History makes justifiable Duterte’s harsh words vs Obama

Not everything is eaten as hot as it is cooked. The same can be said of President Duterte’s words against US President Barack Obama. As a colony of the United States, the Philippines was treated by the Americans as a kind of a slave colony. Also, if it did not serve its interest, the United States would not have helped the Philippines fight the Japanese during World War II.

US assistance has always been driven by its own interest. Recently, we saw this again in the Iraq war in 2003, and now in Syria. This may be the reason that at present, in Western Europe, especially in my homeland Germany, the public sympathy leans more toward Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, or Russia for that matter, than toward the United States and Obama or Hillary Clinton.

I, myself, feel politically closer to Russia than to the United States, but I have no problem with the simple American workers. What I don’t like is their government and foreign policy. The Americans themselves, or most of them, distrust their own politicians, that’s what the surveys says.

President Duterte says what he thinks—indeed, it’s good to have an honest president. Out in the world’s diplomatic theaters, it’s quite different, even slippery.

Can you still remember Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev? A former premier of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics? On Oct. 12, 1960, while delivering a speech before the United Nations, he angrily banged one of his shoes on the table. That’s history!

—JÜRGEN SCHÖFER, PhD., [email protected]