THE PHILIPPINES FIRST RAN INTO TROUBLE WITH CHINA OVER DISPUTED maritime territory in 1995, when Beijing raised the Chinese flag on Mischief Reef, which lies 134 miles off the Philippines Palawan Island and well inside its two hundred-mile exclusive economic zone. Four years later China began to move toward Second Thomas Shoal, shaped like a jagged knife blade just twenty miles away. It was then that the Philippines chose to act.
The Philippine Navy deliberately ran a rusting old warship, a former American 330-foot-long tank landing craft, the BRP Sierra Madre, aground on Second Thomas Shoal. Since then a small unit of Philippine marines has lived on the ship, tasked with stopping China’s encroachment. The grounding of the Sierra Madre was a skillful move on two levels: first, it placed a public militarized cordon around Second Thomas Shoal; second, while dilapidated and unseaworthy, it was still a Philippine Navy ship, therefore protected by the Mutual Defense Treaty with the United States. If the marines on board came under attack, the Philippines could activate the treaty and America would be bound to come to its aid. China Coast Guard crews kept watch and on several occasions tried to harass supply lines to the Sierra Madre. But they did not directly confront.
At Scarborough Shoal there had been no Philippine Navy presence. Therefore, when the Masinloc fisherman Jurrick Oson, and his crew were pounded with water cannons and threatened with firearms, the US government did not get involved. At least, this was the explanation delivered by the US ambassador to both President Rodrigo Duterte and his predecessor, Benigno Aquino.
Each president reacted very differently, giving an insight into the character of the Philippines. If its democracy had become more embedded and its economy had grown in the thirty years since the ousting of Ferdinand Marcos, it might have been able to put up a stronger front. But the Philippines has gone through a roller coaster of economic slump, a paralyzed legislature, and not very good presidents, with the result that it has neither the military nor the economic wherewithal to challenge Beijing.
After losing Scarborough Shoal, President Aquino tore up the diplomatic rule book and compared China to Nazi Germany. “At what point do you say, ‘Enough is enough’?” Aquino asked in a New York Times interview. “Well, the world has to say it—remember that the Sudetenland was given in an attempt to appease Hitler to prevent World War II.”30 He repeated the comparison during a visit to Japan: “Unfortunately, up to the annexation of the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia … nobody said stop. If somebody said stop to Hitler at that point in time, or to Germany at that time, would we have avoided World War II?”31
Aquino’s statement was an open challenge to the United States to do more to protect its long-standing ally and Southeast Asia from Chinese expansion. But there was little America could or was willing to do, and the Philippines discovered, as China had in the mid-nineteenth century, that it had no sea defenses against a hostile foreign power.
“We cannot promise people something on China that we can’t deliver,” Philippine senator Gregorio Honasan, chair of the National Security and Defense Committee, told me. “How can we promote sovereignty if we have no security policy, and how can we have a security policy if we do not have a strong economy?”
This stage of the Philippine embroilment in the South China Sea is a story involving three leaders, each cut from different cloth: Aquino, Duterte, and US president Barack Obama, each wrapped in America’s long history with the Philippines, inadvertently inherited in 1898 from an anticolonial war against Spain in the faraway Caribbean.
The urbane Benigno Aquino was part of a wealthy political dynasty that among its assets listed the Philippines’ biggest sugar estate, Hacienda Luisita. Aquino’s father, Ninoy, an icon of the democracy movement, was assassinated in 1983 on his return from exile to lead the opposition against Ferdinand Marcos. When Marcos was expelled in 1986, Ninoy’s widow, Cory, who was Benigno’s mother, became president and staved off repeated attempts to overthrow her. Her main success was overseeing the democratic transition to the next president, Fidel Ramos, a former chief of staff of the Philippine Armed Forces. From there the country darted to Joseph Estrada, an eccentric film star; Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the daughter of another political dynasty; Benigno Aquino; and then seventy-one-year-old Duterte, cast from another mold altogether.
