Fire and Fury: Duterte’s Revolutionary Foreign Policy

“I will be chartering [sic] a [new] course [for the Philippines] on its own and will not be dependent on the United States,” Rodrigo Duterte declared shortly after his shocking electoral victory in the Philippines’ 2016 presidential elections. True to his words, over the past two-plus years Duterte has rapidly reconfigured Philippine foreign policy with verve and vigor.

The mind-boggling shift in the country’s strategic orientation is a telltale example of how a charismatic and strong-willed leader can upend, almost single handedly, a century-old foreign policy tradition. Almost overnight, Duterte ended his country’s de facto status as an American protectorate in favor of a more transactional bilateral relationship with the Philippines’ former colonial master. Meanwhile, he began recasting China in a new light, seeking to transform a historical rival into a partner for national development.

To be fair, Duterte isn’t the first Philippine president to reshuffle strategic relations vis-à-vis the two superpowers. Former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (2001-2010), currently Duterte’s chief foreign policy adviser, also pursued warmer relations with China amid growing disagreement with Washington over the conduct of the Global War on Terror (GWOT).

By regional standards, Duterte’s equilateral balancing strategy is also far from unique, closely mirroring that of other mid-sized East Asian states, ranging from South Korea to Malaysia and Vietnam, which have carefully cultivated stable relations with both China and the United States throughout the decades.

This way, smaller powers have sought to preserve a measure of autonomy, avoid overdependence on any external actor, extricate themselves from great power rivalries in periods of conflict, and, if necessary, play bigger powers against each other for leverage and strategic benefits.

What makes Duterte’s case distinct is his unabashed call for a post-American order, often portraying China as the new and benign regional leader in Asia. In this sense, his foreign policy has been no less than revolutionary in, at the very least, the Philippine context.

To Duterte, Washington’s decades-long hegemony in the region is a geopolitical anomaly, a contingent outcome of World War II that will soon fade into oblivion. Under Duterte, relations with Washington are neither sacred nor special – a remarkable break from almost all his predecessors, especially the Benigno Aquino III administration, which boosted bilateral security cooperation with the United States to counter Chinese maritime assertiveness.

In contrast, China, according to Duterte, is a geographical reality, which every Asian state should reckon with. He sees the Asian powerhouse as an indispensable source for development assistance as well as a stabilizing force in the region. All of a sudden, China is no longer seen as a hostile communist power by America’s oldest ally in Asia.

The Philippine president has deliberately sidelined maritime disputes in the South China Sea in favor of warmer diplomatic and economic ties with Beijing. Crucially, the Philippine president has also downgraded security cooperation with the United States and traditional partners amid the ongoing Philippine-China rapprochement.

In his third year in office, Duterte remains widely popular, but he is beginning to sense the limits of his power. The festering disputes in the South China Sea have provoked widespread domestic backlash against his China-friendly diplomacy.

Despite his best efforts to cultivate a robust and enduring friendship with China, Duterte has faced stiff resistance from the defense establishment as well as prominent figures within the state, civil society, and intelligentsia, which remain wary of China. The Philippine president may be popular, but he lacks unilateral power over the country’s foreign policy.

Whether he wants it or not, Duterte has had to contend with other veto-players, which seek to maintain strong defense relations with Washington and limit strategic cooperation with Beijing. The Philippines’ foreign policy has entered a twilight zone, caught between the whims of a charismatic leader, on one hand, and the traditions of the old establishment, on the other.

Duterte’s Art of the Deal

There has been an ongoing debate over the origins and direction of Duterte’s strategic rupture, particularly his seeming aversion toward the United States and, correspondingly, fascination toward China. Some critics have, without providing any concrete evidence, portrayed him as a Manchurian candidate, allegedly doing China’s bidding in exchange for the former’s support during the 2016 elections when Duterte was, at least initially, a heavily underfunded candidate set against better known and established rivals from imperial Manila. According to this (unsupported) narrative, China, through its proxies, namely the Chinese-Filipino business community, especially in Davao, bankrolled Duterte’s unlikely rise to the apex of Philippine power.

The other narrative focuses on his personal attributes, with critics dismissing Duterte as an unsophisticated former provincial mayor, who has allowed his personal feelings and limited experience in high-stakes international politics to cloud his presidential judgment, much to the detriment of the country’s interests. Some in the opposition view Duterte as nothing less than a “Filipino Hugo Chavez,” who is supposedly bent on overturning the liberal democratic status quo in favor of a leftist-populist regime that is friendly toward China and Russia, but hostile toward the United States. These quasi-cartoonish portrayals of Duterte, however, overlook important historical and geopolitical factors that have fueled, as well as enabled, his rapid transformation of Philippine foreign policy.

