Missiles, markets, and massacres: Balikatan, ASEAN, and the war logic of US imperial decline*

The midnight firing of a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile from Tacloban during Balikatan 2026 was not an isolated display of military capability. It was the clearest sign yet that Philippine territory is being positioned for a more direct role in U.S. military operations in the region. For the first time since the deployment of the U.S. Typhon mid-range missile system to Philippine soil, a Tomahawk was launched from the archipelago, traveling hundreds of kilometers across national territory as part of a joint war simulation. Together with the deployment of advanced anti-ship missile systems in Batanes near Taiwan, the launch points to a deeper operational integration of the Philippines into Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy. That this escalation unfolds simultaneously with the 48th ASEAN Summit in Cebu is no coincidence.

As regional leaders convene under the Philippine chairmanship’s theme,“Navigating Our Future, Together,” the summit presents itself as a forum for peace, economic resilience, and regional stability. Yet beneath this diplomatic language lies a deeper contradiction: ASEAN’s increasingly visible accommodation to U.S.-aligned security and monetary frameworks, even as the region claims strategic autonomy.

The summit’s dominant concerns—energy insecurity linked to disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, supply-chain volatility arising from the war on Iran, proposals for maritime-security coordination, and new institutional mechanisms such as the Cebu Protocol—are all framed as technical challenges of regional governance. But these are not neutral disruptions. They are the regional aftershocks of an intensifying imperial crisis. The summit in Cebu and the missile launch in Tacloban should be read together. One stages the diplomatic language of regional stability; the other reveals the military arrangements increasingly defining it.

ASEAN: Crisis management under imperialism

What has emerged most clearly from Cebu is that ASEAN is attempting to manage the consequences of geopolitical instability without confronting its structural sources. Energy security has dominated discussions, particularly the economic fallout of disruptions to oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz following the escalation of U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. Regional leaders have focused on emergency coordination, fuel-price stabilization, food-security contingencies, and maritime continuity. Yet the framework remains narrowly managerial. The war itself appears largely as an external shock to be absorbed rather than as the direct product of US imperialist aggression. ASEAN is responding to the consequences of war while remaining largely silent on the structures of power producing it.

The same pattern appears in maritime security discussions on the South China Sea. ASEAN leaders speak of de-escalation and renewed progress on a Code of Conduct with China, even as expanded U.S.-Philippine military exercises, missile deployments in Batanes, and wider regional militarization continue to intensify. In short, de-escalation is spoken in one register while escalation proceeds in another.

The proposal for an ASEAN Maritime Center in the Philippines brings this into sharper view. It is framed as technical coordination—maritime awareness, search and rescue, anti-piracy cooperation. But maritime space today cannot be separated from the wider contest over the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. These are not neutral waters. They are already being reorganized through the US Indo-Pacific military doctrines and concretized in forward deployments. What looks like cooperation is unfolding inside an already militarized geography.

Even the Cebu Protocol, positioned as institutional renewal, follows the same pattern. ASEAN adapts its mechanisms to respond more efficiently to crisis, but the underlying power relations that generate instability remain untouched. The result is a form of governance that learns to operate within crisis without ever touching its source.

Imperialism in crisis: why war intensifies

Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism remains indispensable for understanding the present moment. Imperialism emerges when capitalism reaches monopoly concentration, when profit can no longer be sufficiently extracted within domestic markets, and when capital is compelled to expand outward through financial domination, military power, and control over territories, resources, and strategic routes.

Today, the United States confronts a historic contradiction. Its military reach remains extensive, yet its economic supremacy faces mounting pressure from shifting centers of production, growing de-dollarization efforts, and sovereign developmental projects that resist full subordination to Western financial and political control. This is the essence of the contemporary imperial crisis: the erosion of U.S. global dominance without any corresponding reconfiguration of the power relations that sustain it.

As Jose Maria Sison argued in his analysis of the four major contradictions under imperialism, decline does not dissolve these antagonisms. It sharpens them unevenly. The contradiction between labor and capital intensifies within the imperialist core; rivalries among competing powers deepen; struggles between imperialist states and oppressed nations become more acute; and pressures against socialist and independent developmental projects escalate. What we are witnessing is not the orderly transition of a fading hegemon, but the increasingly coercive management of unresolved contradictions. U.S. imperialism in decline does not simply scale back. It compensates for weakening economic dominance through intensified militarization, sanctions, blockades, gunboat diplomacy, and the direct waging of wars.

From Palestine to the South China Sea, from sanctions regimes to missile deployments, U.S. power is increasingly asserted through these interconnected forms of war. In this global context, the Philippines has become one of its principal forward platforms.

