When Duterte Met Abe: Is Japan America’s Pit Bull or Lap Dog… …or Dog in the Manger?

As I discuss in my most recent piece for Asia Times, Duterte v. United States: The Empire Slaps Back, I find the US tunnel vision concerning Asian attitudes toward engagement with China puzzling.  

The big story in Asia IMO is the smaller powers trying to integrate with the PRC economically while keeping it at arms’ length militarily, but that doesn’t seem to drive the coverage I see.  Perhaps as a function of that “salary depends on not understanding” Mark Twain crack, US diplos/generals/journos/wonks seem determined to ignore the centripetal forces at play in Asia with China at their heart.

There’s also a gigantic blind spot in US coverage of the Philippines.  If you read the papes, everybody in the Philippines is staring anxiously out at the South China Sea for “Chizilla” to emerge and wreak havoc on a jewel of Pacific democracy.   

Actually, if you read my piece, you’ll find that the forces ravaging the Philippines are poverty, inequality, social division, corruption, and the occasional megatyphoon and I have an idea the reason that Fidel Ramos championed Duterte is because he saw him as the one candidate who would focus on domestic issues and not pivot-friendly bullsh*t.

The US story is that the threat of “China rising” must be contained militarily, its economic reach reduced, and Asia should look for a “high standards” trade bloc, TPP, for its growth story instead of canoodling with the Chicoms.

However, I think the CCP read its George Kennan and realized the containment strategy worked on the USSR because the Soviets thought, incorrectly, they could cut it as an autarky.  Deng knew different, enabled inward and outward investment, and now we’re looking at not only Asia but much of the world anxious at how Chinese trouble will play out in their own economies.

In my opinion, the US was only able to establish “China threat” as the top element on the Asian FP agenda temporarily, with considerable effort, and only by the active support of pro-US government officials in Japan and the Philippines who were willing to assist in engineering polarizing provocations with the PRC around the Senkakus and Scarborough Shoal.

Now the economic logic of Asian integration i.e. hoovering up the cash the PRC is willing to throw at the region is reasserting itself.

Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar, Vietnam, and now the Philippines are showing via engagement with China that their participation in any US crusade is conditional and equivocal.

These countries are not democratic and human rights garden spots, so I guess the US could summon up some “birds of a feather” grumbling about why the jefes of these regimes are willing to cozy up to dictators instead of joining the crusade to contain, isolate, and degrade the PRC regime (and heroically put their own economic well-being at risk at the same time).

And then there’s this guy:

That’s Shinzo Abe making nice with Rodrigo Duterte during Duterte’s recent visit to Japan.  Actually, making the "iron fist", the symbol of Duterte's, shall we say, rather harsh vision of how to make Philippine democracy do the right thing "or I'll punch the crap outta you.  Or worse."

I just love this picture.  I don’t recall seeing it in US coverage of Duterte’s foray into Japan.

US tunnel vision was in full force again, focused on the fact that Duterte said he wanted foreign militaries a.k.a. the US outta the Philippines in two years.

But the big story was, to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, “the dog that didn’t snarl.”  Japan.

Abe reciprocated Duterte’s outreached fist, one might say, with his own, and competed with the PRC in offering various goodies to the Philippines.

Abe’s Japan, as I comment in my Asia Times piece, has a rather multi-jointed agenda.  

Japan was in a pretty solid space, securitywise, if it was content to remain a security ward of the United States under the pacifist constitution.   But ideology, opportunity, and necessity are driving Japan back into Asia as a security actor.

Abe, a revisionist nationalist (i.e. he rejects the victor’s justice narrative of World War II that Japan did wrong and deserved to be militarily neutered), is piggybacking on the pivot to enable Japan’s re-emergence as a full-fledged Asian power with an extensive network of relationships cum allies in East and South Asia.

China’s rise is an indispensable element in Japan’s rise.   

The, let’s face it, hulking and goonish face of PRC regional engagement promotes a search for capable friends, and most Asian countries are pretty happy to have Japan in their corner—and not too upset about Japan’s return to the fray as a full-fledged military power.  

