As China aggressively asserted its claims to the South China Sea, President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. of the Philippines spent his first year on the job strengthening Manila’s alliance with its oldest ally, the United States. Now he is strengthening the support of a broader and new network of partners.

Mr. Marcos adds a new intensity to his muscular foreign policy at a crucial moment in his country’s territorial dispute with Beijing. Maritime clashes between Chinese and Philippine ships have become more common in recent months.

In January, Mr. Marcos and the leaders of Vietnam, another country fending off Chinese claims to the crucial waterway, pledged closer cooperation between their coastguards. This month, Mr Marcos signed a maritime cooperation agreement with Australia. And this past week he took his pitch to Europe.

“It must be recognized that the South China Sea handles 60 percent of the entire world’s trade. So it is not only in the interest of the Philippines, or of ASEAN, or of the Indo-Pacific region, but of the whole world,” Marcos said in Berlin on Tuesday, referring to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Standing alongside Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, Mr. Marcos, the first Philippine President to visit Germany in a decade, added: “Therefore, it is in all our interests to maintain the country as a safe passage for all international trade taking place in the world . South Chinese Ocean.”

This wave of diplomacy could ultimately help deter China, analysts say. But they also acknowledged that Beijing would continue to double down on its territorial claims, raising the risks of a conflict that could ultimately attract the United States, the Philippines’ oldest treaty ally. Washington has repeatedly condemned Beijing’s actions and vowed to come to Manila’s aid in the event of an armed conflict.

The foreign policy strategy of Mr Marcos, who took office in June 2022, is almost the opposite of the approach of his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte. While Mr. Duterte rejected the West and courted China, Mr. Marcos has revived and strengthened ties with traditional security partners such as the United States and Japan. He has also built new relationships with countries such as Sweden and France, and his government has pushed for arms deals and military exercises.

Tensions flared again this month when Chinese boats blocked Philippine ships off the Second Thomas Shoal, a disputed reef 190 kilometers off the coast of western Palawan province. The confrontation culminated in the clash between Chinese and Philippine coast guard ships.

Mr. Marcos then told reporters that there was no reason yet to invoke the mutual defense treaty with the United States.

China claims 90 percent of the South China Sea, part of which is hundreds of kilometers away from the mainland and in the waters around Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and the Philippines. Over the past decade, China has exerted increasing control over these waters, using two island chains, the Paracels and the Spratlys, to expand its military footprint by building and fortifying outposts and airstrips.

The militarization of the Spratly Islands allowed China to maintain a 24-hour presence in waters approximately 500 miles from China’s coast. Chinese boats stationed there then repeatedly harassed Filipino fishing boats in an area that an international tribunal in The Hague ruled was a traditional fishing ground of the Philippines, Vietnam and other countries. The Chinese presence also prevented Manila from fully exploring the oil and gas deposits in the surrounding waters.

China has blamed the Philippines for frequent clashes in the South China Sea.

Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, warned the Philippines in December against “changing its policy position, reneging on its obligations and continuing to provoke and cause trouble at sea.”

Mr. Wang also issued a warning: “If the Philippines misjudges the situation, insists on going its own way, or even colludes with evil external forces to continue causing trouble and chaos, China will definitely safeguard its rights in accordance with the law and respond. resolutely.”

Two weeks later, the Philippines announced that it had signed agreements with Britain and Canada to strengthen defense cooperation. They were part of 10 security agreements that Mr. Marcos has signed with seven countries since last year, according to a series of public statements.

“China is actually pushing us closer to the United States and to the other countries that have already expressed their support, as far as Germany and as far as the Czech Republic,” said Renato Cruz De Castro, professor of international studies at De La Salle University in Manila.

On Thursday, Czech Republic President Petr Pavel said he was ready to cooperate with the Philippines on defense and cybersecurity, adding that his country “fully” supports Manila in the South China Sea.

“To us, the South China Sea may seem very far away, but if you take into account the percentage of global or global trade that passes through this area, any disruption to these routes would have a negative impact on Europe. not only in the form of a shortage of goods, but also in rising prices,” Mr Pavel told reporters at a joint news conference with Mr Marcos. “That’s why we need to pay attention to this issue.”

New allies, Mr. De Castro said, are welcome because the Philippines cannot rely solely on the United States, especially if former President Donald J. Trump returns to power next year.

“The US right now is just – even Americans would say – so unstable, the political system is so unstable, look what’s happening with US military aid to Ukraine,” he said. “And I’m not saying Trump would win, but there is always uncertainty because of the volatile US domestic politics.”

Another important factor for Mr. Marcos, analysts say, is securing investment for the Philippines.