Balikatan and the colonial continuum

Balikatan is often framed as alliance maintenance, disaster preparedness, or regional defense cooperation. This framing is ideological cover. The “shoulder-to-shoulder exercises” must be understood historically as a continuation of the same imperial relationship inaugurated by the 1898 U.S. conquest of the Philippines. The forms have changed—from direct colonial occupation to rotational military presence, from permanent bases to “agreed locations,” from occupation forces to interoperability frameworks—but the strategic logic remains.

Philippine territory functions as a geostrategic asset within U.S. projection across Asia. This year’s Tomahawk launch crystallizes that reality. The Typhon system’s significance lies not simply in its technical capacity but in what it signals politically: Philippine territory is being normalized as a launch platform for long-range strike capabilities in a future regional war. This is precisely why organizations such as Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN) and International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS-Philippines) have condemned the launch as a dangerous escalation that transforms the archipelago into a frontline target in a confrontation between rival powers, the US and China.

Balikatan does not stand alone. Together with Salaknib and the permanent infrastructure enabled by Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), it forms a continuous process of military embedding. Missile systems, logistics hubs, fuel depots, expanded access corridor are not temporary arrangements but precisely the material architecture of imperial permanence.

From external war to internal fascism

Imperialist militarization abroad is inseparable from fascistic consolidation at home. This is where the Negros 19 massacre becomes essential. The killings of April 19–20, 2026 stand as a brutal case study of how militarization under the guise of national security reproduces state terror against the poor.

Negros has long functioned as a laboratory of Philippine counterinsurgency. Land monopoly, plantation capitalism, peasant resistance, and military repression converge there with deadly regularity. The massacre was not an isolated atrocity. It was the local expression of the same war logic rehearsed in Balikatan. Counterinsurgency in the Philippines is inseparable from U.S. military doctrine. Its intelligence structures, operational frameworks, civil-military programs, and territorial surveillance systems bear the imprint of decades of American tutelage. The technologies tested in “external defense” are folded back into internal war. The same military apparatus trained for missile interoperability is deployed against peasant communities, labor organizers, and rural dissent.

This is why Balikatan cannot be analyzed solely through geopolitics. It must be understood as part of a political economy of repression. Militarization secures the social order necessary for imperialist plunder. It disciplines resistance to land conversion, infrastructure corridors, mining concessions, and foreign-oriented industrial restructuring.

In this sense, the Negros 19 massacre is tied directly to the economy. State violence clears the ground for accumulation. Counterinsurgency is class war.

Iran and the global war on sovereignty

To grasp the broader significance of these developments, we must situate them within the current U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. The war has never fundamentally been about nuclear weapons. It concerns sovereignty. Iran’s historical crime, from the standpoint of empire, began with the assertion of control over its own resources and deepened after the 1979 Revolution shattered U.S. regional dominance. Its continued resistance represents a challenge to imperial assumptions that sovereign development outside Western control is impossible. This is why pressure against Iran has escalated from sanctions to blockade, from covert sabotage to open war.

The Strait of Hormuz is central here—not simply as an oil chokepoint but as a site where control over global circulation intersects with geopolitical coercion. The war on Iran is an attempt to discipline a state that insists on autonomous development. The same logic underpins U.S. pressure across the Global South. Sovereignty itself has become intolerable where it obstructs monopoly capital.

ASEAN’s discussions on energy disruptions caused by the “Middle East crisis” cannot be separated from this reality. The very instability regional leaders seek to manage is generated by a U.S.-led imperialist war system they continue to accommodate.

ASEAN’s contradiction: diplomacy under monetary and strategic subservience

The ASEAN Summit’s official discourse emphasizes regional cohesion, economic integration, sustainable finance, and strategic balance. Yet the bloc’s integration increasingly unfolds within structures of monetary subservience and externally shaped developmental priorities. ASEAN speaks the language of multipolar cooperation while remaining deeply tethered to dollarized financial circuits, externally driven capital flows, and security arrangements calibrated to U.S. strategic interests.

This contradiction is particularly visible in summit discussions around economic resilience, maritime stability, and digital connectivity. The same language that promises regional modernization also underwrites projects such as the Luzon Economic Corridor and broader semiconductor-centered restructuring. Under the emerging logic of Pax Silica, regional integration is increasingly organized around technological supply chains serving strategic competition among major powers rather than autonomous development.

The same state hosting diplomatic discussions on South China Sea stability, maritime confidence-building, and regional de-escalation simultaneously hosts missile launches and military exercises calibrated to the strategic geography of both the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. The same administration invoking peaceful coexistence deepens military integration with Washington.

