In the days before local elections in the Philippines in early May, the government of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte released a list of 200 neighborhood officials involved in the drug trade. It is not a list anyone would want to wind up on. Duterte came to power in a landslide two years ago, promising to wage a war on drugs. He did not use “war” as a metaphor. “You destroy our country, I’ll kill you,” Duterte said as his presidency began. “You destroy our children, I’ll kill you.”
An addict, as Duterte views things, will betray his loved ones to find money for his dealer. Often he will become a dealer himself, drawing young innocents into the maelstrom of addiction. Small-time users, not just big-time pushers, are targets for aggressive police operations. A bloodbath has resulted. Last August, the government’s “One-Time Bigtime” busts left 52 dead in one night. By the turn of this year, 4,075 people had died in anti-drug operations, according to the government. But that does not include thousands more killings tallied up by human-rights organizations and investigative journalists. These have been carried out by masked men and pairs of assassins on motorbikes. Whether the killers are out-of-uniform policemen silencing witnesses to their own corruption or neighborhood hoodlums using the drug war as a cover to settle scores, the violence has been immense.
Drug addicts have surrendered en masse and asked for treatment. A 10 p.m. curfew has been introduced for teenagers. Lowering the age of adult responsibility in criminal prosecutions from 15 to 9 has been proposed. Those who have wound up on lists like the one Duterte released in May have fared poorly. Melvin Odicta and his wife, the drug bosses of the provincial city of Iloilo who had built a reputation as local Robin Hoods and lived in a mansion surrounded by mendicants and squatters, were singled out by the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency. After traveling to Manila to try to clear their names, they were assassinated by a mysterious gunman as they stepped off a ferry. Months after Duterte placed him on a list of corrupt officials, the mayor of Albuera, Rolando Espinosa, was shot dead in jail.
From outside the Philippines, there is an obvious question: If you think government leaders are corrupt, why not just arrest them and bring them to trial? Inside the Philippines, the question answers itself: Because government leaders are corrupt. They cannot be trusted to clean their own stables. Duterte can. The six-million vote plurality that Duterte won in an insurgent campaign against the country’s political establishment mobilized what political scientist Aries Arugay calls a “cross-class coalition of conservative Filipinos, overseas labor migrants, the educated middle class, the urban poor, and informal workers.” Since his May 2016 election, the president’s approval rating has never been far from 80 percent, and his drug war is an important element of his popularity. According to a detailed poll carried out last year by Manila-based Social Weather Stations, voters approved of the drug war 77-14.
Shabu, the lab-made drug that Americans know as crystal methamphetamine, is common in the warrens of corrugated iron and cinderblocks where a lot of the country’s urban poor have squatted. It renders its users alert, euphoric, and sometimes psychotic. Other street kids have come to be known as “Rugby boys,” not because they studied under Thomas Arnold but because the rubber cement that they sniff out of plastic baggies bears that trade name. Crime has spread along with drugs. Those who live in the walkable neighborhoods of Quezon City, near the big universities, have pooled their money to purchase road gates. These allow their (de jure) public streets to be sealed off as (de facto) gated communities once night falls. Certainly the press does not stint on stories of drug violence. Whenever you read in the tabloids about a family held hogtied for days or the murder of a child or a pile of bodies thrown into a rice paddy, shabu plays a big role.
And yet it is not clear that Filipinos actually see drug use as that serious a problem. The political pollsters at Pulse Asia ask voters every election season about their top five concerns, and drugs have never made the list. That’s hardly surprising in a country where a quarter of the population lives hand-to-mouth. The pollsters at Social Weather Stations register high approval for the drug war in general. People think it is making their neighborhoods safer. But they also fear that their family members will get killed and are almost unanimous in their preference that suspects be captured alive rather than murdered. Half worry that violent people are using the drug war as a cover for settling grudges. Finally, Filipinos are skeptical of police claims about how often suspects are shot resisting arrest. Their skepticism is warranted: The ratio of suspects killed to police killed in Filipino drug operations is 223 to 1. In the United States it is 9 to 1.
