>> Perhaps it has more to do with the Philippines strategic geographic location threatening 40% or more of the world’s trade passing through the South China Sea.
>>I think you have to elaborate to convince us
Dutarte was elected on an anti drug platform and his solution to the drug problem is popular. This drug problem was born in the cargo bays of Air America, whose muling of China White from the Golden Triangle via our military bases in the Philippines is a matter of record to the point that a comedy film was made of it.
Dutarte, like most of the 3rd World has had it up to their necks with our CIA staged coups, assassinations, and puppet tin horn crypto-Nazi dictators. This is not about China’s sphere of influence or shipping choke points or geopolitics. It is about a 3rd World nation state throwing off the yoke of the American Empire, just like we originally did to the Brits. China is marginally a communist government, its capitalists are calling most of the shots any more. The Philippeans sees development loans from BRICS as far more attractive than the extortionary IMF and World Bank debt farming. These developing nations want to borrow money for their own infrastructure evolution, not for Utah Construction Co. to build rails and highways for the specific purpose of raw materials extraction for United Fruit or Cargil or Bunge or Continental or Dreyfus or Nestle’s. We made this bed, we damned well gonna sleep in it.
Thank you for providing insights as to the motivations on the part of the Filipinos to turn their face away from America and get into bed with China. I have been more interested from the point of view of American national security and American economic interests to understand what motivates the Chinese in this grab for sea lanes, geography, trade, and power.
I pointed out that I cannot believe that the Chinese are motivated by an earnest desire to do banking business with the Filipinos. The may want to do banking business with the Filipinos but that is hardly motivation for their belligerency in the South China Sea.
Nor do I accept your vocabulary or characterization of my understanding of American interests as being unable to free myself from the Cold War mentality. The hard and irrefutable facts are Russia and China are behaving much as they did when they were frankly communist. Likewise, I do not accept the anti-colonial jargon nor its sweeping assumptions concerning the feelings of the inhabitants of the Third World. In this context let me be perfectly frank, I regard the British Empire as one of the great boons to mankind, a civilizing influence, a force which spread the rule of law, and governments as honest as existed at the time, education opportunities, and trade opportunities. Similarly, I do not accept your characterization of American "colonial" history.
Whatever the motivation in the Philippines for turning their back on the world's strongest military power with the world's greatest economy for a nation which is autocratic, indifferent to human rights, and utterly corrupt, the effect on America is what counts. It would not have occurred had our foreign policy and defense posture not turned into a pathetic muddle.