Duterte won power in May 2016 on a populist vote of the style that delivered Donald Trump to the White House and, two years earlier, Narendra Modi to India’s top job. All three men appear to be rough-and-ready, sleeves-rolled-up leaders who can get things done. Duterte, an acknowledged killer, won by skirting conventional channels and speaking straight to the common people, often in the language of the grassroots villages with son-of-a-whore and son-of-a-bitch style swearing, whether about the American president or drug traffickers whom he had ordered to be shot dead without judicial process. Duterte had won by six million votes more than his closest rival, a huge electoral mandate that he used to justify his shoot-to-kill program with the aim of wiping out the drug trade.
“We will not stop until the last drug lord … and the last pusher have surrendered or are put either behind bars or below the ground, if they so wish,” Duterte had declared in his June 30, 2016 inaugural address, unfolding a policy that rubbed badly against those who believed democratically elected governments did not do such things.32
He came across as a Clint Eastwood character from a spaghetti western, the guy who walked into town, guns blazing, to raise hell for the common good. Duterte had earned his spurs by grittily taming the vast unruly southern city of Davao, making it safe for families to take their kids to play in parks again. He had achieved that not by being nice but by gunning down the bad guys.
“I’d go around in Davao with a motorcycle, with a big bike, and I would just patrol the streets, looking for trouble,” he told a group of businessmen, recounting his twenty-year tenure as mayor. “I was really looking for a confrontation so I could kill. I used to do it personally. Just to show to the guys (police) that if I can do it why can’t you?”33
Duterte took office in June 2016, a month before the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled in favor of the Philippines and against China over its South China Sea claims. His initial reaction was to warn of war with China. He spoke of it being bloody and of the bones of soldiers, including his own, being sacrificed for Philippine sovereignty. But within weeks of that bravado, Duterte switched his hostile sights from China to the United States, and it became personal. In September 2016, at a regional summit in the small, impoverished, communist-run country of Laos, the street-fighting mayor came head-to-head with the professorial President Obama. It should have been a meeting between the leaders of two democracies with shared values and a military alliance that helped protect Southeast Asia, but it wasn’t.
By the time they both arrived in Laos, more than two thousand had been killed in Duterte’s antidrug operation. The US government and human rights groups had already spoken out against the killings, and Obama said he would raise them with Duterte when they met. That was when the relationship began to fall apart. Despite his earthy, abrasive manner, Duterte’s upbringing was far more privileged than Obama’s. He came from a political family with a network of relatives and supporting clans. His father and cousin served as mayors in the central city of Cebu. He was sent to good private schools, although he was expelled from two, and he graduated with a political science degree from the prestigious Lyceum University of the Philippines in Manila. He went on to get his law degree from San Beda College of Law, which was run by Benedictine monks. From there he joined the prosecutor’s office in Davao City.
Obama, on the other hand, came from a broken home with an American mother and an estranged Kenyan father who died in a car accident when Obama was twenty-one. Obama’s primary school years were spent in Indonesia, giving him experience in Southeast Asia, and from there with help from scholarships he went on to law school, became a civil rights attorney, and was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996.
There is often friction of moral choices between a criminal prosecutor and a human rights attorney and, in the Laos showdown, it unfolded in the will of a democratic superpower against the needs of a poor, developing Asian country.
Duterte’s first outburst came as he boarded his plane for Laos. Asked by reporters what he would do if Obama pressed him on the antidrug killings, he said, “I am a president of a sovereign state and we have long ceased to be a colony.” His voice was raised and he tapped his chest to make his point. “I do not have any master except the Filipino people, nobody, but nobody. You must be respectful. Don’t just throw around questions.” He switched to the local language, Tagalog, to say “Putang ina” (meaning “son of a bitch”), then continued in English: “I do not want to pick a quarrel with Obama but, certainly, I do not want to appear to be beholden to anybody.”34
A story leapt around the world proclaiming that Duterte had called Obama a “son of a bitch,” or “son of a whore,” as some media outlets translated it. Obama canceled their scheduled meeting.
So, was this a real shift in Philippine foreign policy, or was it a lost-in-translation misunderstanding that got out of hand? It was a bit of both.
“So, the president says ‘son of a whore,’ like when something goes wrong you might say ‘fuck’ or ‘goddamn it,’” a senior Philippine official told me in Manila. “He was cursing the situation, not Obama. Listen to it. He didn’t say, ‘you son of a bitch,’ and when he said ‘you must be respectful’ he was talking about the reporters, not Obama. And if you hear Duterte speaking, he’s one of those guys who swears all the time, son-of-a-bitch this, son-of-a-whore that.”
