This is a hostile place when it was supposed to be peacetime.”

Still, Badman remembers his posting to the Philippines fondly. Monsoon rains and touts hawking souvenirs were wholly new to a young man from small-town America. He explored the airfield cut from the jade-colored jungle on his bicycle, awed by the scenery and sheer size of the facility. A huge, highly secretive listening station known as the Elephant Cage sat far out on the base, marking “the end of civilization,” he said. Beyond it stretched even more dense forest and the foothills of the Zambales Mountains.

Mount Pinuatubo, a volcano only nine miles from Clark Air Base, exploded on June 15, 1991. The ash cloud rose 28 miles into the air. Pyroclastic flows, surging avalanches of hot volcanic gas and fire, barreled down its slopes. A powerful typhoon moved ashore at the same time. Heavy rain mixed with ash, creating a blanket of wet sediment that collapsed the roofs of homes and buildings. Clark Air Base was wrecked.

Frank Wisner arrived in Manila to serve as U.S. ambassador to the Philippines shortly after the eruption. The anti-bases campaign was at its height, and Clark was in no condition for American forces to return. But the United States wasn’t ready to relinquish its presence at Subic Bay, which remained important for the 7th Fleet roving the Pacific.

“We worked like hell. I campaigned for it,” Wisner told me recently. “I went all over the country. I marched.” The effort was unsuccessful.

Wisner flew to Washington after the senate vote, hoping to rally support for a last-minute fix, but found little interest in an expensive basing agreement thousands of miles from home as the threats from the Cold War faded. In a meeting at the White House, Wisner told me, President Bush “made it clear his heart wasn’t in it either.” In late November 1991, Wisner received the crisply folded American flag that had flown over Clark, once America’s largest overseas military base. The last American warship sailed out of Subic a year later.   

In the years that immediately followed, the Philippine navy had sporadic run-ins with Chinese poachers fishing illegally in Philippine waters. In the mid-1990s, the Chinese began building structures that appeared to be small huts on Mischief Reef, about 129 nautical miles from Palawan island and within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines. The Philippine government protested, but Beijing brushed its objections aside. There was little understanding at the time of the breadth and speed with which China would build up its military forces and position itself to dominate the South China Sea.

“In hindsight,” Rommel Jude Ong, a former vice commander of the Philippine navy, told me, “the vacuum created by the loss of Subic and Clark provided opportunities for China to take over.”

The Philippines backtracked. It signed a Visiting Forces Agreement with the U.S. in 1998, allowing U.S. forces to come and go from temporary stints on Philippine bases, rather than operating from bases of their own, so as not to run counter to the 1991 vote. The groups that had opposed the U.S. bases had splintered by this time, and a challenge to the agreement in the country’s Supreme Court failed.

“It was very disappointing,” Diokno told me.

Maritime tensions with China were continuing to build. In 2012, Chinese ships moved into the waters around Scarborough Shoal, a rocky atoll that sits roughly 120 nautical miles west of the Philippine island of Luzon in the South China Sea. After a tense standoff with Philippine forces, Beijing effectively took control of the shoal and has held on to it ever since. Later that year, Xi Jinping became China’s president and stepped up Beijing’s militarization activities in the South China Sea, despite pledging during a White House visit not to do so.

The Philippines looked to the United States for support, and in 2014, the two countries signed the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, a 10-year security pact allowing a larger U.S. military presence in the country. Within months, questions about the power imbalance between the U.S. and the Philippines again arose. A U.S. Marine taking part in joint exercises murdered Jennifer Laude, a transgender Filipina. Authorities discovered her strangled, her head pushed into a toilet in an Olongapo motel.

Yet Manila largely tolerated and even welcomed the military relationship until President Rodrigo Duterte took office in 2016. Duterte insisted that the Philippines was no match for its powerful neighbor, and that it was better to court investment than to antagonize China. He flattered Beijing and made a show of his independence from Washington, regularly lambasting the United States and then-President Barack Obama. He even threatened to scrap the Visiting Forces Agreement, but then abruptly did an about-face. The relationship between the U.S. and Philippine militaries was, Ong told me, “the only reason the alliance survived.”

I visited the old Clark facility during the Duterte period, in 2019. The veterans’ cemetery was immaculate, its brilliant-white headstones almost fluorescent in the afternoon sun. Other parts of the old air base had been swallowed by the jungle. Some of the bars were still open. They were relics of the heyday of the 1980s, the walls filled with military memorabilia of long-departed units and photos of young airmen sporting ringer tees and mustaches, their arms slung around Filipina women. The American patrons the bars now drew were a considerably older crowd, mostly retirees in blue-and-yellow veterans’ hats sipping from bottles of San Miguel beer.

