"We had no inkling that President Duterte would turn our foreign policy upside down."
"We had no inkling that President Duterte would turn our foreign policy upside down."
Like that old popular song of Patti Page, the country is currently in the process of changing partners. In the words of President Duterte himself, the divorce is now ongoing. What this could mean is that in the not too distant future, there will be more plane tickets bought for trips to Shanghai and Beijing than for Los Angeles and San Francisco. Even that joke about every Filipino having a cousin in the United States may change and this is hardly surprising. A good part of the Filipino blood after all is Chinese.
For myself, two of my great grandfathers on my mother side were Chinese immigrants who settled here before the turn of 20th century. They subsequently Filipinized their surnames which so many have done in this country.
During the 2016 elections, Filipinos had no inkling that the President would turn our foreign policy upside down because he hardly even touched on the subject during the campaign. Now, he is trying to undo a relationship that has developed over the past 120 years in the six years of his presidency.
The big question to ask is that will the Filipino nation accept this and will it be good and beneficial to the country? It would seem that the President has been harboring a deep-seated dislike for America. When and how this started, we do not know. The media has speculated before about an incident involving an American official when he was Mayor of Davao City as the start. This was suppoedly compounded by the denial of the United States embassy of visas to some relatives.
The first public display was of course when he lambasted former US President Barack Obama when he cautioned President Duterte of the unintended negative consequences of his war on drugs – like the unnecessary killing of innocent civilians as collateral damage to the drug war. He continued this for some time until he offered some kind of an apology recently.
He then talked about the negative consequences of the 48-year American rule in the country, followed by the termination of the long-standing US-Philippine military exercises Balikatan which he never witnessed or attended, leaving everything to Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana. As the months went by, the pivot to China became more evident. This is notwithstanding the fact that China has built an island in an area of the South China Sea that is within our exclusive economic zone.
The government has come up with all sorts of reasons for not pressing vigorously our arbitral tribunal victory at The Hague. That ruling declared that China had no historical rights based on the nine-dash line map.
One persistent reason given by the President is that he will not allow his soldiers to go to war that he cannot win, while at the same time pronouncing his willingness to go to war to defend Benham Rise or the Philippine Rise. No mention was made on the prospective or probable enemy. Taiwan, maybe? Could Japan or the United States be interested in the rise? The only country that has conducted an oceanographic survey in the area—which was by the way allowed by the government—is China. What happens if the Chinese become interested in the Rise?
China has invited our President there; President Duterte has also visited Beijing multiple times. China has also promised billions of dollars in loans with an interest rate of about 3 percent by the estimate of some people with knowledge of the negotiation. This is very much higher than the 0.5 percent interest rate being charged by Japan with 10 to 15 years grace period.
We have not seen anything of these promised loans yet except the delivery of Chinese small arms.
China’s President Xi was honored with a red-carpet treatment befitting a super power. Many memoranda of understanding were also assigned but have not all been made public.
When the visit caused traffic jams, the Palace said this was understandable considering the stature of the visitor. I agree. But the Palace should also have been more understanding of the traffic jam created during the visit of His Holiness Pope Francis. But the good Pope was lambasted by no less than Mr. Duterte who was also caught in the jam.