In November 1991, the United States began pulling its forces out of the Philippines. A combination of natural disasters—the dramatic eruption of Mount Pinatubo on June 15, 1991, burying the US Air Force’s Clark Air Base under tons of mud and rubble—and the vagaries of Filipino politics forced Washington to end a military presence on the island nation that had begun in 1898. In 1992, the same year the US Navy pulled out of Subic Naval Base, China’s legislature passed a bill laying claim to the seas the United States was leaving. The “Law on the Territorial Waters and Their Contiguous Areas”
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