The Philippines pivots to China

FOR some relief from the congestion, fumes and hustle of Manila, take a day-cruise to the island of Corregidor. Guarding the entrance to Manila Bay, the “Gibraltar of the East” has seen the junks that brought Chinese trade and Islam, galleons that brought Spanish Catholicism and, in 1898, the warships of Commodore George Dewey that brought American rule. In 1941 came Japanese invaders who, as tour-guides tell it, made sport of throwing Filipino babies in the air and catching them on bayonets.

The shared memory of the second world war—the rearguard defence of Corregidor by American and Filipino soldiers, the horrors of occupation such as the “Bataan death-march” of POWs to distant internment camps, and the triumphant return of General Douglas MacArthur in 1944—goes a long way to explain the affection of many Filipinos for America. It is hard to imagine other former colonised peoples putting up, or putting up with, the “Brothers in Arms” statue on Corregidor: it depicts an American GI (tall and strong, with a helmet) holding up a Filipino buddy (short and wounded, with a bandana).

Such comradeship assuages some of the resentment Filipinos feel at the mix of brutality and paternalism of American rule. Seventy years after independence, the Philippines feels like an offshoot of America: in its spoken English, its system of government, its gun culture, and its love of fast food and Hollywood. The Pew Research Centre, which polls global opinion, ranks the Philippines as the most pro-American of the countries it surveys: 92% of Filipinos expressed a favourable view of America in 2015, an even bigger share than in the United States itself.

These days the expansionist power in Asia is China. A potential flashpoint for a future war lies barely 170 nautical miles from Corregidor—a ring of reefs and rocks called Scarborough Shoal. A big fishing ground, and a former bombing range for American and Filipino forces, it was seized by China in 2012. Were it to build a military base there, as it has done in the nearby Spratly Islands, Scarborough Shoal would be as a dagger aimed at Manila.

It is time, surely, for the brothers to link arms again. The trouble is, Rodrigo Duterte, the hard-man president, wants to turn his back on America. The Philippines is not a vassal state, putang-ina (“son of a whore”), he exclaimed when asked whether Barack Obama might object to his bloody war on drugs. A month later, on a visit to Beijing, “Rody” announced his country’s “separation” from America, and its dependence henceforth on China. The Chinese leadership promised some $24 billion worth of loans and investments. High on Mr Duterte’s wishlist is a new railway to connect Manila with development zones at Subic Bay and Clark Field, former American bases abandoned in the early 1990s during a previous surge of Filipino nationalism.

China in and America out: on the face of it a geopolitical revolution is under way, breaking the chain of American alliances in the Pacific that contain China. Control of Scarborough Shoal, and a friendly government in Manila, would make it easier for Chinese nuclear submarines to slip into the Pacific Ocean within missile range of America.

Yet, rhetoric aside, strikingly little has changed. American forces are still helping Filipino ones against jihadists and upgrading Filipino bases to challenge China’s ambition in the South China Sea. The promised billions have yet to materialise. To some, Mr Duterte’s pivot is a pirouette, intended to get both powers, and Japan, to woo the Philippines. More plausibly, he is spinning in contradictions. Mr Duterte says that only two out of five of his utterances are true, and the rest “jokes”. But which is which?

Grown-ups in the cabinet are masters at managing his tantrums. The “separation” from America is recast as diplomatic “diversification”, while keeping close ties with America. The threat to abandon the mutual defence treaty of 1951 is but a revision to annual joint exercises. The call to “set aside” the ruling of an international tribunal against China’s trespass on the Philippines’ exclusive economic zones around Scarborough Shoal and the Spratlys is no surrender, just a choice not to discuss it for now.

Mr Duterte’s anti-Americanism is real enough. He bears personal grudges against Americans (and claims to have been molested as a boy by an American priest). A self-declared leftist, he blames America for the legacy of violence of his home island of Mindanao, plagued by communist and Muslim insurgencies.

But the president, although popular, is constrained by a pro-American system. Westerners are told to heed what the government does, not what Rody says. Rattled businessmen hope the harm will be limited. It helps that Mr Duterte has stopped insulting America. One reason is that he has more or less suspended his war on drugs—not because of growing qualms over the death of thousands of Filipinos, but out of embarrassment over the grisly killing of a South Korean businessman by crooked policemen.

A populist axis

The other reason is the arrival of Donald Trump, whom Mr Duterte regards as a kindred spirit. And yet, even for Mr Duterte, Mr Trump is probably a menace, not a friend. Though suspicious of China, the American president’s resentment of costly alliances raises doubt about whether he would defend the Philippines. That could invite Chinese adventurism.

Mr Trump’s dislike of global trade and immigration presents another danger. The gift of English has made the Philippines a winner from globalisation: remittances from millions of workers abroad (many in America), and the outsourcing of call centres and other backroom tasks by big American firms, have powered the economy. Right now, Mr Trump may care most about the loss of manufacturing jobs to Mexico and the influx of migrants from the Muslim world. But in trying to make America great again he may well make the Philippines poorer. Then Mr Duterte really would have good reason to curse America.