There was, though, an added layer that underpinned the shifting winds of Asia when it comes to American influence. Obama had gone to Laos from a G20 summit in Chengdu, China, arriving on a day when five world leaders, including Russian president Vladimir Putin, had been greeted flawlessly. In a calculated, public snub, Chinese airport staff failed to deliver steps and unroll a red carpet for Obama to disembark in presidential style from Air Force One. Hurried arrangements were made for him to leave by emergency steps lowered from the back of the aircraft, while Chinese and US officials exchanged sharp words on the tarmac. “This is our country. This is our airport,” shouted one Chinese official in English, with all the anger that underpinned China’s Century of Humiliation and the unwelcome wielding of American power in Asia.
There is common sentiment here with Duterte’s declaration that the Philippines is “no longer a colony.” A month later, in October 2016, this leader of America’s oldest ally in the Asia-Pacific flew to Beijing with 250 business people. Duterte played up his own Chinese heritage (his grandfather came from Xiamen), declaring, “It’s only China [that] can help us.”35 He started with handshakes and flags, signed agreements on fishing, trade, and Chinese investment, and concluded with a dramatic performance in the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square. “In this venue, your honors,” he told an array of the Chinese elite, “I announce my separation from the United States. … America has lost. I’ve realigned myself in your ideological flow, and maybe I will also go to Russia to talk to Putin and tell him that there are three of us against the world—China, Philippines, and Russia. It’s the only way.”36
Questions were raised as to whether, in its campaign to weaken the pro-Western alliance in Asia, Beijing had taken its first scalp.
THE PHILIPPINES HAD been down this anti-American road before. Like many developing countries, it loved baseball hats, green cards, Disney, and aid money but resented being told what to do and the sense of being beholden to a foreign country. Duterte’s sudden switch of policy was less the grinding of global tectonic plates and more a symptom of unpredictable democracy and the Philippines’ own haphazard way of doing things. In March 2016, less than six months before dramatically shifting his allegiance from the United States to China, Manila and Washington, DC, had signed the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, a military support package that gave the United States the use of five air bases, specifically for South China Sea operations.37
The Philippines mattered to the United States because of its 1951 military treaty, and during its last significant anti-American spell in the early 1990s America ended up having to close two huge bases that had been pivotal to its Cold War regional defense.
First to go was Clark Air Base, fifty miles north of Manila, in what appeared to be an act of God. As the Philippines was debating the expulsion of the US military, the nearby Mount Pinatubo volcano erupted, covering Clark’s sprawling fourteen-square-mile military metropolis with thick, impenetrable ash. The fifteen thousand people who lived there fled. At least a hundred buildings were destroyed; many more were damaged, weighed down by a coating of thick gray sludge. It would have taken up to $800 million to fix, and the Philippines was asking for another $800 million in annual rent.
America did not want to stay where it was not welcome. Communist insurgents were gunning down US servicemen. Activists protested outside the US embassy. The Cold War had just ended, the Soviet threat was gone, and China had not yet risen. The United States had military arrangements with Singapore and Thailand and maintained bases in Japan and South Korea. Farther east, it had huge facilities in Hawaii, home to the US Pacific Command, and Guam, a small island where munitions to fight a Pacific war are stockpiled and 27 percent of the population is the American military. Given the growing hostile mood, the expense, and the difficult negotiations, it made sense to downsize from the Philippines. The United States had been at Clark since 1903. It decided to leave.38 Little did anyone imagine that only a generation on Russia would be resurgent and China would have woken up as a menacing giant.
The naval base at Subic Bay, fifty miles from Clark, was next. Subic had also been hit by Mount Pinatubo, but not as badly, and the US preference was to stay. It negotiated the Treaty of Friendship, Peace and Cooperation to extend the lease. But, in a reflection of nationalistic sentiments running through the country, the Philippine Senate rejected it. The United States narrowed its aims to requesting a three-year extension. That failed too, because the Philippines insisted that the United States revealed if it kept nuclear weapons at Subic Bay. To have complied would have broken the policy of neither confirming nor denying whether its warships, submarines, or aircraft are carrying nuclear weapons.