The closer one looks at it, the more it seems that the war on drugs is only a symbol of some ulterior real predicament and of citizens’ resolve to accept desperate and brutal measures to get out of it. This predicament may have something to do with the position the country occupies in the global economy.
The Philippines is scenic and sympathetic. It is also squalid, unequal, and impoverished. Certain neighborhoods of Manila—Makati, Ortigas, Bonifacio Global City, and the restaurant areas and malls near the university neighborhood of Katipunan—are outposts of Internet Age capitalism. You could walk for several blocks believing you are in a nice part of Los Angeles. The economy is growing at 6.8 percent a year, but these neighborhoods, and similar ones in Cebu and Davao, seem to get all of it. Elsewhere, in what the rich sometimes refer to as the bowels of the city, tricycle-drivers and street sweepers make about $10 a day (that is the minimum wage) and buy their provisions from rickety roadside “sari-sari” stores in sachet-sized quantities: a mango or a teaspoon of instant coffee here, a cigarette there. The country has grown from 30 million people in the 1970s to more than 100 million now. Manila has 15 million of them. Its public transportation consists of two sporadically functioning train lines, which are so overcrowded that to preclude indecencies, the front car, or the front two, must be reserved for women. For most of the day, traffic makes the city nearly impassable. People are trapped in their neighborhoods, however nice some of them may be, as surely as they would have been in the days before the internal combustion engine.
Here comes the mayor
There is no world leader quite like Duterte, but in his special claim to run a country being drawn at lightning speed into modernity, he bears a resemblance to Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who also made the leap from big-city mayor to maximum leader. As Erdogan once was in Istanbul, Duterte was an extraordinary boss of Davao, the largest city on the vast and violent island of Mindanao. Duterte is political royalty there—his father was a governor of the province of Davao. When Duterte himself became mayor in 1988, Davao City was one of the most violent places in Southeast Asia—racked by both the New People’s Army (the Maoist armed wing of the Philippine Communist party) and radical Islamic terrorism. Islam moved through Indonesia to what is now the southern Philippines centuries ago, and Muslims make up 5 percent of the population. Most of them live just west of Davao and many want self-determination and even independence. Last year ISIS-inspired guerrillas took over the city of Marawi and were rooted out only after the army and air force waged a Stalingrad-style house-to-house campaign of urban warfare that killed hundreds. Muslims have brought their war to Davao with terror attacks, and Manila’s malls will remind Israelis of home, with bag-opening guards at the doorways of coffeehouses and sneaker stores.
That is the secret of Duterte’s electoral success. Over two decades, at a time when Davao was doubling in size to over 1.5 million, Duterte transformed the city from a Third World hellhole into a pleasant place for a law-abiding person to live—even a business hub. He pulled this off by mixing wiles and ruthlessness, offering Muslims and Communists financial incentives to carry their campaigns elsewhere and threatening them with retribution should they not. Many human rights groups hold him responsible for about 1,000 unsolved killings during his tenure, carried out by shadowy assailants who came to be called the Davao Death Squad.
Duterte is immensely proud of this record. He still likes to be called “mayor.” He is proud, too, of his mixed Mindanaoan background, with a Chinese grandfather and a grandmother descended from Muslim Maranaos. Having won the presidency on his promise to replicate Davao’s success at the national level, he brought to Manila his trusted Davao political machine, including the thus far highly successful finance secretary Carlos Dominguez and the somewhat less successful justice secretary Vitalicio Aguirre, since replaced. He put three Communists in his cabinet.
Rough though his methods may have been, Duterte had a modern and highly progressive idea of what an orderly city looked like. For one thing it was under surveillance by hundreds of closed-circuit cameras. For another it didn’t have smoking. Duterte paid a heavy price for his own youthful smoking. He limps from Buerger’s disease and has a severe case of Barrett’s esophagus. He often chews gum to mitigate the pain and has said he took fentanyl after a fall several years ago. (He later claimed to have been joking.) Davao passed the first smoking ban in the Philippines in 2002, with fines so steep that passengers on flights landing in Davao were warned about them. Duterte was even said to have forced a tourist to eat a cigarette he tried to smoke. He has since extended a ban on smoking to public places nationwide. Duterte is open to medical marijuana, gay marriage, and divorce, which Philippine law presently bans. He is obsessed with climate change in the country at large, and alludes to it in all his economic-development projects. Just as controversial domestically as his anti-drug crusade is his plan to phase out old-fashioned “jeepneys,” the colorful minibuses that serve as poor people’s transportation throughout the country.