 Second, after the United States signed on to the “China threat” narrative as the driver for its Asia pivot (something that Kurt Campbell, Hillary Clinton, and Seiji Maehara cahooted on in 2010), the US abandoned the honest broker position it had claimed in previous decades and lined up behind Japan and provided material, operational, and diplomatic support for the expansion of Japan's military footprint in Asia.

However, I believe that Japanese strategists regard US anti-China resolve as a wasting asset, not just subject to the vagaries of American politics and conflicting economic/fiscal/trade priorities that undercut the containment strategy, but also because the ineluctable logic of Asian growth is sidelining the US as hegemon of the anti-China alliance.

There is likely to come a day when the US faces its Suez moment and admits it’s not ready to fight a war in the west Pacific to protect US interests and sustain US prestige. 

That day is unlikely to come under the Clinton administration—which has preemptively committed itself to a policy of sustaining US global pre-eminence through the application of military force as needed—and that, depending on your appetite for combat with the Chicoms 8000 miles from home, is either a good or bad thing.

But the day will probably come and if and when it does, Japan does not want to be standing there helplessly holding its daikon (as it did when Nixon went to China).  Instead, it’s going to be militarily strong, probably with a Israel-style covert nuclear weapons capability it will discretely brandish, and with a strong regional network of friends and allies in East Asia.

I think a Japan-centric security regime facing China but complemented by regional economic integration is sustainable; I think a US-centric system based on forestalling economic integration and keeping allies submissive by maintaining a nuclear “umbrella” a.k.a. monopoly is not.

We may de facto be heading towards such a regime, even as the Clinton administration continues its hypernationalist bluster.  There’s the nibbling away at the pivot by the smaller and weaker allies, there’s Abe with Duterte and, if I’m reading Paul Krugman’s tea leaves correctly, it appears that President Clinton may give up on TPP as an Obama pipe dream.

Not to say peace and reduced tensions are in the offing for East Asia; particularly, if I was Duterte I’d watch my back as the Clinton administration will probably seek to punish his lese majeste toward the United States much more than the lame-duck Obama administration.  And, I imagine the U.S. Navy will demand more of its precious FONOPs in order to provoke the Chinese, hopefully to the point of a confrontation that feeds the security polarization narrative and fattens its budget.

But the general trend seems to be away from Hillary Clinton’s goal of “America’s Pacific Century” toward “The Pacific’s Pacific Century” and I think that’s a pretty good thing.

It’s ON! Between Duterte and America

I’ve written a couple pieces of the smoking hot issue in Pivotland, Philippine president Duterte’s swerve toward a pro-PRC foreign policy, and what the U.S. and pro-American sector of the Manila elite are going to do about it.

The first piece, Reports of death of US-Philippine alliance may be exaggerated, addresses the fact that Duterte’s freedom of movement is constrained by the need to keep the Philippine military happy, and notes that ex-prez and retired general Fidel Ramos, who facilitated Duterte’s entrance on the national political stage, is signaling dissatisfaction with Duterte.

The second piece,  Duterte Plays the ‘Mamasapano’ Card, covers a Duterte counter-attack: a threat to relitigate the death of 44 Philippine National Police commandos at Mamasapano in Mindanao, a 2014 special ops fiasco conducted under the aegis of the United States which a) exposes ex-president Aquino to serious legal jeopardy b) posits that the US alliance is doing a better job of killing Filipinos than the PRC can ever hope to do.

The US seems to be embedded in a colonial mindset when it comes to the Philippines, something along the lines of “we’ve been selflessly looking after the Philippines for a century, and that thug Duterte won’t be allowed to screw that up during his brief (maybe curtailed) presidency.”

It takes a pretty superficial view of Philippine history, one that accepts the US self-definition as the Philippines’ security savior while ignoring the distortions and shortcomings of the colonial and neo-colonial relationship.

For me this tunnel vision was typified by the US media crowing over the formal delivery of a refurbished C-130 transport to the Philippine government by outgoing ambo Philip Goldberg.  Message: here’s the US making provisions for Philippine defense at the same time Duterte’s selling out the country to China.

