Duterte’s risky strategy

It must be very difficult being a minister in the administration of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. The leader is constantly making declarations that his ministers immediately must backtrack on the next day.
“We are going to separate ourselves from the United States,” said the president recently while on a state visit to China. The foreign secretary had to explain the next day that Duterte did not really mean it. Then just a few days ago, the president swore at the Americans and said the Philippines could get its weapons from Russia when the State Department said that the sale of rifles to the Philippines might be held up over human rights concerns in the ongoing Philippine war against drugs. Then on Nov. 2 he backtracked and said the country would buy American weapons if his military commanders recommended that they do so.
It seems that he has a strategy, albeit a risky one, of playing big powers off each other, that has been working until now. As Max Fisher noted in the New York Times, Duterte and the Philippines came off winners after his China trip. China agreed to allow Filipino fishermen to return to disputed waters in the South China Sea, and Manila got a pledge of $9 billion in low-interest loans from Beijing. “Yet Mr. Duterte returned home to a country that is still protected by the US military,” noted Fisher.
Fisher says that Duterte is playing an old game of playing off two big powers in order to receive benefits from both. He reminds us that Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser did that with the Soviet Union and the US, buying weapons from the Russians and allowing them to build the Aswan dam, while accepting American aid. French President Charles de Gaulle also played off of US Cold War fears in the 1960s by pulling France out of NATO and recognizing China, while still counting on US protection provided by the American nuclear umbrella.
For sure, Duterte is still immensely popular among Filipinos, who find that they can relate to him. Ironically, Duterte is not from a poor background, but from an upper middle-class background. But he does have the knack to speak in the often crude, slang language that many of the country’s working class population speak in. This has of course horrified the intelligentsia, who has been appalled to hear such coarse language coming from the mouth of the president of the republic. Along with his colorful language, Duterte has been tapping into the nationalist pride of Filipinos, and that of course resonates among a large part of the electorate.
Although most Filipinos love everything American, having been a US colony for nearly 50 years, they also, with reason, nurse a grudge at being looked down upon by Americans. The American conquest of the Philippines was extremely bloody and many Filipinos were killed and treated as slaves. There was a clear distinction between the white Americans and the brown natives during US colonial rule, and many Filipinos have not forgotten that. The positive side of the American occupation is that the US military liberated the Philippines from Japanese occupation during the WWII and allowed millions of Filipinos to immigrate to the US.
But Duterte should be careful in his risky game of offending President Barack Obama and the US in general. When looked at in its entirety, the Philippines has more to lose if this relationship founders than do the Americans. But then Duterte also realizes that the strategic position of his country in Southeast Asia is crucial to the US plan to contain the growth of China’s sphere of influence in the region.
Pandering to nationalist sentiment might make Duterte feel good for a few minutes, but it could do lasting damage to one of its longest and most strategic partnerships. Hopefully he will soon realize that it is a dangerous thing to keep doing. For sure, the Philippine-US relationship can and probably should be reset, but the president should be careful not to spoil a long-term and mutually beneficial relationship for the risky allures of Russian and Chinese enticements that are only being offered to oppose the US.

• Rasheed Abou-Alsamh is a Saudi journalist based in Brazil.