China recently raised eyebrows across the Indo-Pacific by slapping unilateral sanctions on Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro and his immediate family, citing his “erroneous remarks” against Beijing’s paramilitary activities in the South China Sea.
The response from Manila was swift and defiant. “That is truly what they [China] do to those who speak the truth against their deception,” Teodoro stated on June 12, pledging to continue his duty to uphold his nation “in the face of the wickedness they are committing here and even in our seas.”
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This spat highlights a profound, structural irony: unilateral sanctions have long been demonized by Beijing as a Western tool for geopolitical punishment. Now, China is copying that exact playbook — albeit with “Chinese characteristics” — to coerce its neighbors.
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But this raises a fundamental question of efficacy: What can such a sanction actually achieve? Teodoro is a minister of defense, not commerce. His primary duty is to safeguard the national security and territorial integrity of the Philippines. Attempting to intimidate a foreign defense chief through commercial blacklists is not merely bizarre and naive. It exposes a deeper, more systemic flaw in Beijing’s current foreign policy apparatus.
Historically, great powers learn the hard way that protracted engagements and rigid ideological posturing exhaust national strength. The United States spent decades learning this bitter lesson through exhausting quagmires in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Recognizing the limits of overextended power, successive U.S. administrations — including the current Trump presidency — have sought to disengage from strategic traps such as the Iranian quagmire to preserve domestic energy and focus on core priorities.
China’s diplomacy, by contrast, is moving in the pathetic opposite direction. Between 1978 and 2018, Beijing demonstrated remarkable flexibility, pragmatism, and strategic patience. It normalized relations with the U.S., established critical ties with historic rivals such as Japan and South Korea, and secured accession to the World Trade Organization. This “smart diplomacy” fueled China’s historic economic rise.
Today, however, that pragmatism has vanished, replaced by a clumsy, obsolete, and counterproductive doctrine. Even putting aside the notorious “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy that peaked during the pandemic, Beijing has systematically locked itself into three self-inflicted strategic dilemmas: Taiwan, the South China Sea, and its tacit alignment with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Look at the map. Compared to the gigantic landmass of mainland China, Taiwan resembles a small leaf floating off the coast. If the mainland’s political and societal model were genuinely attractive, prosperous, and free, Taiwan might have embraced integration naturally over time.
Instead, China regularly threatens to annex the island by force. This relentless military bullying fails to resonate with the international community. Rather than isolating Taipei, Beijing’s aggressive posture provokes unified resistance, triggering a robust containment strategy from the free world.
The escalation with the Philippines exposes an even more glaring logical contradiction. In 1982, China was one of the original state sponsors and signatories of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which established that a nation’s sovereign territorial waters extend 12 nautical miles from its coastline.
Yet, in the South China Sea, Beijing discards the very international law it helped draft, choosing instead to enforce a sweeping, historical “nine-dash line” that claims nearly the entire sea as its own. This is the root of its friction with neighbors such as the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia.
If China insists on abiding strictly by “historical borders” over modern international law, should it not also pursue sovereignty over the 180,000 square kilometers of territory in Northeast Asia occupied and ceded to the Russian Empire in the 19th century? To ignore that loss while squeezing Manila reveals a glaring historical double standard.
Beijing, of course, silences that question. When the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled in 2016 that modern maritime law overrules historic rights, China — blinded by domestic nationalism and historical inertia — refused to accept the verdict. By choosing coercion over legal compromise, Beijing has buried itself in a protracted, low-level conflict. This has pushed once-neutral states like Manila directly into the strategic embrace of the U.S., Japan, and Taiwan.
China’s third strategic blunder is its “no-limits” partnership with Moscow amid Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. By providing diplomatic cover and economic lifelines to Russia, China has profoundly alienated the European Union — historically its most lucrative and cooperative trading partner.
This alignment has stripped Beijing of its moral high ground, convincing European capitals that China is a systemic security threat rather than a mere commercial competitor. Putin’s protracted nightmare has effectively become a strategic trap for China.
When China stubbornly hinges its global standing on these three simultaneous flashpoints, it does not project strength. It trades credibility for liability and signals to the world exactly where China’s weak cards lie. China’s current foreign policy increasingly resembles someone entangled in a web of ropes: the more clumsily and aggressively he struggles to break free, the tighter the knots lock around him.
David W. Wang is a senior international business executive, geopolitical affairs consultant, analyst, and writer based in the Washington, D.C., metro area. David can be reached on X @DavidWWang203.