Against elitism
Because he speaks with an unpredictability and bluntness that sometimes cracks people up and sometimes embarrasses his countrymen, Duterte has been called an Asian Donald Trump. At certain points in his 2017 State of the Nation speech, his sign-language translator was laughing too hard to go on. Speaking to a group of former Communist rebels he had invited to the Malacañang presidential palace in February, he joked that if one shot female guerrillas in the bisong (a term in his native Visayan language), they would be useless to the cause. It was arguably a subtle and anti-sexist remark, exposing the subordinate position of women even in leftist insurgencies, but the impression left was ghastly.
Like Trump, Duterte the orator sometimes likes to drift and wing it. But he is also a trained prosecutor with a vast English vocabulary and a gift for oratorical parallelisms. In this he is more like, say, Viktor Orbán of Hungary, capable of laying out convincingly the ideology in the name of which he and his followers demand justice and the grounds on which his dastardly adversaries are seeking to thwart him.
Chief among these is elitism. To use the term “1 percent” to describe the four dozen families who have dominated the Filipino economy and politics for the past century would grossly overestimate the degree to which money and power is spread. These families thrived after Americans drove out the Japanese occupiers in 1945 and for a quarter-century thereafter held a lock on the system that the historian Benedict Anderson called “cacique democracy.” The same families’ sons and daughters kept turning up on top. It was partly to bring them to heel that the broad public backed Ferdinand Marcos when he transformed his elected presidency into a “constitutional authoritarian” one in 1972. It was the same families that led the opposition to Marcos when his government degenerated into a kleptocracy. Benigno Aquino was shot dead when he arrived at Manila airport from his Cambridge exile in 1983, but three years later his wife Corazon (née Cojuangco), scion of the wealthiest family in the country, led mass demonstrations on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) that laid the groundwork for 30 years of democracy.
Dutertism is the claim, usually implicit, that that democracy was a sham, more procedural than real, and that it did nothing to make the lives of the poor better. And Duterte’s is not the first post-Marcos attempt to bring the Manila rich to heel. The blunt-spoken action-film star Joseph “Erap” Estrada, who won a presidential landslide in 1998 on the strength of similar arguments, was the real Filipino parallel to Trump. He was brave in identifying corruption in the capital but not patient or purposeful enough to fortify himself against it. The establishment he had maligned ate him for lunch. Arriving with no understanding of the rules of political warfare, he lived in a grand style that he associated with Filipino statesmanship but failed to secure sympathetic judges on the supreme court, which brazenly removed him from office. It appeared at the time that “the public” had lost faith in Estrada—the marches held against him were called “People Power II”—but this was a manufactured appearance. We can tell because Estrada made a strong bid to return to the presidency in 2010, finishing second, and was elected mayor of Manila in 2013.
Duterte knows his way around better. Without being a member of the Manila elite, a mayor of Davao naturally develops a certain familiarity with it through decades of managing visits, lining up infrastructure projects, and delivering votes. Unmarried, childless, gnomic, Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino, son of the makers of the EDSA revolution and president from 2010-16, did not present that elite’s most charismatic face. His priorities were progressivism and globalization, in that order, which put him in sync with the Obama White House. Aquino passed a sex-ed and family-planning bill, called the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012 (though it was largely blocked by the country’s still-powerful Catholic hierarchy). He removed restrictions on the full foreign ownership of Philippine banks. To the public he came off as feckless. He resolved to quit smoking as an example to other Filipinos—and failed. A rumor spread that he was a video-game addict, and he never managed to shake it. When he smiled inappropriately during a hostage crisis that resulted in the death of a busload of Hong Kong tourists, when he failed to show up for the return of soldiers’ bodies to a military airbase, his foes implied he was probably sitting around in his pajamas, chain-smoking and rattling the buttons of his Nintendo console.
