The U.S. Shouldn’t Assume It Can Weather the Duterte Storm

Over the long run, then, China's neighbors may feel compelled to do what Duterte is doing of his own volition: sidling up to China

By Ali Wyne

Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte has many U.S. observers worried that he will undermine the Philippines’s longstanding relationship with the United States and move his country more firmly into China’s strategic orbit. 

He has announced that he “will be reconfiguring [his] foreign policy,” potentially even “break[ing] up with America,” and has threatened to terminate the Philippines-U.S. Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement that his predecessor signed in 2014. 

While these declarations are concerning, a few caveats are in order before rendering sweeping judgments.
First, U.S.-Filipino relations have often been turbulent. 

n December 1991, for example, the Philippines ordered the United States to withdraw from the approximately 60,000-acre Subic Bay naval base; combined with the closing of Clark Air Force Base earlier that year, it marked the largest reduction up to that point in America’s military presence in the Western Pacific. 

Despite the grim prognosis for the bilateral relationship at the time, the Philippines has become one of America’s central partners in Southeast Asia in the interregnum.
Second, it is difficult to overstate the contribution of Duterte’s temperament to the present downturn in bilateral relations. 

Although he has been in office for less than four months, his top officials have already had to expend considerable effort walking back some of his more provocative statements. 

While his volatility challenges U.S. foreign policy, it could also cause headaches for China — particularly if he invokes July’s unanimous ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration to challenge China’s claims to Scarborough Shoal. 

The Global Times cautions that “China should not hold too many illusions. From a long-term perspective, it will not necessarily be easy to deal with the Philippines under his rule.”
Third, observers should take care not to reduce complex, multifaceted bilateral ties to the vagaries of relations between individual leaders. 

The United States has a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines and is the country’s third-largest trading partner. 

Duterte will find it difficult to abrogate decades-long institutional networks between the two countries’ national security establishments with a series of uncoordinated outbursts.
The United States would be remiss, however, to assume that it simply needs to weather the Duterte storm. 

However mercurial a figure he may be, many of his contemporaries in the Asia-Pacific likely share, or may soon come to echo, his judgment that “China is now in power” in the region. 

With the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s prospects foundering, and with China deploying a raft of infrastructure initiatives under its ambitious “One Belt, One Road” undertaking, the regional balance of economic power continues to shift in China’s favor. 

Geography amplifies that reality: China is in the Asia-Pacific; the United States is not. 

Even those countries in the region who worry about China's strategic ambitions will be unlikely to take steps that jeopardize Chinese trade and investment; and with time, China will be increasingly capable of conditioning that assistance on their acquiescence to its geopolitical preferences.
Over the long run, then, China's neighbors may feel compelled to do what Duterte is doing of his own volition: sidling up to China, even if doing so puts relations with the United States at risk.