“That means that we can be really assertive, that we can really protect the interests of the South China Sea without thinking about the economic setback that China could impose on us,” said Aries A. Arugay, chairman of the political department sciences from the University of China. the Philippines Diliman.

Even India, which has been silent on the South China Sea dispute for years, announced last June that it would provide loans at preferential rates to the Philippines for its military modernization. In August, both countries signed agreements to cooperate in the field of coast guard.

Last week, while in Australia, Mr Marcos warned that ongoing clashes between Philippine and Chinese ships had increased the risk of miscalculations.

“The likelihood of outright conflict is now much greater than before,” he said. “We are concerned in the Philippines because it cannot be the result of a strategic decision by someone who says, ‘Okay, we’re going to go to war,’ but of a few soldiers making a mistake, or of an action that becomes wrong understood.”

In Taiwan, the government is rushing to do what no country or even company has been able to do: build an alternative to Starlink, the satellite internet service operated by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company.

Starlink has enabled militaries, power plants and medical personnel to maintain crucial online connections when primary infrastructure fails in emergency situations such as an earthquake in Tonga and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Officials in Taiwan are constantly reminded that communications infrastructure must be able to withstand a crisis. The island democracy is 80 miles (130 kilometers) from China, where leaders have vowed to use force if necessary to claim Taiwan is part of its territory.

Taiwan faces regular cyber attacks and almost daily incursions into its waters and airspace by the People’s Liberation Army, which has been built up in recent years.

And Taiwan’s infrastructure is vulnerable. Last year, the remote Matsu Islands, within sight of the Chinese coast, suffered patchy internet for months after two undersea internet cables broke. These fiber-optic cables that connect Taiwan to the internet have suffered about 30 such breaks since 2017, mostly due to anchors dragged by the many ships in the area.

The war in Ukraine heightened the sense of vulnerability weighing on Taiwan’s leaders. With much of its telecommunications system taken offline by Russian weaponry and cyberattacks, the Ukrainian military has become dependent on a system controlled by Mr Musk.

“The war between Ukraine and Russia gave us a profound reflection,” said Liao Jung-Huang, director of the government-sponsored Industrial Technology Research Institute. “Even if the cost to build it is high, in a special scenario the value of having your own constellation is unlimited.”

SpaceX dominates the satellite internet industry, and Mr Musk has long done business in China through his electric car company Tesla, which has a major production facility in Shanghai. Officials in Taiwan decided it would be best to build a satellite network that they could control.

But building a network of satellites manufactured, launched and controlled from Taiwan will require billions of dollars and years of research and testing.

SpaceX has spent five years launching thousands of satellites into so-called low Earth orbit, an area much closer than where traditional communications satellites fly, starting about 100 miles above Earth. The satellites send signals to terminals on the ground, and as they get closer, the signal gets faster.

Mr Musk has repeatedly proclaimed that within a few years his satellite network will provide the entire world with internet as fast as any land-based internet.

He’s not the only tech billionaire with this goal. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has also announced plans for a low-Earth orbit network. But while SpaceX is responsible for more than half of the active satellites orbiting Earth, Amazon has only launched two.

The British company OneWeb also sent a few hundred satellites into space. But the effort was so costly that it had to be bailed out by the British government before merging with European conglomerate Eutelsat to form a company called Eutelsat OneWeb.

In Taiwan, the government has said it wants to have its first communications satellite in orbit by 2026 and a second within two years, while developing four more test satellites. President Tsai Ing-wen has promised this $1.3 billion that Taiwan’s space program would develop the best of these tests into a satellite internet network created and operated entirely from Taiwan.

While the network is being developed, the Taiwanese government has entered into agreements for access to existing satellite networks. It has said it plans to deploy 700 terminals receive satellite signals. In August it became a partner of Luxembourg company SES, and in November Chunghwa Telecom announced a partnership with Eutelsat OneWeb. The partnerships could provide layers of backup even after Taiwan gets its own network up and running.

“We need to invest in more than one system,” said Yisuo Tzeng, a researcher at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a think tank funded by Taiwan’s Defense Ministry. “We can’t put all our eggs in one basket.”

More than 40 Taiwanese companies make parts in the satellite supply chain, said Mr. Liao of the Industrial Technology Research Institute.

A satellite network developed in Taiwan could do more than provide Taiwan with an alternative communications system. It could make Taiwan a key technology producer for years to come, just as the country is the source of most of the world’s advanced semiconductors.

“Right now we are strong in semiconductor and electronics manufacturing, but space is a new industry where we can leverage that,” said Yu-Jiu Wang, founder of Tron Future, a startup that provides the payload for one of the satellites that the government is testing. .

