Japan-U.S. ties vital, Manila says

Japan-U.S. ties vital, Manila says

MANILA (AFP): The United States and Japan should become equal partners to counter-balance any possible Chinese expansionism into the Asia-Pacific region, a top Philippine official said yesterday.

President Fidel Ramos' national security adviser, retired army general Jose Almonte, also said the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) should encourage the interdependence of China's economy with those of the rest of the region.

He said that ASEAN views the United States as an "irreplaceable fulcrum of an East Asian balance of power over the foreseeable future," but that Washington should shed its "old patron-client relationship" with Tokyo from a full partnership.

ASEAN groups Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

"Client states must become genuine partners," said Almonte during a speech at the Philippine Business Summit here.

"This transformation is most necessary in the Japan-U.S. alliance ... because Beijing might misread the trade disputes between Washington and Tokyo" as a sign of their inability "to respond in unison to a Chinese assertion of power in East Asia."

He said that the United States "will stay in the region in its own self interest," adding that Washington "cannot tolerate East Asia's being dominated by a single power."

Almonte urged China's neighbors to discourage Beijing's "lingering idea of itself as the Middle Kingdom" while encouraging Beijing's economic interdependence with its neighbors "to promote harmony and unity."

Almonte added that if nationalism replaced communism as China's unifying factor, the regional giant would "become an even more prickly neighbor than it is already."

Manila and Beijing are among six claimants to the potentially oil-rich Spratly islands in the South China Sea along with Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam. The area has become the focus of a sometimes acrimonious territorial dispute between the claimants, notably China.