At Manila Dialogue, Contemplating UNCLOS Rights and China's Might

By Euan Graham Published Nov 14, 2025 3:45 PM by The Strategist

Last week’s Manila Dialogue demonstrated that the Philippines is far from cowed or isolated in the face of China’s continued bullying in the South China Sea. But it also highlighted the limitations of transparency as a stand-alone strategy against Beijing’s maritime encroachment. The dialogue’s focus on international law has broader relevance for Australia.

This annual meeting about the South China Sea is a fairly new addition to the regional conference scene. Last week’s iteration, which I attended, was only the second.

It serves, in part, to promote the transparency campaign led by the Philippine Coast Guard, which for more than two years has systematically publicized China’s sustained harassment of Philippine vessels and aircraft within Manila’s exclusive economic zone. Dialogue participants included practitioners and experts from around the region, including several non-government representatives from China.

The transparency campaign has been highly effective at generating international sympathy and support for the Philippines as it grapples with encroachment and harassment by Chinese paramilitary and military forces on a daily basis. In the court of global public opinion, the campaign has provided an effective informational counter to Beijing’s bullying tactics, which are designed to subdue the Philippines and other Southeast Asian states into a state of strategic quiescence.

Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and several European countries have stepped up security cooperation with Manila under the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos. In parallel, Manila seeks to build up the Philippines’ conventional defenses while deepening military cooperation with like-minded partners. On 2 November, Canada became the latest country to sign a visiting forces agreement with the Philippines. By providing for the presence of signatories’ forces on each other’s territory, such agreements strengthen military cooperation and deterrence.

Sympathy and support for Manila’s plight have been in conspicuously shorter supply in Southeast Asia. Next year, however, the Philippines will host the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit and other meetings as the grouping’s rotating chair. This gifts Manila a decadal, diplomatic opportunity to channel intra-mural support for its frontline stand in the South China Sea. ASEAN’s external credibility will ride on the grouping’s ability to maintain unity on this internally divisive issue.

At the same time, the Philippines can be under no illusions that transparency has dented China’s determination to continue pressing its claims. In early August, the fratricidal collision of a Chinese destroyer and coast guard vessel in close proximity to a Philippine patrol ship off Scarborough Shoal confirmed Beijing’s willingness to pressure Manila to a reckless degree. Even in the face of clear video evidence to the contrary, poker-faced Chinese participants at the Manila Dialogue maintained that China was exercising restraint, merely reacting to the provocations of others. China is unswayed by reputational damage, relying instead on demonstrations of power and dominance.

A related conference theme was the tension between the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), as a legal and normative framework that supports the Philippines’ sovereign equities in the South China Sea, and China’s might-over-right approach despite the illegitimacy of its dashed-line claims. One of UNCLOS’s guiding principles, that land dominates the sea, naturally favors Southeast Asia’s maritime geography over China’s as a basis for jurisdiction in the South China Sea. International law gives maritime Southeast Asia its best shot at inoculation from the alternative of an expansionist China dominating its strategic future.

The key shortcoming of international law is weak enforcement. Even without a law-of-the-sea police force to patrol the South China Sea, littoral states in Southeast Asia can still improve their position by bringing national laws into conformity with UNCLOS. Vietnam has already made progress here. So too has the Philippines, last year enacting two new laws delineating its maritime zones and designating sea lanes for international passage through its archipelago. These laws involved compromises on the part of Vietnam and the Philippines, as coastal states. But conformity with international law enhances their collective stake in the rules-based order and simplifies the problem of enforcement for national agencies, and potentially for international partners.

The defense of international law and UNCLOS have become key points in Australia’s strategic policy and regional narrative—something that resonates with Minister for Defence Richard Marles. Close partners such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Fiji and Papua New Guinea, as archipelagic states, owe not only their exclusive marine resource rights, but their basic territorial integrity and sovereignty over water, to UNCLOS’s existence. UNCLOS is a key pillar of the regional rules-based order, not only for Western countries interested in freedom of navigation, but also for developing, formerly colonized states for which maritime porosity was historically their main strategic weakness.

This helps to explain why Australia emphases UNCLOS to the extent that it does in its definition of the regional order. As a signatory to UNCLOS, China doesn’t ignore it. Rather, Beijing picks the principles that suit its national interests and ignores the parts that don’t. If China tramples on the sovereignty of large, archipelagic states, such as Indonesia and the Philippines, it could face a more concerted response than it has bargained for.

