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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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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