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Don McLain Gill – Philstar.com
August 10, 2025 | 11:24am
Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. embarked on a five-day state visit to India from August 4 to 8 to build on the growing momentum in the Philippine-India bilateral partnership.
The visit sought not only to deepen existing bilateral activities but also to explore ways to broaden the scope of collaboration based on the emerging challenges in the Indo-Pacific.
Furthermore, along with signing 13 bilateral agreements covering defense, maritime security, law enforcement, digital technology, tourism and outer space, the Philippine president and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the elevation of bilateral relations into a strategic partnership.
From the Philippines’ perspective, this elevation goes beyond mere symbolism.
Before India, the Philippines had only designated four other countries as strategic partners: Japan, Australia, South Korea and Vietnam. The first three countries are vital elements to the United States’ hub-and-spokes alliance network in the Pacific, thus making them natural strategic partners of the Philippines.
Moreover, Vietnam, an important immediate Southeast Asian neighbor that shares the challenges brought by China’s expansionism in the greater South China Sea, is the Philippines’ only strategic partner within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
However, all four countries are Pacific Ocean nations. Therefore, India’s incorporation as the Philippines’ fifth strategic partner represents a strong sense of clarity in Manila as an Indo-Pacific nation and India’s significant stabilizing role in this greater region, encompassing the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans.
Furthermore, this elevation demonstrates Manila’s recognition of India as a vital, trusted, and credible collaborator that would continue to figure prominently in the Southeast Asian country’s strategic calculations.
The Marcos administration has emphasized that the Philippines’ defense and foreign policy should be anchored on the recently implemented Comprehensive Archipelagic Defense Concept (CADC), which aims to reorient the defense capabilities of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) towards the security of the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in order to uphold the inalienable right of every Filipino to reap the benefits from the Southeast Asian country’s resource rich maritime zones.
The CADC marks an important and full-hearted attempt by the Marcos Jr administration to prioritize territorial defense and security of the interlinked maritime zones of the Western Pacific. Against this backdrop, the Philippines has been placing great importance on its security partnership with India.
India looks at the Philippines as a natural partner that shares the same regional interests and adheres to securing the rules-based order of the Indo-Pacific.
Moreover, India’s willingness to engage more comprehensively with the Philippines in areas of defense and development shows that New Delhi recognizes that as it continues to rise in material power, it would need to translate this capacity into a more robust foreign policy that would cater to the stability of both sides of the region at a time when China has relentlessly been pursuing its expansionist two-ocean strategy.
Since 2014, New Delhi has been able to muster the needed political will to take up a more visible and effective role as an alternative security partner in Southeast Asia through the Act East Policy. In this regard, with a convergence of clear interests in preserving the rules-based order of the Indo-Pacific, the Philippines and India have moved to institutionalize their growing partnership under the respective governments of Marcos Jr. and Modi.
Since 2022, the Philippines has welcomed a more active collaboration with India in defense and maritime security. Moreover, to ensure continuity for the long term, several initiatives have been developed to institutionalize the growing momentum behind the partnership.
These include the signing of the first-ever memorandum of understanding on cooperation between the Indian and Philippine Coast Guards in August 2023, the elevation of talks at the defense secretaries level at fifth meeting of the India-Philippines Joint Defence Cooperation Committee (JDCC) in September 2024, the inauguration of the first Track 1 maritime dialogue in December 2024, and an increase in Indian Navy ship visits and joint maritime activities.
In fact, the Philippine and Indian Navies held their bilateral maritime activity this week in the West Philippine Sea, intersecting with Marcos’ visit. Accordingly, Armed Forces of the Philippines Chief of Staff General Romeo Brawner Jr. highlighted that more than its symbolism, the navy-to-navy engagements between both democracies send “a powerful signal of solidarity, strength in partnership and the energy of cooperation between two vibrant democracies in the Indo-Pacific.”
Additionally, India is ready to support and bolster the Philippines’ defense capabilities by exporting cutting-edge defense platforms like the BrahMos and participating in the Southeast Asian nation’s Self-Reliance Defense Posture initiative.
Therefore, more defense industrial base collaborations and joint production discussions will likely take place in the coming months and years, along with a likely increase in joint maritime activities.
The bilateral partnership has also shown its multi-level dimensions with the involvement of significant civil society and academic discussions to further the relationship. In September 2023, both sides held their first Track 2 dialogue in maritime security cooperation in Manila, organized by the Stratbase Institute, in partnership with the National Maritime Foundation.
Moreover, coinciding with Marcos’ visit to New Delhi this week, a second Track 2 on security cooperation was held in Jakarta between the Observer Research Foundation and the Stratbase Institute.
In this light, as direct flights and visa-free connectivity begin between the Philippines and India, such engagements are likely to expand, thus coating the robust government-to-government relations with an equally formidable civil society-to-civil society partnership.
Thus, the strategic partnership between the Philippines and India is not only natural, but also crucial amid the growing uncertainties of Indo-Pacific geopolitics. As Modi noted, “India and the Philippines are friends by choice and partners by destiny.”
Don McLain Gill is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Stratbase Institute.
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