By the end of 1991 all US military personnel were being ordered out of the Philippines. The naval base became the Subic Bay Freeport Zone, a magnet for tax-exempt auctions, imported vehicles, construction equipment, and the like. Today it is no bustling commercial port, but more an empty expanse of wide roads, huge jetties, and military barracks turned into fast food joints, hotels, and massage parlors. Its small airfield, with old planes, rusting hangars, and grass growing through the runway resembles the set of a 1980s mercenary movie. American warships visit, but none is based there and crews are not allowed into the town. During the Second World War, Vietnam, Korean, and Cold Wars, American servicemen raised hell and laughter along strips lined with bars, brothels, and beckoning girls. Those fresh-faced or war-damaged young sailors have long gone. A few bars have survived; many customers are veterans going down memory lane, some with wives in tow, or retired servicemen who are never able to leave.
The US bases were a lightning rod for nationalist Philippine discontent. But shutting them down didn’t bring closure about the Philippines’ history and its place in the world, the stigma exposed by Duterte of being treated like a colony. It was not too long before the government was asking the Americans back. For a moment, it was a win-win: America needed an extra foothold in Asia, and the Philippines needed help against Islamic extremism. The 9/11 attacks motivated a resurgence of centuries-old Islamic unrest in the south. American special forces became a fixture in training and intelligence gathering. Then came China’s resurgence and the Scarborough Shoal incursion. That not only underlined the country’s military weakness but also exposed how much the Philippines, indeed each Southeast Asian nation, relied so much on China for its economy.
Since 2012, Beijing had slapped sanctions on the Philippines’ fruit exports, claiming they did not meet pest control standards. Thousands of tons were impounded and destroyed. The banana market alone was worth $60 million a year together with jobs and livelihoods. And that was just one industry. China deliberately kept Philippine exporters on edge. Some goods were let through; some were impounded. They never knew whether a shipment would make it, and it became clear that China’s leverage could make or break the Philippines’ development. The choice was either to sacrifice its economy or accept China’s authority, its aid money, its building of infrastructure that could turn the Philippines into a modern Asian nation. On the one hand, the choice was clear cut because the United States could no longer fill the role. On the other, it was unacceptable to exchange one colonizer for another. The Philippines had been under the sway of foreign powers since the sixteenth century, and each time it tried to take control of its destiny something got in the way. As Senator Honasan argued and China itself discovered, first a country needs a strong government and economy. After that things can begin to fall into place.
America colonized the Philippines almost inadvertently when it won a swift war against the fading Spanish Empire in 1898. The fighting took place in the Caribbean, where the United States took Cuba and Puerto Rico. The Philippines, also ruled by Spain, came with the surrender treaty, establishing the United States as a Pacific force. America’s decision to go into Cuba came after more than three years of guerilla insurgency that was disrupting trade, particularly in sugar. There was also political pressure because of atrocities being carried out by the Spanish colonial government. American victory was swift, a decisive blow against the old European order, and, by taking ownership of the Philippines, too, America unexpectedly became a Pacific power. The war against Spain, intervention in Cuba, and taking the Philippines marked the beginning of an ideological mission encompassing trade and human rights that continues to underpin so much of US foreign policy today.
Spain had run the Philippines for more than three hundred years, from 1521 to 1898, and US president William McKinley’s thoughts at the time revealed his hesitancy and how unsure he was of how to handle the Philippines. He concluded that he could not argue the case for colonization; the American flag had not been planted on foreign soil to acquire more territory, he argued, but “for humanity’s sake.”
“When I realized that the Philippines had dropped into our laps, I confess I did not know what to do with them,” McKinley said in a magazine interview.39
And one night late, it came to me this way. One, that we could not give them (the Philippines) back to Spain. That would be cowardly and dishonorable. Two, that we could not turn them over to France and Germany, our commercial rivals in the Orient. That would be bad business and discreditable. Three, that we not leave them to themselves. They are unfit for self-government, and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain’s wars. And four, that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.40
Significantly, more than a hundred years before George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, his predecessor had understood that regardless of the high moral purpose, freeing up a country too quickly was fraught with danger.
