He did announce the abrogation of the VFA sometime ago but later announced the suspension of that abrogation, meaning restoring the full effectivity of the arrangement.
Note that while he is wont to cuss America and top US officials, like President Obama and former US ambassador to the Philippines Philip Goldberg, he has taken care not to disturb the existing military treaties that bind the Philippines to the United States, i.e., the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT), the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) and the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), treaties that certainly will plunge the Philippines in whatever war the United States will get involved in. Now, it must be this strategic utility of the Philippines to world politics that President Duterte is quite keen on so that he should exploit it to the hilt for the maximum betterment of the Filipino people. The four-month-long Battle of Bataan delayed the Japanese timetable, ultimately accounting for its defeat at the sea battle in Moresby and the frustration for keeps of its push to America. For this reason, right on the day after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, they proceeded to bombard the US military installations in the Philippines as a prelude to its occupation of the country. During the Second World War, the Philippines served as a most vital transshipment point for the Japanese Imperial Army of war supplies to its military expeditions all over Southeast Asia, onward to its intended conquest of America. Who controls the country, controls the region in all its spheres. As such, in terms of economic, political and military equilibrium in the area, the Philippines is the one single fulcrum. To call US President Barack Obama a sonnavabitch is a rarity, more so from a small-time head of state, who thenceforth proceeded to have the balls to declare forming a triad with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin: "The three of us against the world." If at all, what this apparent mere show of bare guts by President Duterte (a characteristic of gutter thugs) actually demonstrated is his acute grasp of geopolitics working on the Philippines' own search for its rightful place in the sun.Ī quick glance at its geography immediately shows that the Philippines is at the center of the Far East region. It does strike one as odd that car-owning people (hence should be well-off economically) queuing up in their numbers (and in their vehicles at that) at barangay centers for hours on end to receive their share of the government aid.Īside from his unpopular war on drugs, the source of President Duterte's instantaneous international fame is his guts in locking horns with the United States and the United Nations. His attention to people's day-to-day subsistence became so pronounced in times of the Covid-19 pandemic when he saw to it that the "ayuda" was given to the masses suddenly deprived of income-earning jobs. To public school teachers and the men in uniform, President Duterte will come down in history as the president who directly addressed their livelihood woes by doubling their salaries.