This reveals the central contradiction: while ASEAN pursues diplomatic mechanisms to contain maritime tensions, one of its chairing states is being more deeply embedded in the military architecture intensifying those very tensions. The same summit discussing disruptions caused by war on Iran unfolds while the Philippine state actively participates in the wider military architecture sustaining U.S. coercive power globally.

This is how imperialist domination is being reproduced under present conditions: diplomatic multilateralism on the surface, strategic subordination underneath. The Philippines as forward operating terrain The links between the war on Iran, the Balikatan exercises, the ASEAN summit, and the Negros 19 massacre point to a broader process through which the Philippines is being drawn more deeply into the management of imperial crisis.

This process unfolds through several interconnected developments. Philippine territory is increasingly being configured as a logistical corridor for U.S. military operations across the region, with expanded access arrangements, missile deployments, and military infrastructure tying the archipelago more closely to Washington’s strategic planning. This military integration is matched by a parallel economic reordering. Projects such as the Luzon Economic Corridor—presented as pathways to modernization, digital competitiveness, and supply-chain resilience—must be read within what has been described as Pax Silica: the fusion of technological production, strategic logistics, and military-industrial coordination under U.S.-centered regional restructuring.

The Philippines is not being developed as an industrially sovereign economy. It is being positioned as a subordinate production site within a wider strategic architecture: a source of low-value raw materials, a reservoir of cheap labor, and a logistical bridge for semiconductor and critical technology supply chains organized around foreign strategic priorities. This helps explain why summit discussions on “resilience” and “connectivity” deserve closer scrutiny. In the present conjuncture, resilience increasingly means adapting local economies to absorb geopolitical shocks generated elsewhere, while connectivity often means deeper insertion into strategic production chains over which the country exercises little real control.

The restructuring extends beyond territory and labor into education itself. The reduction of General Education requirements in Philippine higher education is often defended in the language of efficiency and market responsiveness. Yet viewed in this broader context, it reflects the same technocratic logic underpinning Pax Silica. By narrowing the space for history, philosophy, literature, and critical social thought, education is increasingly recalibrated toward the production of technically competent but politically decontextualized labor.

The educational counterpart to the Luzon Economic Corridor is a curricular corridor: one that channels students toward narrowly functional competencies while diminishing the intellectual traditions necessary for historical memory, democratic critique, and anti-imperialist analysis. This is not merely a curricular debate. It concerns the kind of subjectivity required by a semicolonial economy reorganized for foreign strategic competition. Even diplomatic initiatives framed around regional stability and multilateral cooperation increasingly function to normalize these arrangements.

Against the war machine

The Philippines is being positioned at once as a military platform for U.S. strategic projection, an economic adjunct to foreign monopoly capital, and a political site where the language of modernization and cooperation is used to legitimize deeper forms of subordination. But history also teaches that every imperial escalation sharpens the contradictions it seeks to contain. The same crisis driving militarization generates resistance. The challenge before anti-imperialist forces is therefore clear: to expose the links between ASEAN’s economic diplomacy and military subordination; to reveal Balikatan as colonial continuity rather than alliance partnership; to name counterinsurgency for what it is—class war; and to stand in solidarity with all peoples resisting imperial assault, from Negros to Tehran.

The issue is no longer whether U.S. imperialism is in crisis. It is. The question is whether that crisis will be resolved through intensified war—or through the organized struggle of peoples determined to end the system that produces it. #

*Based on a panel presentation on “Imperialist Crisis and War: A People’s Alternative Forum to the ASEAN Summit 2026, ”University of the Philippines-Cebu, May 8, 2026.

References:

“ASEAN and EU Leaders Tackle Sustainability,” ABS-CBN News, May 8, 2026.

“Cebu Summit: ASEAN Leaders Tackling First Charter Change Since 2007,” The Philippine Star, May 7, 2026.

“US fires missile during Balikatan,” The Philippine Star, May 6, 2026.

“The Voyage to the 48th ASEAN Leaders’ Summit: Ministerial Meetings Set Tone of the Agenda,” BusinessMirror, May 6, 2026.

Bagong Alyansang Makabayan, Facebook photo post, Facebook, May 5, 2026.

International League of Peoples’ Struggle Philippines, Facebook post, https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1403014328524151&set=a.466993065459620

“Philippines Convenes the ASEAN Senior Officials’ Meeting (SOM),” Philippine Information Agency, April 10, 2026.

Monthly Review Online. “ASEAN Summit 2025: Imperialism, Monetary Subservience, and Racial-Class Divisions.” January 8, 2026.

Jose Maria Sison, “On the World Situation,” PRISM, September 26, 2022.

1. Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism*(1917), [Marxists Internet Archive](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

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