The American geopolitical analyst Robert D. Kaplan calls it Asia’s “cauldron.” Nations sitting within and around this cauldron have a duty to keep it from boiling. Cooperation, not belligerence or confrontation, should inform their relations with each other, given their competing national interests and territorial claims. Allies of the United States, China’s neighbors from the very beginning, know that their alliance rests on the US as the dominant Pacific and world military power; they should not undermine it, as the late Bavarian statesman Franz Josef Strauss (1915-88) used to say; neither should they seek to maintain it by taking an unduly aggressive stance against China as the secondary power. This is the specific case of the Philippines.