A more nuanced, diachronic analysis of Duterte’s foreign policy, however, reveals a more complex picture, where a combination of factors has driven his constantly evolving strategic posturing. First of all, one has to take into account how his rise to power took place within the context of right-wing populism. Duterte, throughout his campaign rallies, portrayed himself as a nationalist leader, often dramatically draping himself in the Filipino flag and promising to make the Philippines a truly “independent” nation.

Duterte’s landslide election victory, where he comfortably trounced American-educated candidates Manuel Roxas III (Wharton) and Grace Poe (Boston College), was portrayed as a wholesale rejection of the cosmopolitan liberal establishment, which has been, according to Duterte, subservient to the West, particularly the United States. Duterte’s campaign wasn’t only about fighting drugs, but also the reassertion of the Philippines’ national sovereignty after a century of alignment with Washington. Since the Philippines’ formal independence (July 4, 1946), it has effectively outsourced much of its external security obligations to the United States under a package of agreements, namely the Military Bases Agreement (1947), the Military Assistance Pact (1947), and the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) of 1951, and, after the Cold War, the Visiting Forces Agreement (1998) and the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (2014). Duterte promised to end the Philippines’ virtual protectorate status.

A second factor was Duterte’s uncanny ability to colonize different branches of the state within a relatively short period of time. In the first three months of his presidency, almost the entirety of the Philippine House of Representatives as well as the majority of Congress members defected to the new president. This was presidential bandwagoning par excellence, as opportunistic politicians with little party loyalty and political conviction enthusiastically tied their fate to that of the new chief executive.

Duterte also had the unique privilege of appointing (without the necessity for Senate supervision, as is the case in the United States) the majority of the members of the Supreme Court. As one of the members of the country’s highest court, who has often been critical of Duterte’s policies, once told me, “It’s simply a numbers game, and he got it!” In effect, Duterte managed to tighten his grip on all branches of the state without installing a formal dictatorship. The rapid defection among the ranks of the ruling elite, combined with historically high approval ratings, emboldened the Philippine president to overhaul the country’s foreign policy unlike any of his predecessors.

In this sense, Duterte’s case mirrors that of other strongmen populists such as Vladimir Putin (Russia) and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Turkey), who have radically reconfigured their country’s foreign relations amid a process of “authoritarianization.” Putin ended his predecessors’ (Gorbachev and Yeltsin) Westpolitik within a few years in office, while Erdoğan similarly reoriented his country’s foreign policy toward the Near East and broader Islamic world. Both the Russian and Turkish leaders have focused on reviving their old empires, while progressively shunning an alignment with the West. Buoyed by high approval ratings, outsized egos, and a passionate base of support, strongman populists tend to boldly challenge foreign policy dogmas with impunity. The difference, however, is that Duterte began the process of strategic rupture only a few months into office and rarely shied away from using invective-laced rhetoric to castigate traditional partners in the West. (The fast and furious pace, however, would raise its own questions on sustainability overtime, as will be discussed later.)

Yet, Duterte’s strategic recalibration was also grounded in a sensible calculus, especially in light of the festering disputes in the South China Sea. For all its talk of a “pivot” to Asia, the Obama administration not only failed to anticipate and constrain China’s massive island-building project at the heart of the South China Sea, but also repeatedly equivocated on its alliance obligations to the Philippines. On at least two major occasions, Washington seemed less than committed to coming to its treaty ally’s rescue. The first instance was during the months-long Scarborough Shoal standoff in 2012, which ended with China gaining effective control over the Philippine-claimed shoal. Based on conversations with senior policymakers in all involved parties, it’s clear that the Obama administration refused to provide a clear guarantee of support to the Philippines, as China deployed an armada of well-armed coast guard forces to challenge Manila’s apprehension of a Chinese fishing vessel straddling the shoal.

The second occasion was after the Philippines’ landmark arbitration award on July 12, 2016. Instead of unequivocally standing by the Philippines, Obama immediately dispatched National Security Advisor Susan Rice to Beijing in order to calm down tensions, even as an arbitration body, constituted under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), effectively ruled China an outlaw in the South China Sea. To many within the Philippine government, this was seen as more evidence of the United States trying to play good with both sides and refusing to stand firmly by its ally. As one senior Philippine defense official told me, “There was simply no firm support from Washington.” No wonder then, Duterte, a month after his election, openly challenged Philip Goldberg, then the American ambassador to Manila, by asking: “Are you with us [in the South China Sea]?”

