Opinion | US and the Philippines are playing a dangerous game in the South China Sea
- Provocative actions over a contested atoll, the US stepping up threats over mutual defence, and planned joint naval patrols could push China to miscalculate
- An incident like that in the Gulf of Tonkin – real or manufactured – which launched the US into the Vietnam war, may push an anti-China Congress to demand military action
On August 4, 1964, the US claimed that North Vietnamese patrol boats had attacked the US naval destroyer Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. This led to the passage by the US Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution less than a week later that became then-president Lyndon Johnson’s legal justification for sending US forces to South Vietnam. That led to the open involvement of the United States in Vietnam’s civil war.
We now know that the attack never happened and the fateful decisions were based on naval intelligence shaped to fit Johnson’s political needs and preferences. He was looking for an excuse to take the country to war without a formal declaration by Congress. That was then. But history has a way of repeating itself, especially if lessons go unlearned.
Could recent developments set the stage for an excuse for the US military to enter someone else’s conflict – this time, between the Philippines and China in the South China Sea? Such an incident could – like before – suck US allies Australia and South Korea into a wider fray.