And increasingly he was accused of corruption. The Priority Development Assistance Fund permitted congressmen, provided they had presidential sanction, to access government funds with no accountability and no strings attached. Everyone called it “pork barrel,” but in theory it might have been a useful way to cut through red tape and carry out important projects. In practice, an operator named Janet Napoles was setting up ghost corporations to capture disbursements and, in some cases, to funnel them back to the same politicians who proposed them. After Aquino allies impeached supreme court chief justice Renato Corona for corruption, pork-barrel funds were reportedly offered to senators who voted to convict him. Once Corona had been ousted, Aquino broke the tradition of appointing the court’s most senior judge and nominated a loyalist fledgling, Maria Lourdes Sereno. The supreme court, under strong urging from Duterte, who called himself Sereno’s “enemy,” removed her from office in mid-May.
In the Philippines as in the United States, the separation of powers has begun to break down. Duterte has set his sights on discrediting not just the country’s elites but also all the institutions that can be accused of doing their bidding. This starts with the Catholic church. Duterte has claimed credibly to have been sexually abused by an American Jesuit during confession when he was 14 or 15. Since the church is a leading foe of his war on drugs, he recurs to this story—and to the supposedly lavish lives the church’s priests lead—quite frequently. In late April, Duterte expelled the Australian nun Patricia “Sister Pat” Fox, who had been resident in the country for decades, on the grounds that she had violated her missionary visa by attending a protest against extrajudicial killings in the drug war. “At least here, I am killing criminals,” Duterte said. “How about you?” He accused her of treating the Philippines like a doormat.
In such incidents it can seem as if Tu quoque were Duterte’s middle name. His supporters like him for it. People in the Philippines carry an enormous chip on their shoulders about sovereignty, not just from their status as a Spanish and then American colony from the 16th century until World War II but also from their crypto-colonial status for decades after the war. The Philippines has a lot of laws intended to protect the country from inadvertently letting its self-rule slip through its hands, or to keep elites from selling it off. There is a law against foreigners engaging in politics, under which Sister Pat got booted. There is a law against foreigners controlling banks, which Aquino got rid of. And there is a law against foreigners taking ownership of press institutions, which Duterte has skillfully used as a cudgel against his critics.
The Philippine Daily Inquirer, traditionally the country’s top newspaper, and Rappler, the country’s most informative online news site, have both fallen afoul of him. PDI kept a running total of deaths in the drug war (or tried to, until access to crime scenes became difficult) and published hard-hitting cover photos, including one of a woman cradling her dead boyfriend that Duterte compared to a pietà. Its owners, the Prieto family, threatened with jail by Duterte for violating the country’s “plunder” laws, last year sold their interest in the paper to Ramon Ang, the magnate who makes San Miguel beer. Ang is a Duterte supporter.
Rappler, run by CNN’s former bureau chief Maria Ressa, is the most modern news source in the country. Since he took power, Duterte has banned Rappler’s top reporter from the Malacañang palace, and financial authorities are prosecuting Rappler for an “unconstitutional Philippine depositary receipt provision.” It involves moneys from the Omidyar Network Fund LLC, an investment company set up by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, an American, which is therefore said to violate the law against foreign ownership. The case is making its way through the courts.
Duterte was the first candidate in the country to master social media, and there was a lot of it in the last campaign. (“Even the Pope admires Duterte,” ran one quite false post.) Today, many of the country’s top bloggers are Duterte diehards, like the “30-ish-year-old Filipino citizen journalist” R. J. Nieto, who blogs under the name Thinking Pinoy (the Filipino word for Filipino) and describes himself as “crazily patriotic, almost a nut job.” Nieto is described by his adversaries as one of the worst practitioners of “fake news.” But of course dissent from conventional wisdom is not the same thing as dishonesty. As in the United States, the outrage over fake news often depends on blurring that distinction.
Duterte, who for decades was the law in Davao but a bit player at the national level, is an unusual actor in national politics. He is a person with a great deal of inside information about ruling-class secrets but not much concern that anything might be revealed about himself. That Duterte darkly insinuates a given politician has been involved with drugs or has had an affair with her limousine driver is not a prima facie reason to believe that it is not true. For now, his supporters believe him. This has something to do with the modest size of his house in Davao: In a country where a certain grandiosity is often considered necessary to signal power, he lives simply.
