The Philippines is fortifying its role inside America’s sphere of influence and domination ahead of the 2022 presidential election. Following President Rodrigo Duterte’s declaration during his final State of the Nation Address last July that his administration would retain the RP-US Visiting Forces Agreement, Manila’s foreign policy has firmly realigned with Washington’s new global thrusts.
Throughout the past three months alone, both countries have stepped up a range of bilateral security-related engagements and activities. All of these undertakings not only focus on preserving RP-US relations, but also on deepening the agenda of the Philippines’ military integration into the United States’ shifting regional security architecture aimed at China. Indeed, the Philippines has just reenlisted in American imperialism’s war camp as a refurbished puppet-state.
Linked to this, President Joe Biden’s White House has launched a renovated foreign policy framework beyond America’s two-decade-long “Global War Of Terror” crusade. This new course is guided by a revitalized set of precepts earlier advocated by three Cold War-era US national security advisers that epitomized Washington’s geostrategic thinking: a) To protect and advance America’s core strategic interests through a balance of power in international relations directed by US-led alliances; b) To actively pursue political warfare to manipulate and sway global public opinion behind US foreign policy goals and aims; and, c) To dominate the Eurasian landmass with a broadly unified strategy to influence and control the Eastern hemisphere—earth’s largest hemisphere—to sustain America’s global primacy.
These dictums reflect the mindsets of three of America’s foremost foreign policy architects, namely Henry Kissinger, Gordon Gray, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. As former national security advisers, they were principally involved in designing, crafting, and executing the US’ belligerent schemes in the latter half of the last century, mainly against the former Soviet Union. A synergized external relations approach employing the major strategic concepts of the Kissinger-Gray-Brzezinski policy thrusts is America’s new “KGB” foreign policy line.
To understand America’s current world outlook and stance, its KGB foreign policy track needs to be grasped. Firstly, Kissinger’s realist standpoint asserted that the US must permanently maintain a global balance of power by constantly building and securing major international alliances under Washington’s perpetual leadership. This is to ensure its comprehensive rule over the international order and community.
Secondly, Gray pushed for the prime employment of a “psychological strategy” to decisively manage overall US foreign policy. This political warfare approach pursues an integrated range of gray-zone tactics—disinformation campaigns, economic pressures, and political manipulation in selective combination with covert direct actions—at a threshold level just below all-out military conflict. The intent is to coerce and persuade foreign targets to bow to America’s global priorities.
Thirdly, Brzezinski’s pivotal counsel was for America to constantly drive forward a geostrategy projecting its inherent global power to clearly assure its worldwide predominance. To do so, the US must assume superiority across the transregional Eurasian zone—the immense landmass encompassing both China and Russia. The central task here is to expand and deepen US-led alliances in the Eastern hemisphere to boost Washington’s external objectives for effective command and control over this vital geographic space. Geopolitically, this helps explain Washington’s escalating measures targeting the Beijing-Moscow axis in this part of the world.
As a countermeasure, the China-Russia strategic partnership strives to build its own regional alliance versus America’s dangerously threatening probes and malign intentions throughout the area. Thus, a risk of war is now posed—embroiling the Philippines.
Unless next year’s electoral outcome brings forth a new Malacañang regime that advances a peacefully progressive foreign policy alternative—aligned neither with America’s nor China’s respective spheres of influence—Manila will remain chained to the greater agenda of Washington’s bellicose aims and designs.
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Rasti Delizo is an international affairs analyst and an activist in the socialist movement.