And this brings us to another factor, which is China’s unequivocal offer of a package of carrots and sticks to the Philippines. Ahead of the release of the arbitration award at The Hague, the culmination of a process initiated by the Aquino administration to challenge Beijing’s claims, the Chinese ambassador to Manila Zhao Jianhua repeatedly met Duterte to negotiate a “soft landing” on the issue. Beijing made clear that it was willing to offer large-scale infrastructure investments and mutually satisfactory arrangements – including joint development agreements, the opening of Scarborough Shoal to Filipino fishermen, and establishment of marine sanctuaries in contested areas – in the South China Sea if the Duterte administration were to downplay the arbitration award, which nullified much of China’s claim across the disputed waters. To make it clear that the Philippines would a pay a heavy price if it refused to do so, Beijing conducted naval drills and aerial patrols in contested areas as Manila nervously deliberated on how to leverage the arbitration award. In this sense, Duterte’s foreign policy recalibration was sensible and logical in light of the prevailing geopolitical circumstances in the early months of his administration. When faced with an equivocating ally and a determined adversary, Duterte opted for de-escalation and détente.

At a Crossroads

In short, the tough-talking Filipino president, who has openly celebrated violence and called for mass killing of criminals and drug dealers, became an unlikely advocate for peace and pragmatism in the South China Sea. As Duterte’s ambassador to Beijing, Chito Sta. Romana told me in January 2017, “Under [Duterte’s] new approach, economics, trade and commerce – and not territorial and maritime disputes – will be the key driver of Philippines-China relations. The disputes will still be subject to negotiations but they will not be at the front and center of bilateral relations [with China], nor will they [serve as] an obstacle to the improvement of bilateral ties.”

It didn’t take long, however, for Duterte’s sensible equilateral balancing strategy to start unraveling. And this is due to the final and crucial driver of his foreign policy: personal grievance and animosity. Under his watch, the Philippines’ external relations have often become hostage to the sentiments and historical experiences of the Filipino president. Far from an unhinged and unmoored statesman, Duterte has approached foreign policy from the perspective of a 21st century Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) leader. He has held the principle of “non-interference” as the core element of his understanding of an “independent” foreign policy. In the first months of his administration, he sought to develop a basic rapport with the West, knowing the latter’s deep-seated influence among the Philippine defense establishment, intelligentsia, and broader public.

As soon as the United States and other Western countries began to criticize his human rights record, however, Duterte reverted back to his age-old grievances, often denouncing them, in a Nehruvian fashion, as imperialists interfering in the domestic affairs of the Philippines. As a self-described “socialist,” Duterte’s ideological roots can be traced back to his college mentor, Jose Maria Sison, the founder of contemporary Philippine communist movement, and his long-term friendship with Moro nationalist leader Nur Misuari, who has been among the most articulate critics of American imperial footprint in the southern island of Mindanao. Coming of age during the Vietnam War, Duterte has been steeped in anti-Western ideological discourse throughout his life in isolated Davao, away from cosmopolitan centers such as Manila. During his long stint as a provincial mayor in Mindanao, he developed tense and often adversarial relations with Washington, particularly at the height of the GWOT.

Duterte has often mentioned the 2002 “Meiring incident,” where a suspected CIA operative experimenting with explosives was escorted out of Mindanao without his permission, and the reported rejection of his visa by American authorities as just two, among many, sources of his anger at Washington. Duterte even made the unprecedented move of blocking the annual Philippine-U.S. Balikatan exercises in his backyard, while denying Americans access to the Davao airbase for drone operations in 2013. Against this adversarial background, it’s no surprise that the tough-talking Filipino president would go so far as cussing at Obama and Goldberg after they criticized his human rights record. Although the election of Donald Trump led to a slight thaw in bilateral relations, Duterte has maintained generally tense relations with the American press, Congress, and broader government institutions. No wonder then, shortly after receiving an invitation to visit the White House in mid-2017, the Philippine president nonchalantly said, “I’ve seen America, and it’s lousy.”