But like any reforming politician, he faces a great tautology. The tool at hand to reform a corrupt state is a corrupt state. This is especially the case with his drug war. Year in, year out, as Columbia journalism professor Sheila Coronel noted in a recent essay, the Philippine National Police (PNP) get rated one of the most corrupt parts of society. They are the source of drugs in many neighborhoods. They hire assassins. They collect under-the-table commissions from funeral parlors when they drop off the bodies of the people they have killed. And Duterte’s drug war, Coronel writes, “was possible only because the PNP was a ready, willing, and able killing machine.” On at least two occasions, police violence and corruption have wound up the main obstacle to the continued prosecution of the war on drugs. Early last year, South Korean businessman Jee Ick-Joo was kidnapped by Manila’s police and garroted in the back seat of a parked car inside the snazzy new police headquarters at Camp Crame. Jee’s sin, it seems, was not just refusing to pay protection money to the police officers keeping tabs on his office—but also counseling his fellow Korean businessmen not to pay it either.
After that episode, Duterte called the police “corrupt to the core” and suspended them from participating in the war on drugs for several weeks. He did something similar last August when police were captured on camera dragging away a teenager named Kian delos Santos in the northern Manila neighborhood of Caloocan, moments before they executed him. In both cases, Duterte’s pique was temporary, and the police were soon back on the front lines. At the very least Duterte considers the police part of his political “base.”
But there is a darker theory of the role of the police, one put forward by political theorist and Philippine senator Walden Bello. In this view, the violence of the drug war is a part of a march to dictatorship. “The strategic aim of the [extrajudicial-killing] campaign is not to win the war on drugs,” Bello wrote recently. “It is to promote a broader authoritarian agenda by establishing a climate of intimidation and fear that will make the destruction of democratic political institutions and political rights and their remaking in an authoritarian direction a ‘walk in the park.’ ” In this context, it must be noted that the pique of the public, too, has been temporary. According to Coronel, the Philippine Congress has greatly augmented a “presidential intelligence fund,” which allows the paying of rewards to police officers for drug seizures.
There is something deep-seated, you could even say anthropological, about the Philippine people’s support for the drug war. It involves the special meaning loyalty has in Philippine society and culture and the special way it is lived out. People are strikingly deferential to the prevailing mood. You could call this an admirable spirit of cooperation or a deplorable conformism. It simplifies the task of building national unity but makes the maintenance of an ordinary party system difficult. Duterte ran in 2016 under the banner of PDP-Laban, a merger of two parties that had risen to fight the Marcos dictatorship in the 1980s. The party won just 3 seats in the 297-seat Congress, but once it became apparent Duterte would win the presidency, half of the former ruling party, the Liberals, defected to it, making PDP-Laban, with 114 seats, by far the largest party in Congress. This is a democracy that social conventions render capable of behaving like an autocracy. Representatives can turn like a school of fish.
Other collectivist societies, whether Western ones in Scandinavia (with their “Jante laws”) or Eastern ones on the Asian mainland (with their “Asian values”), tend to have a gift for organization and direction. Not so the Philippines. Order tends to be imposed from without. Where it is not, society’s institutions tend to implode. Filipinos often explain the livelier aspects of their street life—hundreds of thousands surging through the narrow alleys of the neighborhood of Quiapo every January 9, for instance, to attend the Feast of the Black Nazarene—by saying, “We don’t have parks.” And aside from the Rizal park near the old Spanish capital, they don’t. How could they? They don’t really have sidewalks, either. In a dirt-poor part of a big city, any eight-foot-wide stretch of concrete next to a flow of traffic is too valuable to leave to pedestrians—so the sidewalks are blocked by sari-sari stands and parked cars, leaving the people to walk on the highway.
