The presence of foreign troops is a sensitive issue in the Philippines, a former American colony.
Left-wing activists have protested against Obama's visit and the new defense pact in small but lively demonstrations, saying that the agreement reverses democratic gains achieved when huge U.S. military bases were shut down in the early 1990s, ending nearly a century of American military presence in the Philippines.
The Philippine Senate voted in 1991 to close down U.S. bases at Subic and Clark, northwest of Manila. However, it ratified a pact with the United States allowing temporary visits by American forces in 1999, four years after China seized a reef the Philippines contests.
Following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, hundreds of U.S. forces descended in the southern Philippines under that accord to hold counterterrorism exercises with Filipino troops fighting Muslim militants.
This time, the focus of the Philippines and its underfunded military has increasingly turned to external threats as territorial spats with China in the potentially oil- and gas-rich South China Sea heated up in recent years. The Philippines has turned to Washington, its longtime defense treaty ally, to help modernize its navy and air force, which are among Asia's weakest.
Chinese paramilitary ships took effective control of the disputed Scarborough Shoal, a rich fishing ground off the northwestern Philippines, in 2012. Last year, Chinese coast guard ships surrounded another contested offshore South China Sea territory, the Second Thomas Shoal, where they have been trying to block food supplies and rotation of Filipino marines aboard a grounded Philippine navy ship in the remote coral outcrops.
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