McKinley also inherited an ongoing Islamic insurgency. As soon as the United States took control in 1899, it found itself at war with Moro fighters who fought with such intensity that the United States appealed to the Ottoman Empire in Turkey to broker a peace deal. But the dogged Moros would not even listen to the mighty Ottomans. Fighting lasted fourteen years, to 1913. American dead were fewer than a thousand. The Moro casualties were far higher because of their unwillingness to surrender. Another Moro war ran from 1972 to 1986, and at its peak in the mid-1970s, 80 percent of the Philippine military was deployed against more than thirty thousand Moro fighters. Casualties totaled more than fifty thousand.
There has never been real peace in the Moro areas of the southern Philippines. The insurgency comprises a mix of the old Moro groups who had fought the Spanish, Americans, and their own government for centuries, and newer groups inspired by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda from the Middle East. In 2017, fighters associating themselves with the Islamic State (commonly called ISIS) fought Philippine troops as they moved in and occupied large parts of the city of Marawi in the south, holding it from May to October 2017 and prompting Duterte to declare martial law in the area.
About 5 percent of the Philippine population, or four million, are Muslim. Most live in Mindanao, where a quarter of the twenty-five million people follow Islam. The heartland of the Moro Islamic insurgency lies on the Sulu Archipelago, which, strangely, has a long history of allegiance to China. One of its first rulers, Paduka Pahala, the East King of Sulu, is buried in the northern Chinese province of Shandong. In the early fifteenth century he led a three-hundred-strong delegation to China to pay tribute to the third emperor of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Di. Paduka Pahala became ill, died, and was buried in an intricately sculpted tomb that has become a key tourist attraction. Descendants of his delegation are now classed as part of the Hui Islamic minority.
The key islands of the Sulu Archipelago are Basilan, Jolo, and Tawi Tawi, where battles with high casualties have been fought between extremists and Philippine troops. This is as almost as much a no-go area for civilians as Raqqa was once in Syria or Mosul in Iraq, with visitors risking kidnap or murder. The archipelago stretches to the Malaysian state of Sabah and out toward Indonesia. Today much is controlled by the Abu Sayyaf affiliate of the Islamic State, which has gained notoriety by carrying out executions and kidnapping of foreign hostages.
Duterte is hoping that China can succeed where Spain and the United States failed and that the Philippines’ new infrastructure of high-speed railways, roads, and airports can lift Mindanao’s economy enough to show the next generation that fighting for Islam is not worth it.
The United States gave the Philippines full independence in July 1946 in the wake of the Second World War. But it retained its military bases, and very quickly the Cold War set in. The United States retained its grip, finally supporting the authoritarian rule of Ferdinand Marcos. It was not until Marcos was overthrown that the Philippines had a real chance to strike out on its own and become a strong democracy.
In early 1986, businessmen, nuns, grassroots activists and others joined together to force an end to Marcos’s twenty-one-year rule. After he fled to Hawaii and protesters breached the walls of Malacañang Palace, the colorful symbol of Marcos’s misrule came in the discovery of his wife’s three thousand pairs of shoes alongside coffers of corrupt money, while outside malnutrition and disease were rife.
The Philippines became an early modern experiment in the tricky transition to democracy that we have seen so much of in recent years. Unfamiliar with the horse trading and compromises of the democratic process, a restless military staged coup attempt after coup attempt while communist and Islamic insurgents exploited the power vacuum with new campaigns. The West poured in money that vanished into corrupt pockets. In the ensuing years the authoritarian regimes of Southeast Asia forged ahead, while the Philippines foundered. The per capita annual income in 2016 was less than eight thousand dollars, only just ahead of India and way behind China, where it was almost double.41 The Philippines had fallen behind in many other areas, too. Its infant mortality rate was twenty-two deaths per thousand births, twice that of China, and Filipinos lived on average five years less than the citizens of that autocratic superpower.
The pitfalls of the dictatorship-democracy transition are weak institutions, entrenched interests, ethnic divisions, and an ignorance of how legislative checks and balances are meant to work. The Philippines experience is comparable to that of Egypt, Iraq, Ukraine, and others. As President McKinley had feared, after the fall of Marcos, anarchy and misrule prevailed.