In such a situation, a strong and sincere feeling can develop on the part of the Filipino public that we would all be better off if someone told us what to do, and what we need to do is cut the crap. Singapore’s prime minister Lee Kwan Yew, whose authoritarian leadership is credited (rightly or not) with quadrupling his country’s per capita GDP between 1960 and 1990, used to paint pictures of how much his countrymen could achieve if they could only work together. When he tried to paint pictures of what would happen if they didn’t work together, the Philippines were the country he obsessed over, admiring their people as much as he deplored their government: “Something had gone seriously wrong,” he wrote. “Filipino professionals whom we recruited to work in Singapore are as good as our own. Indeed, their architects, artists, and musicians are more artistic and creative than ours. . . . The difference lies in the culture of the Filipino people. It is a soft, forgiving culture.”
As the promises of democratization made after the overthrow of Marcos in 1986 have gone unfulfilled, the reputation of Marcos himself has risen in a way that would shock anyone who has been away from the country for a few decades. In the 2016 elections that brought Duterte to power, the late dictator’s son Ferdinand Marcos Jr. (known as “Bongbong”) was only narrowly defeated for the vice-presidency, a defeat he continues to appeal in the courts. Months after taking office, Duterte authorized the reburial of Marcos in Libingan ng mga Bayani, the country’s heroes’ cemetery, in what was once Fort McKinley.
Duterte is sick of People Power and the way it is reminisced over every year at the end of February. “I do not have to repeat the EDSA revolution every day before breakfast,” he said to Al Jazeera in a postelection interview. He has let the last two anniversaries pass wholly uncommemorated. In retrospect, the EDSA revolution of 1986 represents not just a moment of liberation but the installation of a new and optimistic moral system built in America’s image: It brought to power the Aquino family, which had spent years in exile in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It introduced emulative pro-Americanism as an alternative to Marcos’s use of the country’s Cold War strategic geography to shake down the U.S. government. It scaled down the U.S. military infrastructure that had metastasized during the Vietnam war. It entrusted the country’s future to its rich businessmen. In a way, the 1986 Philippines revolution looks like a founding event of the post-Cold War world, a harbinger of the transformation of 1989. Its repudiation today may be the sign of something major.
America, China, and the Philippines
Duterte belongs to an in-between generation of Filipino leaders—too young to have come to pro-Americanism during World War II and too old to have come to it in the Internet Age. Feelings about the United States have always been ambivalent in the Philippines. On one hand, the United States short-circuited the country’s revolution in the Spanish-American War and has repressed one independence movement after another, from the anti-Spanish Katipunan rebels at the end of the 19th century to the anti-Japanese Hukbalahap insurgents who kept fighting after World War II. On the other hand the United States introduced democracy, set up the country’s educational infrastructure, and fought side by side to oust the Japanese.
Duterte considers the upside of this narrative baloney. “Had [the Americans] not been here in the Philippines, there would have been no Second World War for us,” he said in 2016. “The enemies came because they were here in the first place.” He raises Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan whenever the subject of American hegemony comes up (“I have yet to hear an apology”) and adds a remembrance of the early-20th-century massacres at Bud Dajo and Bud Bagsak in Sulu before World War I.
The Philippines can seem to Filipinos like a kind of international punching bag. Duterte spends much of his time defining and defending his country’s dignity. His cabinet has attacked the French drug multinational Sanofi, which made an arrangement with the Aquino administration to use the Philippines for human trials of a new vaccine against dengue fever, common in the tropics, even though France’s own tropical territories would not permit the drug to be tested there. Children sickened and died. The Philippine island of Boracay is reputed to have the best beaches on the planet, and since 2010 its intake of visitors has tripled, to 2 million visitors, almost all of them foreigners. Its resorts were built before anyone thought to construct a modern sewage system, though, and in April Duterte ordered the island closed, pending a cleanup. At the same time, Duterte signed an agreement with a Macau firm to build a half-billion-dollar casino on Boracay.
The Philippines will soon be a bigger country than Japan, but its growth is so poorly distributed that jobs are perennially lacking, and economic planners must seek them where they can. The country is dependent on call-center and manufacturing jobs offshored from the United States and Europe, and on remittances from the millions of Filipinos who work around the world, who in 2010 accounted for $21.3 billion, or 12 percent of the country’s GDP. There are almost 2 million of them in the United States.