[Read: A U.S. ally is turning to China to ‘build, build, build’]

Government officials at the time were abuzz over anticipated Chinese investment, which they said would help develop the area into a business hub and woo residents sick of the congestion and stifling crush of life in Manila. And Chinese investment did flow into the Philippines during Duterte’s tenure—particularly into the pockets of those close to the president. But many of the large-scale, Chinese-backed projects his administration promised never materialized. The $2 billion industrial park that was to provide hundreds of jobs at Clark was one such phantasm.

As U.S. troops left the Philippines in 1991, the Marcos family returned from Hawaii and set about rehabilitating its dynasty through a sustained campaign of historical revisionism. The effort paid off handsomely last year, when Bongbong Marcos was elected president. Joe Biden was one of the first world leaders to call the new president after his victory.

Marcos came to office with scant public record of a foreign policy. But his priorities became clear in short order, as he abandoned what Victor Andres Manhit, the founder of Stratbase ADR Institute, a think tank in the Philippines, described to me as Duterte’s “appeasement policy towards China” in favor of stronger ties with the United States and other maritime powers, such as Japan and Australia. Wendy Sherman, a high-ranking U.S. State Department official, jetted to Manila to meet Marcos even before he was sworn in. Marcos announced the expansion of the 2014 security agreement, granting U.S. forces access to four more bases in addition to the five it already uses. Two of the new ones are close to Taiwan.

The Balikatan Exercises have been held annually for years, but the scale and scope of the 2023 events were meant to send a warning to China. On the beach of San Antonio, in Zambales, hundreds of soldiers trudged through powdery sand, manning heavy weapons and logistical equipment. U.S. Marines sweltered in rows of tents lined up just off the beach. Military helicopters and V-22 Osprey, a hybrid aircraft, passed overhead. Counterparts from the Philippines and Australia worked alongside the American soldiers.

Toward the end of the week-long exercises, target drones meant to mimic competitors’ hardware launched from the beach and buzzed just offshore. A burst from a .50-caliber machine gun sent one nose-diving into the South China Sea. Another was eviscerated by a Stinger missile. (A different Stinger plopped into the sea, an apparent dud. “Obviously not what we were looking for,” an Army major quipped.) Later, at another site, a set of American Patriot missiles ripped through the air. Members of the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment, a newly formed group designed specifically for fighting in the Pacific island chains, performed sensing and intelligence operations for the exercises, its very existence a testament to the priority Washington now places on the region’s security.

[Read: China’s plan to buy influence and undermine democracy]

The exercises concluded with a mock attack on a 1940s warship anchored eight nautical miles offshore in the direction of Scarborough Shoal. Having served in World War II before being transferred to the Philippine navy, the ship had been “built to take some punches,” a Marine public-affairs officer told me. And it did.

Marcos looked on from an observation tower alongside the U.S. ambassador and military brass. A barrage of artillery hammered the ship, its repercussions setting off car alarms and sending billows of smoke rolling down the beach. Attack helicopters shot at the ship, and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, like those supplied to Ukraine, fired on it. Marcos, the first Philippine president to watch the exercises in more than a decade, peered through a pair of binoculars at the display. Even as the exercises were happening, a Chinese coast guard ship offshore blocked a Philippine patrol vessel, nearly hitting it.

Marcos eventually descended from his perch and sped off in a convoy of black SUVs, kicking up a cloud of dust. Days later, he arrived in Washington, where Biden briefly reminisced about Marcos visiting the White House as a child with his father while Reagan was in office.

Such memories don’t cast a particularly warm glow for many in the Philippines, despite worries about Chinese designs. Senator Risa Hontiveros, a Marcos critic who backed his progressive challenger in the last election, told The Philippine Star in November that she fears her country will soon find itself “choosing between our former colonial master and one that wants to be the new regional or global colonial master.”  

Diokno, the anti-bases advocate, expressed a similar frustration. The aspiration in 1991 was for the Philippines to stand on its own. But “we have done nothing to defend ourselves from foreign aggressors. Why do you think China can do this to us?” she said of Chinese ships’ harassment of Filipino fishing and coast-guard vessels.  

“Because we are nobody; we don’t do anything. We have had since 1991 to do this and we have done nothing but rely on the U.S.”

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