Unlike any of his predecessors, Duterte snubbed the White House invitation, having, so far, shown zero interest in visiting any major Western country, including Australia for the ASEAN-Australia Dialogue. Traditionally, Washington has been the first major foreign destination for newly elected Philippine presidents. A number of Philippine presidents visited the United States, the Philippines’ sole treaty ally and former colonial master, several times during their term in office. Not Duterte, who has instead visited China on three different occasions within his first two years in office.

For Duterte, no external power should question his domestic policies, including the scorched-earth counternarcotics campaign, which has reportedly claimed the lives of thousands of suspected drug dealers and users. While much of the West has regularly criticized Duterte’s human rights record, China, in contrast, has expressed full support for his controversial drug war.

Over time, Duterte has been further drawn into the Chinese orbit of influence due to ideological convergence and personalization of Philippine foreign policy. In particular, he relishes Beijing’s supposed commitment to the principle of noninterference in the domestic affairs of other countries. Much to his delight, China has offered full support to his drug war in multilateral fora, including at the United Nations Human Rights Council, while offering to build drug rehabilitation centers in the Philippines and make large-scale infrastructure investments in Duterte’s home island of Mindanao.

In exchange, Duterte has refused to raise the Philippines’ arbitration award in international fora, including during his chairmanship of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), while telling external powers that the South China Sea disputes are “better left untouched.” He has also floated the idea of Joint Development Agreements in the South China Sea, a controversial policy that may inadvertently legitimize China’s expansive nine-dash line claims in the area in violation of the 2016 Arbitral Tribunal ruling at The Hague.

Duterte has also given China a green light to expand its military access to Davao’s airbase and ports in recent years, even though the two countries are yet to negotiate a formal defense agreement. In effect, Duterte has not only ended the Philippines’ role as the vortex of resistance against China within ASEAN, as was the case under Aquino, but also turned the Southeast Asian country into a potential military partner for Beijing.

In recent months, amid a blossoming of bilateral relations, Duterte became the first Philippine president to openly express his “love” for the Chinese leadership, describing the Asian powerhouse as his personal “protector,” and calling on smaller nations to be “meek” and “humble” in exchange for Beijing’s “mercy.” To top it all off, Duterte has even quipped about the Philippines becoming a “province of China.”

But it’s precisely Duterte’s brazen strategic flirtation with China that has to begun to undermine his strategic realignment, unleashing widespread backlash across the country. Amid China’s relentless militarization in the South China Sea and constant harassment of Filipino fishermen straddling the disputed areas, the public has openly questioned Duterte’s foreign policy. Even senior statesmen, including Vice President Leni Robredo and acting Supreme Court Chief Justice Antonio Carpio, have been openly critical of Duterte’s soft-pedaling in the South China Sea, rallying the public against the Beijing-leaning president.

The latest surveys show that a vast majority of Filipinos want the president to assert the Philippines’ arbitration award against China and retake Scarborough Shoal and other Philippine-claimed land features under Chinese occupation. The mainstream media and leading opinion-makers have warned against welcoming large-scale Chinese investments to avoid a possible “debt trap.” So far, there hasn’t been even a single big-ticket Chinese infrastructure investment in the country, prompting some commentators to ask whether Duterte has been taken for a ride by Beijing.

Crucially, the defense establishment, particularly the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), has repeatedly leaked information about Chinese threats to Philippine sovereign claims to members of the media and opposition, publicly called on the government to take a tougher stance against Beijing, and openly emphasized its “constitutional duties” to protect the country’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.

Meanwhile, the AFP has gradually restored maritime security cooperation with traditional allies. For instance, this year saw the AFP reviving joint war games with the United States in the South China Sea and expanding the number of participants in the annual Balikatan joint exercises, with Australia and Japan dispatching their own warships and personnel as prominent observers.

Amid a concerted pushback from other key sectors of society and the broader public, the Duterte administration was compelled to issue multiple “redlines” against China, warning Beijing not to reclaim and militarize Scarborough Shoal, to refrain from coercive action against Filipino troops stationed in the disputed land features, and to avoid any unilateral drilling for oil and gas exploration within the Philippines’ Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).

The upshot is an increasingly contested foreign policy, with varying factions jostling for the soul of Philippine foreign policy. This largely explains the inherent contradictions and unpredictability in Manila’s position toward the South China Sea issue, in particular, and relations with the superpowers of China and the United States, in general. Though Duterte may want to cultivate a de facto alliance with China, he is facing fierce resistance from other veto players.

The future of Philippine foreign policy is uncertain, but what’s clear is that Duterte is increasingly discovering the limits of his power to unilaterally shape his country’s external relations.