One of the challenges Taiwan faces is the cost of the rockets that launch the satellites. Most rockets can only be used once and require enormous amounts of fuel, making the costs too high for all but the wealthiest governments to experiment with.

Every Taiwanese satellite that went into space between 2005 and 2016 was launched in the United States, said Yen-Sen Chen, founder of the rocket launch company TiSpace, who worked for more than a decade at the Taiwanese space agency’s predecessor.

Over the past year, Taiwanese research and weather satellites have been launched by French company Arianespace, as well as SpaceX.

Perhaps no entity has devoted more resources to rocket development than SpaceX.

It has become so unavoidable that it even sends competitor payloads into space. In December, Mr. Bezos’ project said it would launch some of its satellites three future Falcon 9 launches.

Taipei has been exploring ways to acquire satellite internet technology since 2018, including in talks with SpaceX. But Mr Musk resisted the requirement that any foreign entity involved in communications infrastructure be a joint venture with a local partner that would have a majority stake. Mr. Musk found this “totally unacceptable,” said Hsu Chih-hsiang, a researcher at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

The talks did not result in a partnership with SpaceX.

Last month, Rep. Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin, alleged that by not making Starlink available in Taiwan, SpaceX could be in violation of its contract to make the service accessible to the U.S. government worldwide, according to a letter reviewed by The New York Times. .

SpaceX is complying with all of its US government contracts, the company responded in a message on X.

When asked about the prospects of any cooperation with SpaceX, Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs said in an emailed statement that it would “evaluate the possibility of cooperation” with any satellite operator, as long as the operator is “in accordance would be with Taiwan’s national security and information security regulations.”

Musk’s close business ties with China have also raised concerns in Taiwan. China is Tesla’s largest market outside the United States.

The Chinese government has eased long-standing restrictions on foreign ownership of companies and handed out lucrative incentives ahead of Tesla setting up its Shanghai Gigafactory. And he has made comments endorsing the Chinese Communist Party’s position on Taiwan.

“What if we were relying on Starlink and Musk decided to cut back under pressure from China because he has the Chinese market at stake?” asked Mr Tzeng of the defense think tank. “We have to take that into account.”

As Mohammed Sweirky prepared to go on a business trip in January to repair telecommunications infrastructure destroyed in northern Gaza, his wife and children begged him not to go.

Fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas members was still raging in the area, said Mr. Sweirky, a technician for Paltel, the largest telecommunications company in Gaza, and his family feared he might not return. But he said he felt he had no choice as residents there desperately needed their phone services restored.

“It was painful to say goodbye,” said Mr. Sweirky, 50, who fled Gaza City at the start of the war and is now sheltering with six relatives in a garage in Rafah, the territory’s southernmost city. “They were crying, but I couldn’t give up our mission.”

Since the war began, Mr. Sweirky’s job has become one of the most dangerous in Gaza, and one of the most important. Israel’s bombing campaign against Hamas has ravaged Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure, destroying underground fiber optic cables, damaging data centers and blowing up transmission towers.

Since the start of the war, about 50 engineers and technicians at Paltel, one of two Palestinian mobile service providers in Gaza, have crisscrossed the enclave to restore service to neighborhoods that have been electrified for days or even weeks.

Paltel – which depends on three telecommunications lines running through Israel – manages Gaza’s infrastructure. Trying to repair that infrastructure has posed enormous risks for Paltel’s technicians, who often have to work near battles and who say they are also under fire.

At least two Paltel employees were killed on the job, according to the company and the Palestinian Authority’s Telecommunications Ministry. A total of 16 people have been killed since the war began, Paltel said.

Power outages across Gaza have severely hampered Palestinians’ ability to call for help, report on unfolding events, coordinate relief efforts, and communicate with friends and family abroad. Calls routinely go straight to voicemail and when they do connect, the connection is often weak.

Some Palestinians in Gaza have found ways to get around the power outages by using cards compatible with Israeli or Egyptian networks and connecting to a backup infrastructure known as a microwave link.

“During a war, the difference between life and death can be one phone call,” said Tariq Bakhit, 33, a medical worker. “We can hardly do anything without the ability to communicate.”

An executive from Paltel and the Palestinian Authority’s telecommunications ministry blamed most of the poor connectivity on airstrikes and bulldozed roads, causing damage to surface and underground infrastructure.

But the executive, Mamoon Fares, the head of Paltel’s Gaza Emergency Committee, said Israel had also cut communications in Gaza three times. He said Paltel came to that conclusion because the network was later restored on those occasions without his intervention. The Israeli military declined to comment.

