{"id":154750,"date":"2020-02-24T12:00:15","date_gmt":"2020-02-24T12:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=154750"},"modified":"2020-02-21T09:18:35","modified_gmt":"2020-02-21T09:18:35","slug":"duterte-does-the-right-thing-for-a-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/02\/duterte-does-the-right-thing-for-a-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Duterte Does the Right Thing for a Change"},"content":{"rendered":"

He might be the devil incarnate, but Philippine leader Rodrigo Duterte is beginning the process of ending over 120 years of colonial subjugation. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

U.S. Army 1st Lt. Alex Donahue discusses the importance of proper knots and rigging with Philippine soldiers at Fort Ramon Magsaysay, Philippines on May 4, 2017.\u00a0 US Army Photo<\/p><\/div>\n

19 Feb 2020 – <\/em>Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte\u2019s termination of a key military pact with the United States, the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), which governed the deployment of US troops in the country, has evoked varied responses. In some liberal and progressive circles, the move provoked trepidation owing to Duterte\u2019s perceived closeness to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Others were disoriented by the fact that the agent of a change they had long wanted had also been responsible for thousands of extrajudicial executions in his \u201cwar on drugs.\u201d Adding to the confusion was President Donald Trump\u2019s facetious reaction to Duterte\u2019s move, saying \u201cit\u2019ll save us money.\u201d<\/p>\n

It cannot be denied, however, that the termination of VFA was a positive, historic step from the point of view of the national interest of the Philippines. In recent years, much local attention has focused on China\u2019s incursions and outright grabbing of maritime formations claimed by the Philippines in the South China Sea, officially renamed by the Philippine government as the West Philippine Sea. Like many U.S. dependencies, the Philippines has had a Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) with Washington that dates back to the Cold War era and serves as the legal touchstone of the VFA. Not surprisingly, as frictions with China increased, Philippine presidents from Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s to Benigno Aquino III in more recent years invoked the MDT to get the United States to back up the Philippines\u2019 territorial and resource claims in the Spratly Islands group. In response, Washington has consistently said that the MDT does not obligate the United States to support the Philippines\u2019 territorial claims because it \u201cdoes not interfere in sovereignty issues.\u201d Essentially, Washington was saying, \u201cyou\u2019re on your own\u201d as far as the Spratly Islands were concerned.<\/p>\n

At the same time that it was refusing to be drawn into what it saw as a matter of marginal relevance to U.S. interests, however, Washington was busy drawing the Philippines more tightly into a de facto<\/em> military alliance to project power onto the Chinese heartland. This revealed to many Filipinos how one-sided the relationship was and led some traditional politicians like Duterte to begin to appreciate what the Left had been saying all along: that the MDT and the VFA were vestiges of a colonial past that subordinated the country\u2019s national interest to the strategic designs of the United States in the Asia Pacific.<\/p>\n

Why Washington Wanted the VFA<\/strong><\/p>\n

Coming into force almost a decade after the Americans gave up Subic Naval Base and Clark Air Force Base in 1991, the VFA reflected the U.S. move from a position of regarding China as a \u201cstrategic partner\u201d under the Clinton administration in late 1990s to its defining Beijing\u00a0 a \u201cstrategic rival\u201d under George W. Bush in the early 2000s. Under the guise of training Filipino troops, the VFA was a step toward reestablishing a permanent military presence in the Philippines and making it a forward base in its strategy to \u201ccontain\u201d China.<\/p>\n

What motivated Washington was China\u2019s major push to improve its missile defense emplacements on its long southeastern and eastern coastline and on maritime formations in the East and South China Seas. This followed Beijing\u2019s realization of how vulnerable to U.S. attack its coastal urban industrial infrastructure was when Bill Clinton sent two carrier task forces to the region to intimidate China during the Taiwan Straits Crisis in 1996.<\/p>\n

In the succeeding years, the Pentagon carried out an aggressive upgrading of its capabilities to penetrate China\u2019s improving anti-ship and anti-missile defensive shield (A2\/AD) in the area. The result was the institutionalization of an offensively oriented warfighting doctrine focused on China: the AirSea Battle Strategy. According to the most authoritative elaboration of AirSea Battle\u2014recently given the new name of Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons (JAM-GC)\u2014the strategy is designed to carry out \u201c\u2019kinetic and non-kinetic\u2019 (in other words, both explosive and electronic) strikes against inland command centers, radar systems and intelligence gathering facilities, raids against missile production and storage facilities and \u2018blinding\u2019 operations against Chinese satellites.\u201d It also says that China\u2019s \u201cseaborne trade flows would be cut off, with an eye toward exerting major stress on the Chinese economy and, eventually , internal stress.\u201d The account explicitly admits that the aim of AirSea Battle is \u201cto overcome China\u2019s A2\/AD defenses\u201d because failure to so would result in the \u201cUnited States [finding] itself effective locked out of a region that has been declared a vital security interest by every administration in the last sixty years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, revelation of the strategy rattled Beijing and pushed it to fortify and increase its defensive perimeter in the South China Sea. This also led it to some rash and unjustifiable moves such as seizing and erecting military structures on maritime formations claimed by the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries and declaring some 90 percent of the sea as belonging to China.<\/p>\n