To me, the inadvertent message was 1) here’s the US blindly stroking the pivot fetish while Duterte tries to solve the Mindanao insurgency that has cost at least 400,000 lives over the last century, win his drug war, and find a place for the Philippines in Asia that doesn’t give primacy to the US preoccupation with confronting the PRC and 2) the U.S., in my opinion, pretty much has a policy of keeping the Philippines flat on its behind as an independent military force by trickling out second-hand gear to the Philippine military while the sweet stuff is dangled in front of it during US joint military maneuvers and port calls.

But the United States is trying to find political leverage wherever it can and the Western media will, I’m sure, put its shoulder to the wheel to help out.

Philip Goldberg sat down for a 45-minute exit interview with Rappler.  As befitting Rappler’s origins in the Soros/Omidyar network of pro-US globalization advocacy, the interview was a stream of softballs about what to do about Duterte’s disregard of the awesomeness of the American relationship, an awesomeness that is acknowledged by virtually all Filipinos who inexplicably (and, if the US has anything to do about it, temporarily) at the same time give Duterte approval ratings of over 80%. 

It’s worth watching if you have the patience.  Goldberg is a smooth cat, and the Rappler tonguebath gives you no inkling of the fact that he intimately familiar with the wet work of end-arounding national governments to cultivate secessionist movements, you know, like what he did in Bolivia (declared persona non grata as a result) and Kosovo, and like that thing in Duterte’s home province of Mindanao, which in my opinion probably the main reason why Duterte wanted him out of the Philippines.

Goldberg also discretely plays the economic threat card, concern-trolling that anti-US attitudes will dismay “foreign investors”.  

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in subsequent weeks.  As far as I can tell, the biggest U.S. factor in the domestic Philippine economy is the call-center industry.  I doubt US corporations are interested in actually pulling their operations out and subjecting them to the English-language mercies of India, but certainly a call from the State Department or White House would convince them of the wisdom of at least making the threat.

And I also wonder if expected President Hillary Clinton will find it necessary to drop the hammer on Duterte, in order to demonstrate to a rather dubious Asia that there is no alternative to loyalty to the pivot.

I expect the next few months, in other words, to be very interesting.

How Do You Handle a Problem Like Rodrigo Duterte?

Awkwardly, apparently.

Awkward facts surrounding Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's awkward estrangement from the United States seem to produce some awkward reporting.

I have a piece up at Asia Times about “Sonofawhore-gate” i.e. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s alleged insult delivered to President Obama that got the Duterte-Obama confab in Laos canceled, and was breathlessly reported in much of the Western press to the exclusion of the issues Duterte was raising: Truth and Duterte in Media Crosshairs.

Read it.  Repeatedly!  Tweet it! And tell your family and friends.  Gotta build traffic.

As a langniappe, it provides a deep dive into what was apparently the most important issue in US-China relations, “Stairgate”, the cock-up with the delivery of the motorized stairs needed for President Obama to deplane from Air Force One at the G20 meeting in Hangzhou in the proper presidential fashion.

Probably unfairly—I don’t read all the coverage—but I feel reporting on Duterte has been pretty shallow in terms of explaining his attitude toward the US presence in the Philippines.  Seems I’ve pretty much held that corner alone.  [Update: Reader GW pointed me to a fine piece by Adele Webb of the University of Sydney on the same theme.  So I do not have this corner all to myself.]

Long story short, the American presence in Duterte’s home ground of Mindanao has been a 115 year horror show that Duterte is trying to end.  The most recent iteration is Duterte’s declaration that he wants all U.S. Special Forces removed from Mindanao.

Duterte has appalled the United States not only by criticizing the US presence, but by engaging bilaterally with China on the issues brought to a head by the UNCLOS arbitral award instead of doing that shoulder-to-shoulder Pivot Thunder! thing to confront the PRC as part of a US-orchestrated united front.

I’ve written some pretty nifty pieces on the issues surrounding Duterte and the US:

Mindanao, Duterte, and the Real History of the Philippines

Meiring, Murder, Subversion, and Treason: Duterte’s Beef with US

Mamasapano: The Philippines’ Benghazi

Here’s another one! focusing on the under-reported consequences of Duterte’s drug war.

Duterte’s first priority is the drug war which is reported in the Western press primarily through the lens of the vigilante killings.  