Mr Fares said dozens of kilometers of Paltel’s fiber optic cables were destroyed, two of its four major data centers were knocked offline and more than 100 of its transmission towers were destroyed in the fighting.

Before Paltel employees enter Israeli-controlled areas, the company says it sends technicians’ names, ID numbers and license plate information to international organizations or Palestinian officials, who pass the information on to Israeli security officials. After receiving permission from Israel to begin a project, workers follow instructions from Israeli officials, including specific routes they plot on maps, the company said.

But there have still been several close calls and one fatal incident, according to Paltel.

In mid-December, members of a Paltel team found themselves in the middle of the fighting. They were trying to reconnect a cable that had been submerged in a water-filled crater in the southern city of Khan Younis when clashes broke out between the Israeli army and militants, said Kamel Amsy, 52, an engineer on the team. Overwhelmed with fear, they lay flat on the ground as bullets flew overhead.

“The tanks in the area went crazy,” he said. “The situation was terrifying.”

When Mr. Fares called Palestinian officials to ask them to inform their Israeli counterparts that his employees were in the line of fire according to established protocol, the Israelis told the technicians to remain seated, the Paltel executive recalled.

Half an hour later, a soldier emerged from a tank and told technicians to evacuate east, but their cars could not drive through the crater, Mr. Amsy said. Worried for their lives, they drove west until they escaped the fighting, he said.

The next day, technicians completed the job, which aimed to restore connectivity to southern Gaza after a multi-day power outage.

When later asked about the event, the Israeli military said it had allowed Paltel technicians to work in the area but later told them not to come due to “operational activity” there. It said the military was not aware of tank fire directed at the technicians, who it said were not targeted.

In another incident in December, Nader Abu Hajjaj, 49, a technician from Khan Younis, was repairing cables and replacing batteries in a building in his hometown when he said it had been hit by airstrikes. “It was a disaster,” Mr. Abu Hajjaj said during an interview in January. “We coordinated our movements, but they still shot at us.”

The Israeli military said it targeted an anti-tank launch position on the roof of the building and ceased fire as soon as it was informed that Paltel operatives were present.

Two weeks later, Mr. Abu Hajjaj was less fortunate. While returning from a project in Khan Younis, his car was hit by tank fire, killing him and Bahaa al-Rayes, his colleague, Paltel said. Mr Fares said a worker who was injured during the episode reported it was caused by opening a tank.

The Israeli military said it is investigating the incident. COGAT, the Israeli agency responsible for contacts with the Palestinians, confirmed that Paltel had coordinated the movements of Mr Abu Hajjaj and Mr Rayes.

While Paltel still does not know the exact extent of the damage to its assets in Gaza, Mr. Fares said 80 percent of its network was offline, including a significant portion that needed to be replaced. He predicted that it would take years to repair the entire network and that repairs would depend on the pace of the broader reconstruction process.

A major challenge in rebuilding the network, Mr. Fares said, was Israel’s blocking of equipment in Gaza, such as antennas, fiber optic cables and microwave dishes.

Eyhab Esbaih, a senior official at the Telecommunications Ministry, said talks continued with Israel through international interlocutors about bringing equipment to Gaza. Like Mr. Fares, he said Israel has not yet allowed such items.

COGAT said it allowed the entry into Gaza of spare parts for communications infrastructure, but declined to specify what was allowed. Israeli officials have long been reluctant to allow it what they consider dual-use items to Gaza – equipment that can be used for both military and civilian purposes.

Technicians say they are also frustrated by clashes with Israeli forces. In December, Mr. Amsy and Mr. Sweirky said they and several technicians were held at gunpoint during a trip to northern Gaza to repair damaged cables.

Mr Amsy said soldiers blindfolded him and tied his wrists before accusing him and other technicians of taking images of the area. He said they were only released after he convinced them they were on an Army-sanctioned repair mission.

“It was incredibly humiliating,” Mr Amsy said. “You try to do your job, but you don’t get any respect.”

When asked about the event, the Israeli military did not comment specifically on Mr. Amsy, nor did it confirm the incident. Instead, it said all detainees “must be treated with respect and dignity.”

After being released, most engineers wanted to abandon the project, but Mr. Amsy said they should do everything possible to improve communications in the north and continued.

But as they got close to their destination, a tank started firing nearby, they said. “It was then that we realized we were on an impossible mission,” Mr. Amsy said. “We had no choice but to go home.” Mr. Fares, the Paltel official, said he was on the phone with technicians when the episode occurred and he heard shots.

The Israeli military said the incident could not be identified using the data provided.