This is CBS Eye on the World.

Here's John Batchelor.

I welcome Gordon Chang, at Gordon-Gee Chang, my colleague and co-hust and friend.

We're off to East Asia.

We welcome the co-author of Embracing Communist China, America's Greatest Strategic Failure.

Jim Fennell, former U.S. Navy Captain Intelligence, now a government fellow at the Geneva Center for Security Policy.

Jim, I read from the Financial Times reporting in these last hours.

Defense Secretary Gilberto Teadora of the Philippines said in an interview with the Financial Times

that his country was looking at getting mid-range capability launchers, which the U.S. brought

to the Philippines in April.

We do intend to acquire capabilities of such sort, said the Minister.

We will not compromise with our right to acquire

any such kind of capabilities in the future within our territory. What's happened, Jim?

Well, this latest announcement and focus on this acquisition of the Typhon missile system,

which is otherwise named the strategic mid-range fire system,

which comprises two elements, the SM6, 2009 nautical mile, surface-to-air missile,

and the 1,000 monocomile TILAM missile system that's been out in the Philippines since April, as you noted. That's kind of the

culmination over the last, just over a week's worth of activity that started really on the 5th

of November when the Philippines began a two-week exercise in the South China Sea, where they were

basically training to retake an island that

they, an island that would have been taken by the Chinese. And so they've been training in the

South China Sea. China was not happy about that. They sent in their aircraft carrier, the

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