Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte told a celebrity pastor on Wednesday that he was invoking the nation’s Mutual Defense Treaty with the United States to demand the U.S. Navy attack China.

Duterte was responding to widespread domestic pressure for his government to expel Chinese ships from the Spratly Islands, located within Philippine sovereign territory in the South China Sea. The Chinese Communist Party claims almost the entirety of the South China Sea despite a 2016 international tribunal finding that Beijing’s claims were incorrect and its construction of artificial islands in Philippine and Vietnamese territory is illegal.

China vowed to ignore the ruling and has since continued sending fishing vessels into sovereign Philippine waters. China’s practices prompted multiple protests in Manila this month following the sinking of a Philippine fishing ship anchored by Recto Bank, territory that the international community, barring the Chinese communist regime, considers indisputably Filipino. The Chinese ship that rammed into the Filipino fishermen sunk the ship and fled, leaving them to drown. The men were ultimately rescued by a Vietnamese ship that legally passed near their wreckage.

https://halturnerradioshow.com/index.php/en/news-page/world/philippine-president-invokes-us-mutual-defense-treaty-demands-naval-war-with-china-over-spratly-islands