Today, the start of the second year of the Duterte administration, I give way to the views of historian Van Ybiernas on one of President Rodrigo Duterte’s most controversial and radical policy shifts: the so-called pivot to China.
Ybiernas writes:
The Philippines is still many decades away from being able to take credible control of the seas that are part of our 200-km exclusive economic zone. Decades of reliance on the United States’ protection and benevolence is the reason for this weakness.
In those years of friendship and alliance with the US, it was never the American intention to help us achieve the ability to protect our own territory independently. We might even say that the US was making sure we continued to rely on them for our external defense.
Of course, our friendship with China won’t be any better. China isn’t going to help us become strong enough to resist their encroachment on the West Philippine Sea. However, China is the region’s largest, richest and most powerful nation, and it doesn’t really make sense for us to antagonize China.
During the Aquino administration, China saw us as an American puppet, an errand boy sent by big, bad US to harass them.
The Duterte administration decided that it wanted to pivot away from complete reliance on the US and be less antagonistic towards China. That didn’t sit well with the US and their plans in the region.
The American strategy—at least during the Obama years—was to avoid direct conflict with China. Instead, the US wanted to mobilize its allies in the region to inflict a million paper cuts on China, which pissed Beijing off against Manila and others who went along the American hub-and-spoke game plan.
Things got ugly when Obama sought to keep Duterte in check by pressuring him through a shaming campaign, a non-stop barrage of criticism against alleged human rights violations committed during the early days of the War on Drugs. In addition, Obama also sought to use a strategy employed by his predecessors going back to the post-World War II era: use American money to bribe us. Or in this case, to blackmail us.
Sadly for Obama, American money isn’t what it used to be. And the Philippines isn’t as poor as it used to be.
Donald Trump is more conciliatory than Obama. He replaced the meddlesome Ambassador Philip Goldberg with a more reserved Sung Kim. Also, the US under Trump isn’t as pushy as before. I figure it has more to do with Trump’s massive domestic problems—he doesn’t need more problems overseas—rather than a real shift in American policy towards the Philippines, which I think has not changed.
China will be supportive of the Philippines under Duterte. We’ve seen the humanitarian aid and military assistance for Marawi. But don’t expect China to be really helpful. It would be anti-Sun Tzu for China to help its potential enemy become strong enough to fight it. China will be nice to us, but not too nice.
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Thus, it’s really up to us to make ourselves stronger. We need a foreign and defense policy that makes sense for us. Geopolitics is important but we’re too weak to make that our primary focus. Our focus needs to be domestic security against the likes of the CPP-NPA-NDF, the Muslim secessionists and terrorists (they are sometimes separate and sometimes the same).
But, our long-term vision needs to be focused on protecting our waters, which is not necessarily a military or naval concern. It should really be more of a Coast Guard matter.
The Coast Guard, which is the police of our waters, is essentially a civilian force. Focusing on the Coast Guard sends the message that we are not militarizing our seas, unlike the stupid policy of Aquino, which highlighted the acquisition of old, converted naval ships, which he and fellow Three Stooges Albert del Rosario and Voltaire Gazmin amusingly brandished against China in the West Philippine Sea.
All in all, the trio of Duterte, Delfin Lorenzana and Alan Peter Cayetano seems to me light years better than the moronic trio of Aquino, del Rosario and Gazmin. We need to stay the course and slowly develop the ability to effectively patrol our waters through the Coast Guard, not the Navy (unless we want to antagonize our neighbors). This is the policy that makes sense.
Domestically, we need to weed out the terrorists in Mindanao and end the Communist insurgency and Islamic secessionist problems once and for all.
Afterwards, we also need to shift away from a focus on the military to an enlargement of our police. The PNP needs to become bigger in number and resources.
In the 21st century, at least, when countries all over the world are turning their backs from the Cold War geopolitical hangover and focusing instead on domestic issues, the threat of inter-state wars is dwindling. International relations scholars have noticed this trend for at least two decades now: conflict is moving away from state versus state and heading towards conflict within the state.
This is a trend that I think will continue for decades, and I think we need to recalibrate our strategic thinking when it comes to security concerns. Thus, after one year of the Duterte administration, I think we’re headed in the right direction.