This paper examines the Marcos Jr. administration's pivot toward hard balancing in the South China Sea (SCS) dispute through the lens of perceptual neoclassical realism (PNCR). While power distribution in the region and China’s rise provide the systemic pressures, this paper argues that the resulting policy shift cannot be solely attributed to structural stimulus. Instead, two intervening variables at the unit level mediate this translation: elite perception of the China threat and elite confidence in the credibility of the US-Philippine alliance. Drawing on the transparency policy, the expanded Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), and incidents at sea, this paper traces how the Marcos administration's foreign policy elites reinterpreted both variables relative to the Duterte era, reframing threat as acute and alliance guarantees as credible. This shift in elite cognition accounts for the move from bandwagoning to hard balancing, illustrating PNCR’s capacity to explain variation in state responses to structurally similar external pressures.