However, just as the Philippines needs to think beyond its transparency campaign, Australia should be careful not to wrap its strategic narrative too tightly around international law. Coercive and destabilizing behavior can still be consistent with international law. China’s military air and sea patrols around Taiwan have demonstrated this, along with its near-encirclement of Australia earlier this year. Applying a law-enforcement or excessively legalistic mindset to a strategic problem such as China may be a losing game from a deterrence perspective.

https://maritime-executive.com/editorials/at-manila-dialogue-contemplating-unclos-rights-and-china-s-might

Google To Build Subsea Cables In Papua New Guinea

By Kirsty Needham Reuters December 13, 2025

SYDNEY, Dec 12 (Reuters) – Alphabet’s GOOGL.O Google will build three subsea cables in Papua New Guinea, which the largest Pacific Island nation said was funded by Australia under a mutual defense treaty, in a key upgrade to its digital backbone.

Australian and U.S. military strategists view resource-rich but largely under-developed Papua New Guinea as having a prized location north of Australia at a time when China is boosting its influence in the region.

The $120-million effort will link northern and southern Papua New Guinea and the Bougainville autonomous region with high-capacity cables, Peter Tsiamalili, PNG’s acting minister for information and communications technology, said on Friday.

PNG SAYS PROJECT FUNDED BY PUKPUK TREATY

“The entire investment (is) funded through Australia’s commitments under the Pukpuk Treaty,” he said in a statement, referring to a mutual defense pact signed in October.

The project reflected both nations’ shared commitment to advance digital security, regional stability, and national development, he added.

The subsea cables will be built by Google, the statement said, adding that Tsiamalili met Australian and U.S. diplomats to discuss the project at Google’s Australian office this week.

A Google Australia spokeswoman declined to comment on the PNG project.

Australia’s foreign affairs department said on Saturday the cables will lower internet prices for consumers, support economic growth and increase education opportunities.

The cables will position PNG to attract investment from hyper-scalers and global digital enterprises, said Tsiamalili, who is also police minister.

The Pukpuk Treaty gives Australian defense personnel access to PNG communications systems, including satellite stations and cables. The United States is also strengthening military ties with PNG, signing a defense cooperation pact in 2023.

AUSTRALIA, U.S. SEEK TO COUNTER CHINA’S INFLUENCE

Australia and the United States have funded various subsea cables across the Pacific Islands in recent years to block a push by China to build the vital communication links, viewed by Canberra as a security risk.

PNG’s domestic submarine cable was built by China’s Huawei in 2018 and financed by a loan from China’s EXIM bank.

“Australia has committed over A$450 million ($300 million) to support undersea cable connectivity across the Pacific and Timor-Leste, including the Coral Sea Cable between Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Australia,” an Australian foreign affairs official said in a statement to Reuters on Saturday.

Australia is expected to also finance a new international cable to PNG.

Google said last month it planned to build a data hub on Australia’s Indian Ocean outpost of Christmas Island, another strategic defense location, with new cables linking the island with Australian cities hosting key defense bases also used by the U.S. military.

Two more cable systems will extend westwards to Africa and Asia, to “deepen the resilience” of Indian Ocean internet infrastructure, Google said.

($1 = 1.5033 Australian dollars)

https://gcaptain.com/google-to-build-subsea-cables-in-papua-new-guinea/

Canada #86

France, Australia, and Germany Have all Canceled New Years Celebrations – We All Know Why, But They’re Not Brave Enough to Tell Us

by Jim Hoft Dec. 19, 2025

Popular TV host Rob Schmitt from Newsmax reported last night that France, Australia and Germany have canceled their New Year’s celebrations due to the threat of radical Islam.

This is what the Islamists have hoped for.

Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt:

A beautiful and spectacular event, and it has all been canceled because the French government can no longer keep its own people safe from potential radical Islamic terrorists that they have welcomed into their country. Think about that. France has led in so many Middle East and North African migrants that they can no longer assemble in crowds.

We’re watching one of the most beautiful countries and cultures in the world commit suicide, and this threat has now spread all over the West. This is not singular to Australia or France. It is everywhere now, including in Germany, where many are too scared to go to the country’s many famous Christmas markets because they are now so dangerous. They’re such a target for radical Islamists. Take a listen to the details from this report:

“Terrorists have struck seven European Christmas markets since 2014, three in France and four in Germany, all carried out by men of Muslim or Middle Eastern backgrounds. Authorities arrested five men suspected of planning attack number 8 in Germany last week. One of them, a Muslim cleric from a German mosque who urge his followers to kill as many people as possible.”

