Needed: a Philippine Foreign Policy Council

The year 2021 marks three historically significant events in Philippine-American affairs linked to international security concerns. The effects of this troika of correlated moments greatly endure, and their potential outcomes will critically affect the overall course of Philippine foreign policy. However, these major national dilemmas urgently need to be resolved through a more democratic and collective mode in favor of the greater majority of our people, especially the younger generation who is set to become the country’s future leadership.

On Aug. 30, the Mutual Defense Treaty between the Philippines and the United States will mark exactly 70 years — seven decades of the country having chained an “independent and sovereign Philippine State” to the US imperialist war machine since 1951. On Sept. 16, freedom-loving Filipinos will commemorate the 30th anniversary of the expulsion of American military bases, facilities, and troops from Philippine territory by the Philippine Senate — powerfully bolstered by a national, broad-based anti-imperialist mass movement — in 1991. And on Sept. 11, the global community of nations, and its vastly oppressed peoples and exploited working masses, will remember the foreign-organized terrorist attacks on American soil in 2001. It was 9/11’s turning point in contemporary world history that swiftly triggered US imperialism’s “Global War OF Terror” and wholly secured Manila behind Washington’s decades-long hegemonic project of militarist aggression worldwide.

Contextually, it is the RP-US Visiting Forces Agreement that connects all of the above three episodes. The VFA, signed by Manila and Washington seven years after the Senate rejected the 1991 RP-US Military Bases Agreement, is a booster instrument of the MDT. Likewise, the VFA activated the Philippines into becoming one of America’s major non-North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies post-9/11, and so a member of US imperialism’s “Coalition of the Killing” in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the overall pursuit of the country’s external policy objectives, Manila has made detrimental decisions that have created dangerously harmful impacts and threats upon the country since 1946. But surely, such missteps are avoidable. President Duterte’s publicly aired shaming attack against Vice President Leni Robredo and Sen. Panfilo Lacson over the VFA just a few weeks ago once again focused national attention on the perennial problems affecting Philippine foreign policy.

In this incident, Mr. Duterte arrogantly asserted that the President of the Philippines is “the chief architect of Philippine foreign policy” and that the Philippine Senate has nothing at all to do with foreign policy-making. His claim is wrong in view of the Constitution’s authorization for the Senate to concur on the validity and effectivity of international treaties and agreements. Likewise, this was also the spirit and intent of the framers of the 1987 Philippine Constitution based on the official records of the 1986 Philippine Constitutional Commission. During an interpellation between ConCom delegates Ricardo Romulo and Ponciano Bennagen on the latter’s question as to which parties are to be involved in the crafting of an “independent Philippine foreign policy,” Romulo answered Bennagen, “Congress will have to be involved.” The ConCom’s intent was clear. Likewise, it was made clear that “consultation with broad sectors of the people” is to be expected, in view of the Constitution’s “social justice sections.”

Hence, it is high time that a “Philippine Foreign Policy Council” be established. The council can act as an institutional democratic mechanism to comprehensively and vitally address our country’s pressing foreign relations agenda in a more constructive, broadly cooperative, and unifying manner. This body should be able to possess the character of a state-level foreign policy advisory board with a cross-sectoral composition. As such, leading members of the Philippine mass movement (i.e., people’s organizations, labor centers, NGOs, think tanks) must also have equal representation in the PFPC — jointly with key government officials and legislators — to collectively shape, forge, and guide Philippine foreign policy forward in a progressive direction.

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Rasti Delizo is an international affairs analyst and a longtime activist in the socialist movement.