To keep the frame on Duterte’s excesses in a way that makes it easier for Human Rights Watch to flay his policies as “death squads run amok for no justifiable reason”, there have been interesting attempts to dismiss the Philippine drug problem as no big deal. 

But apparently it really is a big deal in terms of its social costs (the Philippines has the highest rate of meth use in East Asia), multinational implications (Philippine mules are getting executed in China and in Indonesia, the Sinaloa cartel has even started exploring the Philippine as a market and source of material), and as a driver for corruption of Philippine government and security forces that  reaches up to the highest level.

The actual story is that Duterte is not only using the threat of summary executions to round up addicts and pushers; he’s naming names, both of cartel leaders and the national and local politicians and officers who shelter them.  It’s a rather thrilling high stakes game—allegations emerged this week that the bombing in Davao that killed 14 people and was apparently an assassination attempt on Duterte was actually conducted by threatened narcopoliticians, not the Abu Sayyaf Islamist banditti—but the US press has apparently shown little interest in covering these ramifications.

Also I haven’t seen a lot of reporting on the fact that Duterte’s drug war necessitates deeper PRC-Philippine engagement in several important aspects.

First of all, the Philippine drug trade—primarily meth, locally known as shabu—is dominated by Chinese Triads by virtue of the fact that the large and poorly regulated PRC drug industry is a ready source of the intermediates needed to make the drug and also by the fact that Triads are deeply embedded in the major Chinese-diaspora presence in Filipino society.  The PRC has a lot to offer in terms of tighter enforcement on the mainland and perhaps in using its good offices to encourage crackdowns in a key Triad operational base, Hong Kong.

On the other hand, the PRC can make life difficult for Duterte if it wants to, by turning a blind eye to the export-oriented meth trade.  So there you have it.

Duterte made his expectations concerning PRC assistance quite clear by summoning the PRC ambassador back in August:

The Philippines government said on Wednesday it had summoned the Chinese ambassador earlier this week to explain reports that traffickers were bringing in narcotics from China, opening a new front in President Rodrigo Duterte’s controversial war on drugs.

On Tuesday, the country’s police chief told a Senate hearing that China, Taiwan and Hong Kong were major sources of illegal drugs, and Chinese triads were involved in trafficking.

Foreign Affairs Secretary Perfecto Yasay told a Senate hearing on Wednesday that the Chinese ambassador had been summoned for an explanation, and the government would also send a diplomatic communication to Beijing to “pursue this in a more aggressive note.”

Another area of potential Philippine-PRC cooperation is PRC assistance in a crash program to rehabilitate the Philippine drug users who have turned themselves in to the police to avoid getting targeted by the death squads.

Though virtually unreported in the Western media, over 700,000 users have turned themselves in.

Let me repeat that.  700,000 drug users have turned themselves in.

And they presumably need to get a clean "rehab" chit to live safely in their communities, presenting a major challenge for the Philippines drug rehabilitation infrastructure.  Duterte has called on the Philippine military to make base acreage available for additional rehab camps and the first one will apparently be at Camp Ramon Magsaysay.

Duterte has turned to the PRC to demand they fund construction of drug treatment facilities, and the PRC has obliged.  According to Duterte and his spokesman, preparatory work for the Magsaysay facility has already begun.

There’s an amusing wrinkle here.

Magsaysay is the largest military reservation in the Philippines.  It is also the jewel in the diadem, I might say, of the five Philippine bases envisioned for US use under EDCA, the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement that officially returned US troops to Philippine bases.  It looks like the US military might be sharing Magsaysay with thousands of drug users…and PRC construction workers.

I expect the Pentagon is quietly fuming at Duterte’s presumption.

Duterte is understandably leaning on China to assist him with his drug war.  The Philippine establishment may or may not be thoroughly corrupted by drug money, but it’s probably happy to restrain him by slowwalking legislation related to the war.  

And although the United States quickly “committed” $32 million for “law enforcement and training”, who knows when and if it’ll show up and where it will end up.  I also get a feeling the US wouldn’t mind seeing Duterte and his drug war fall on their *sses, so the civilian and military Philippine establishment could get back to its main mission of pleasing the United States and returning to a pivot-centric foreign policy.