Yeah, attack number 8 foiled. There was another attack in Poland on a Christmas market foiled as well. The one in Germany, a Muslim cleric that left Egypt to move to Germany, moving to a country which tolerantly allows him to work at a mosque, to have a mosque. What does he do when he gets to Germany and he’s saved by the West? He begins indoctrinating other Muslims to murder as many Christians as they possibly can. Going to a German Christmas market at this point is a bit like playing Russian roulette.

Is today Can you say the day that one of our asylum seekers, living off our tax dollars, is going to plow his car through this market and kill 20 of us? We don’t know. In Australia, where 16 were murdered on a beach this past Sunday, many say that they have felt the threat skyrocket as their own government imported tens of thousands of migrants from Muslim countries.

The Muslim population doubling in a decade in Australia. The left wing Prime Minister of Australia, the Labor Party, a country that has the strictest gun laws in the world already, just wants to add more gun laws, light a candle and move on.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/12/france-australia-germany-have-all-canceled-new-years/

General Research #29376

UK Seeks to Partner with Australia and Canada in Censorship Plot Against Elon Musk’s X: Report

The British government has reportedly reached out to fellow leftist-run Anglo-sphere nations Australia and Canada in an attempt to wage a coordinated campaign to potentially ban Elon Musk’s X social media platform.

Earlier this week, UK Prime Minsiter Sir Keir Starmer said that “all options” were on the table, including a potential ban of X in Britain, over users being able to have the platform’s Grok artificial intelligence generate “deepfake” nude images of women and children.

The recently enacted Online Safety Act — passed by the previous “Conservative” government — empowers broadcasting regulator Ofcom to impose fines of up to 10 per cent of a social media firm’s global revenue, and allows for bans in extreme cases.

Yet, apparently reticent to draw the ire of President Donald Trump alone, Downing Street reportedly held talks in recent days with Canberra and Ottawa to craft a joint response to the tech platform, The Telegraph reported.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who is pushing for more censorship rules in his own country following the Islamist mass shooting at Bondi Beach last month, said, “The fact that this tool was used so that people were using its image creation function through Grok is, I think, just completely abhorrent. It, once again, is an example of social media not showing social responsibility. Australians and indeed, global citizens deserve better.”

Toronto MP Evan Solomon, the Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation in Mark Caney’s government, denied on Sunday that Canada is considering a ban on X.

For his part, Elon Musk, who has long been critical of the increasingly censorious climate in Britain, accused Starmer’s government of acting “fascist” and suggested that they were merely looking for “any excuse for censorship” of X.

Censorship has become increasingly prevalent in Britain. Despite its long tradition of freedom of speech, the country is arresting around 30 people every day for comments made on social media, or over 12,000 per year. Such offences can include the sharing of “grossly offensive” messages or spreading content of “indecent, obscene or menacing character”.

The banning of X would remove a major headache for the struggling Labour government, which has come under consistent pressure personally from Musk, on issues such as freedom of speech, immigration, and the predominantly Pakistani Muslim child rape gangs and the failures of police and government to protect mostly young white working-class girls.

However, such an action taken against one of President Trump’s key allies and a major American business could risk further angering the White House, which has made fighting censorship in Europe a key foreign policy plank.

Indeed, just last month, the Trump administration sanctioned multiple Europeans, including two Britons, for their involvement in the international censorship industry.

This included Imran Ahmed, the head of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an organisation with close ties to Prime Minsiter Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. The administration has sought to deport Ahmed from the United States for his group’s efforts to censor American conservative outlets, including Breitbart News.

While the CCDH has close ties to the Labour government, the White House has yet to sign off on sanctions against any British government official.

This may change if X is banned, however, with Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna vowing to introduce legislation to sanction Prime Minister Starmer and the UK as a whole should the platform be banned in the UK.

“There are always technical bugs during the early phases of new technology, especially AI, and those issues are typically addressed quickly. X treats these matters seriously and acts promptly. Let’s be clear: this is not about technical compliance. This is a political war against Elon Musk and free speech—nothing more,” she said.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2026/01/11/uk-seeks-to-partner-with-australia-and-canada-in-censorship-plot-against-elon-musks-x-report/