EDCA and AirSea Battle<\/strong><\/p>\n

Key to AirSea Doctrine was obtaining bases in the Philippines to provide fire and logistical support to American air and naval efforts to swamp or maneuver around China\u2019s coastal and island defenses.<\/p>\n

Concluded by the Aquino administration and the Obama administration in 2014, the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), the VFA\u2019s sister agreement, can be described as nothing less than a gift to Washington. It allowed the United States to set up military bases for troops and store war materiel in nominally Philippine bases. And Washington could have these bases without paying rent\u2014the sticking point in the failed 1990-91 base renegotiations that had led to the closure of Subic and Clark.<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, Filipinos became increasingly alarmed that they had not only been maneuvered into making a major cession of their sovereignty, but geopolitically and geographically, they were being placed between a rock and a hard place. Joint military training under VFA and hand-me-down military aid plus \u201cdefense of freedom\u201d rhetoric were cheap change for placing the country in harm\u2019s way. The bases were being primed to serve as springboards for an offensive strategy to overcome China\u2019s A2\/AD defenses on its coasts and the West Philippine Sea. At the same time, these bases and the surrounding Philippine cities and countryside would be within range of intermediate-range Chinese missiles in the event of a conflict. With heightened tensions in the South China Sea, where a runaway arms and strategic race had created a situation where a mere ship collision could escalate into something much bigger, the bitter realization took hold that Washington had enlisted Duterte\u2019s strategically na\u00efve predecessor, Aquino, in a dangerous military alliance against China without even the decency of a formal alliance. This was, in strategic terms, the worst of all worlds, and it rankled not just progressives but Duterte as well.<\/p>\n

The Trump Factor<\/strong><\/p>\n

Under the Trump administration, the position of the Philippines has gotten even more precarious. The interests of allied states have perhaps counted less with Trump than with any other U.S. president in recent times. More important, Trump has taken the United States out of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), and his Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has made it clear that Washington will now set up intermediate-range nuclear missile emplacements directed at China in the Western Pacific, with the possibility that these could be lodged in the U.S. bases in the Philippines.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s anti-China rampage cannot be assumed to be confined only to the trade front, especially since key advisers like Peter Navarro see trade and military strategy as part of the same stick. This makes the Pentagon quite happy since it has corralled Washington\u2019s civilian leadership into viewing China with the same lens: not just a strategic competitor but a strategic enemy.<\/p>\n

The National Interest and History\u2019s Tricks<\/strong><\/p>\n

The logic of national interest dictates that, like the proverbial David, the Philippines must not be dragged into this conflict between two Goliaths. Indeed, the Philippines is ditching the VFA just in time. And Duterte should not just end the VFA but go all the way and scrap the Mutual Defense Treaty and EDCA as well.<\/p>\n

There are progressives in the Philippines that are bothered by the fact that it is a mass murderer like Duterte (the victims in the war on drugs are now said to be about 27,000) that is ending the military alliance with the United States. Or they\u2019re concerned that the fellow\u2019s motivations may not be the purest (he is reportedly miffed by one of his top allies being refused a visa by Washington).<\/p>\n

But hey, history loves to play tricks on people. The man may be the devil incarnate, but if he serves as history\u2019s agent to begin to put an end to over 120 years of colonial subjugation and post-colonial subordination to a supremely self-interested, callous, and imperious master, I\u2019m on his side\u2026on this issue, that is, even as on matters of human rights and democratic rights, I and other progressives continue to condemn his policies.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Walden Bello is a former member of the Congress of the Philippines.\u00a0 A consistent advocate of an independent foreign policy, he opposed the US-Philippine Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) at the same time that he sponsored the resolution renaming the South China Sea the West Philippine Sea.\u00a0 He is the author of many books and articles on U.S. political, military, and economic relations with Asia. Bello is an expert on the World Trade Organization and global trade, senior analyst at the Philippine think-tank <\/em>Focus on the Global South, and <\/em>TNI fellow. He was the principal author of <\/em>A Siamese Tragedy: Development and Disintegration in Modern Thailand (London: Zed Press, 1998). <\/em>He is also the author of two recent studies, <\/em>China: An Imperial Power in the Image of the West, and <\/em>Trump and the Asia-Pacific: The Persistence of Unilateralism, which can be accessed at https:\/\/focusweb.org<\/a>. <\/em>Bello did his doctoral dissertation on the counterrevolution in Chile in 1970-73. He is currently senior research fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies of Kyoto University.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 fpif.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

19 Feb 2020 – Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte\u2019s termination of a key military pact with the United States, the Visiting Forces Agreement, which governed the deployment of US troops in the country, has evoked varied responses. He might be the devil incarnate, but Duterte is beginning the process of ending over 120 years of colonial subjugation. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":78790,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[1149,756,1126,1050,1856,95],"class_list":["post-154750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asia-pacific","tag-asia-and-the-pacific","tag-asian-pacific-history","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-philippines","tag-us-military"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154750\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}