So Duterte is going executive decree, and twisting China’s arm to get quick, effective “facts on the ground” i.e. rehab camps.  I suspect the camps are absolutely essential to Duterte’s plan; if he can’t process the users, he’ll have to leave them in their communities and the drug war will be revealed as a damp squib and a farce—unless the death squads are up to massacring another 700,000 people, which I think is beyond even their murderous capabilities.

It looks like Duterte thinks that the UNCLOS ruling could be put to better use extorting Chinese cooperation to house an army of drug addicts, instead of gratifying the United States by a futile attempt to evict the PRC from Scarborough Shoal (the PRC, by the way, appears to be allowing Filipino fishing boats to work the shoal, at least for now).

Interesting, no? 

But an immense social and political upheaval concerning drugs and highlighting the interdependency of China and the Philippines is apparently not really worth reporting, since the designated US theme is that the existential issue for Asia is meeting the military threat of rising China by a big reboot of the US presence in the Philippines.

The US government and US-friendly Western press may be unhappy with Duterte and his tilt away from the US, but finding a news hook to demonize him is a little difficult.  

For one thing, the way the US and Aquino administration structured EDCA oh-so-cleverly to avoid legislative review apparently put control of implementation completely in the hands of the President of the Philippines--who turned out not to be a pliable member of the Manila set but Rodrigo Duterte.  If the US gets too pointed in its criticism, US access to bases in the Philippines, a cherished US objective since the eviction of US forces in 1993 and an important chess piece in the South China Sea, might get restricted.

Secondly, Duterte is a non-socialist business-is-business guy whose election was, as we say, free and fair.  So the “Philippines’ Putin/Chavez/Assad” frame doesn’t fit very well.

Third, Duterte is popular thanks to his whole-hearted prosecution of the drug war.  His approvals are up in the 80s I believe.

Fourth, the US record in the Philippines is genuinely god-awful.  The mission that the United States wants to focus on—what I call the sailor suit/battleship/yo ho ho democracy and freedom confronting China in the SCS—is a small fraction of the reality of the US presence in the Philippines and its corrupting penetration of the Philippines’ military and security forces and the Manila elite.  Doing a deep dive into America’s Duterte problem means acknowledging that the US presence in the Philippines recapitulates the Indian Wars, Vietnam, and Iraq: a gigantic and bloody imperial botch.

No need, I think, to trouble the beautiful minds of American readers with the realization that Duterte’s tilt away from the US is completely understandable and probably justified.

So I expect the roots of Duterte’s problems with the United States will not get a particularly extensive and honest airing in the Western press.  

However, I expect alternative reporting frames have to be developed to guide a bewildered readership if Duterte persists in twisting America’s bayag.

There has been some road-testing of “Duterte is a paid-for Chinese stooge” to explain his otherwise inexplicable lack of America love and willingness to go bilateral engagement with the PRC, but that doesn’t seem to have acquired sufficient legs.

The US government and press seems to be settling into the “Philippines’ Donald Trump” mode i.e. Duterte is an unstable reactionary goon unfit for the high mission of sustaining the rules-based international order that’s all the vogue these days, and blind to the fact that in the age of rising China the Philippines has no space to run a non-aligned foreign policy.

The best way to understand Duterte is to listen to him in his own words sans filter.

Here’s the video of his infamous press conference before he embarked to Laos (in my AT article I incorrectly placed the presser at Manila; he was actually leaving from Davao International Airport; sorry!).  

Only 19 minutes and well worth your time.  At the end, you’ll understand Duterte and his priorities pretty well.

And at the end, you also get a harbinger of things to come—Duterte’s impending clash with the Manila elites who he believes are being egged on by Washington to impede his policies.  In his final words, Duterte provided this characterization of the local critics who felt it was more important for Duterte to respond to questions from Obama concerning human rights abuses in the drug war than to assert Filipino sovereignty and dignity:

There are others with mental capacity of dogs who lap at the ass of the Americans.

As it transpired, Duterte discarded his prepared remarks in Vientiane to deliver a denunciation of US historical crimes in Mindanao, complete with atrocity photos.

Duterte says a lot of interesting and important things.  But I doubt you’ll read a lot about them in the Western papers.