The Aquino-Marcos one-two punch

China is fuming mad at the decision of the Philippines to grant the United States access to four more military bases. They have been quick to warn the Philippines that the bases destabilize the Indo-Pacific region. They should look at themselves in the mirror. If only they did not wantonly disregard the hundreds of protests the Philippines has lodged against their crude cabbage expansionist strategy in the West Philippine Sea, all the while duplicitously extending the hand of friendship and cooperation between our two nations, things would have been different. China dangled unfulfilled promises of investment and infrastructure and stepped all over an earnest but naïve President Rodrigo Duterte like a doormat.

The Philippines would have stayed proudly equipoised between the United States and China since President Ferdinand Marcos decided to “open more windows to the world” in 1975. That gentle jab was followed by an uppercut—a Senate that delivered a resounding NO to renewing the US military facilities in the Philippines in 1991.

That was the wistful era of Pax Filipiniana when the Philippines no longer saw an external threat, the wide South China Sea on the west and the Pacific to the east serving as a comforting moat. No longer did the Philippines subscribe to the domino theory under which it committed combat troops in Korea in 1952 and a civic action group in Vietnam in 1966.

The Filipino expression of sovereignty through the removal of US bases may have contributed to the perception of a vacuum that eventually goaded China to fill, encouraged by their victory in “teaching the Vietnamese a lesson” in the battle of the Paracel islands in the South China Sea in 1974 and the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979.

China has become the bully it warned the world against when it was still prostrate. China has missed the sterling message of Paolo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” that the oppressed, in rising from adversity, should use critical thinking to free themselves from the shackles of institutionalized ruling class dominance, never allowing themselves to become the oppressor in turn and in the mold of its former tormentor.

The decision by President Marcos to grant four more bases is the uppercut to the Chinese chin that follows the straight jab that former president Benigno Aquino III gave when he filed the now-celebrated arbitration case against China in 2013. What a one-two punch that is!

China acts as if the Philippines is a new kid on the block by putting its shoulder against the containment wall against Chinese expansionism. The Philippines has been a part of Indo-Pacific US-led alliances since World War II, its Mutual Defense Treaty with the US dating to 1951.

The location of these additional four bases leaves no doubt they are forward bases dedicated to projecting the kind of alliance power that will deter China from stumbling into a Putinesque mistake in Taiwan and in the South China Sea.

While unintended, the designation of the name of the existing Camilo Osias Naval Base adjoining the San Vicente Naval Airfield at the northeastern horn-shaped tip of Santa Ana as one of the four additional bases is serendipitously meaningful.

For once, this is an opportune occasion to express the Filipino commitment to defend its sovereignty and democracy in terms of a civilian statesman, not a military soldier. For too long, our nation has defined heroism primarily in terms of combat heroism, and the visuals that accompany our singing of the national anthem are Lapulapu defeating Magellan, or the Death March heroism of our soldiers.

Camilo Osias (1889-1976, born in Balaoan, La Union), was one of the finest statesmen of the Philippines, in the genre of Carlos P. Romulo and Salvador P. Lopez. They were educators, writers, diplomats, and Ilocanos with unquestioned integrity and patriotism.

Many pre-World War II generations remember learning about English, civics, and ethics from a series of excellent hardcover elementary textbooks called the Osias Readers. In the Readers is the famous story of the monkey and the turtle, where the monkey tricks the turtle into carrying him across the river, only to leave the turtle behind once it was across. The story warns against the dangers of deceit and trickery, a most apt description of how China deals with the Philippines.

The timely Aquino-Marcos one-two punch puts a little smile on my face. Taking a page from the Chinese book of trickery, the Philippine government is maintaining with a straight face that the new bases have nothing to do with China. Two can play this venerable diplomatic game.

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