It was reported that former US ambassador to the Philippines, Philip Goldberg, is plotting to destabilize the government of President Duterte. The Americans are again up to their old trick of wanting to undermine governments. Maybe the so-called “blueprint” was intentionally floated to test just how the people will react. As usual, it seeks to enjoin its institutional allies made up of the Yellow-cum-US lackey opposition and the opportunistic Catholic Church to wage propaganda aimed at discrediting the government of President Duterte.
The plotters hope to get an instant result, which is to put on guard the government and serve as an indirect warning for the President to refrain from giving his blusters and insulting tirades at the US. The US ambassador who fractured the Philippine-US relations could console himself that after being called a faggot, could make a revenge by intimidating the Duterte government of possible coup d’etat.
This mob-like strategy of roughing up leaders who refuse to toe the line is a fantasy because it appears to have been hatched by one who is completely detached from reality. The US no longer command that much influence or respect in world politics except to use what political scientist, Paul Kennedy, called the “hard approach” of going to war.
As US influence continues to decline, it will encounter more maverick political leaders and they all express the same desire of wanting to escape from the grapple of US imperial domination. The Americans themselves elected their own maverick President in the person of Donald Trump. The neo-liberals, the oligarchy and the wolf-in-sheepskin Democrats, were all dumbfounded.
Americans today are complaining about their role of playing bad cop to police the world. Instead of them enjoying the prosperity of their great society, many feel they are now living in a Third World country suffering the same pangs of hunger, poverty, unemployment, homelessness and indebtedness. They could feel the high price of maintaining an “alliance” that is no longer based on the wisdom of preserving the legacy of their founding fathers.
Goldberg tries to ridicule President Duterte’s style of politics saying that his “views are shaped not by ideology or personal ambition, but by old-fashioned nationalism where he holds the United States accountable for the Philippines’ current state of poverty and dependence.” But such observation is more of an attempt to gloss over the truth that since the country was granted its “independence,” it has not managed to economically take off. When the country was about to succeed, the US worked out a plot to make sure there would be a regime change.
Accordingly, the plot states that “…ideology and old-fashioned nationalism of castigating the US for its current state of poverty and dependency,” is, on the contrary, an admission that the US has failed. Despite being a career diplomat, Goldberg miserably forgot that countries are no longer engaged in an ideological contest, but are driven with a strong shade of nationalism in what Hans Morgenthau call “power politics.“
The US, in the likes of Goldberg, refuses to accept that whatever the President says, he speaks for and in behalf of the Filipino people. As diplomat, he should have known that when Duterte boldly renewed our ties with China and Russia, he is merely pursuing the country’s desire for an independent foreign policy which at its core represents our national interest.
How Goldberg plans to orchestrate public dissatisfaction is an admission that the administration enjoys enormous popular support. Invariably, the US and its local collaborating traitors from the opposition would have to exert extra effort to bring down the government relying mainly on the so-called “mainstream media” to do the dirty work of systematically distorting every word that the President says.
To quote from the plan of former US ambassador, “(it) calls for stoking public dissatisfaction with the President over unfulfilled election promises, isolating the Philippines from the rest of the Asean by extending military assistance to member countries except the Philippines, and /or through economic ‘blackmail’ that aims to limit trade by some Asean member countries with the Philippines.”
Again, this needs to be clarified. Members of the Armed Forces have never before been dissatisfied in our alliance with the US. First, many of the equipment which we received through the Mutual Defense Agreement are mostly second- hand and outmoded, and paid a high price for their acquisition, repairs and refitting. Since the Balikatan exercise has become a regular undertaking between the US and AFP, it is now seen by our soldiers as wholly advantageous to the Americans. Our participation is merely to complete the scenario of a war game with our soldiers serving as “fillers.”
The same can be said about the decision to stop the delivery of about 26,000 assault rifles. US claims that the decision to stop the delivery was due to the alleged failure by the Duterte administration to comply with rule of law in its war against drugs.
Maybe it is no longer for us to judge the conduct of the US on the issue of human rights, but we can cite the torture of prisoners and suspects at the infamous US prison camps in Guantanamo, Cuba, at Abu Gharaib, Iraq, Bagram, Afghanistan, the CIA “Operation Rendition” by kidnapping suspects out of their country to be tortured and locked up elsewhere, the so-called “tiger cases” during the Vietnam War and on its involvement of numerous undeclared wars where US soldiers routinely commit massacre, atrocities, genocide and carnage, all without regard to international law.
Curiously enough, the alleged destabilization plot failed to mention that what happened in 1986 was not a People Power, but a coup d’ etat initiated by the rightist elements in the military only to be usurped by the oligarchy with the active participation of the Catholic Church. It also remains an inexplicable chapter in the bloody history of the Left why it supported the bogus People Power unmindful that what was taking place was a counter revolution that would debase our people of the economic gains they earned under the Marcos administration. Unfortunately, the Left continues to hanker the issue of Martial Law to cover their treachery in supporting the elitist counter revolution.
(rpkapunan@gmail.com)