Duterte wants to be the protector and guarantor of these overseas workers. In February, the corpse of a Filipina maid was found in a freezer in an abandoned apartment in Kuwait. It was not the first such outrage. In December 2014 another maid had died after being mauled by her Kuwaiti boss’s pet lion. The Filipinos who go to the Middle East as teachers and office workers can keep their phones and passports. Those who go as maids and nannies cannot, and they get treated like dirt.
In the wake of these incidents, Duterte ordered a halt to labor migration to Kuwait until an agreement on working conditions could be negotiated. In April the Philippines embassy in Kuwait released a video of personnel going to homes where women had complained of mistreatment and rescuing them. It went viral. Swashbuckling defenses of the downtrodden foreign worker, the ability to thumb one’s nose at tax-exempt human-rights foundations that would meddle in Filipino domestic affairs—these are among the fruits of what Duterte calls a “truly independent foreign policy.” The issue is a winner. There are rich Filipinos and poor ones, but almost all of them have some relative working abroad in danger of being exploited. As of this spring, Filipinos approve of Duterte’s policies on overseas workers by 84-4, according to Pulse Asia.
To put it mildly, though, there is a limit to the Philippines’ ability to thumb its nose at the rest of the world. Were all its overseas workers to return home, their competition would drive down the wages of Filipinos, just as it does the wages of the laborers in the countries to which they travel.
At the start of Duterte’s term, the Philippines won what looked like a crushing victory over China. During the Obama administration, the Chinese occupied Scarborough Shoal, a fish-rich Filipino reef 123 miles west of Subic Bay, and renamed it Democracy Reef. They built artificial islands for the landing of transport planes west of the Philippine island of Palawan. They began to express an interest in the mineral-rich Benham Rise, in the waters of the Pacific east of the Philippines. The Obama administration urged Aquino’s government to respond by suing China in the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague (2015). At the start of Duterte’s term, the court handed down its decision: Scarborough Shoal belongs to the Philippines, not China, under international law.
But Duterte has chosen not to contest China’s occupation. Why not? When the question came up in late April, during a speech to Masons in Davao, Duterte answered that the moment to contest China’s occupation had been when it happened and that this was something only the Obama administration could have done. “At the time, who could have stopped it?” he asked. “Tell me. Philippine Navy? Marines? There would have been a massacre.” Against the American principle of international norms stands the Chinese principle of you-and-whose-army? Duterte prefers China. He has joked that when you meet Americans they give you water, but when you meet Chinese they give you a buffet. Duterte may also feel his country needs China more. Like Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia, the Philippines now exports more to China than to the United States.
For now, the Philippines and the United States each appear to be trying to milk the other. As Turkey has shown over the past decade, if a U.S. ally is in a pivotal enough strategic position, it can effectively renounce the alliance without much fear that the United States will come up with alternative strategic alignments and exclude it. “If there is trouble in Mindanao, if there’s going to be a bloodbath,” Duterte said at that Masonic speech in Davao, “the nearest I could call, which I’m sure would come, would be China. Maybe America but because their Congress is so powerful that it can paralyze actually the presidency of America, unlike in countries where there is only one leader to reckon with.” For the moment, the Philippines, which signed a 10-year enhanced defense treaty with Washington in 2014, feels able to benefit from the U.S. military umbrella even while denouncing it. At the same time, the United States has been resting on its laurels, as if its lectures on human rights and international law, so convincing on American think tank podia, were a sort of common sense that every country will inevitably choose to follow, even those at high risk of anarchy, subversion, exploitation, and military defeat. When popular demand brings leaders like Duterte to power, America risks being frozen out altogether.
Duterte has described his strategy for the coming years as “build, build, build.” His country needs train networks, roads, new factories, and mines for extracting its rich mineral resources. If its infrastructure building in the Horn of Africa is anything to go by, China will be more than willing to send its businessmen and engineers into the dangerous, conflict-scarred areas of Mindanao so close to heart of the Filipino strongman. These are projects the United States has long been disinclined to pursue. Under the circumstances, it would be natural if the Philippines looked increasingly towards China, which has made “build, build, build” the cornerstone of what it offers its allies, and less towards the United States, which in recent years has contented itself with “nag, nag, nag.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the minimum wage is $10 per week. It is $10 per day.
