Three stooges on the South China Sea issue

First of two parts

THE Philippine Senate once prided itself on being a debating chamber of the wisest legislators. Not a choir loft. Not a tribunal of the pure. Certainly not a revolutionary court where dissenters are paraded as traitors. Yet this is precisely the road down which three senior senators — Sotto, Lacson and Ejercito — have tried to drag the institution by publicly lambasting colleagues who refused to sign a Senate resolution (256) lambasting the comments of the Chinese embassy, which in truth were really an accurate condemnation of the hysterical Sinophobic statements of a coast guard nut.

The statements of these three senators — a former comedian, a police official, and a nobody were he not the son of a popular, but convicted president — reveal their gross ignorance of the Philippines’ South China Sea disputes. They don’t even, and with their pygmy brains won’t ever understand the difference between sovereign territory (which is the gist of China’s claim in the area, first formalized in an official 1947 map, and affirmed by several laws in the 1990s) and an exclusive economic zone, a weaker claim and only over a maritime area based on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos) which took effect only in 1994, and which is the basis for the Philippines’ claim.

None of these senators have even read the 500-page “ruling” of the ad hoc “arbitral” tribunal on the issue, whose proceedings China refused to participate in, which in effect revised the English language which defines arbitration as a voluntary process by two parties. The senators should study (or ask their staffs to study) what the ruling emphasized in its very first page (paragraph 5): The convention, however, does not address the sovereignty of states over land territory.

“This Tribunal has not been asked to, and does not purport to, make any ruling as to which State enjoys sovereignty over any land territory in the South China Sea, in particular with respect to the disputes concerning sovereignty over the Spratly Islands or Scarborough Shoal. None of the Tribunal’s decisions in this Award are dependent on a finding of sovereignty, nor should anything in this Award be understood to imply a view with respect to questions of land sovereignty.”

Let me explain this to compensate for the senators’ limited intellectual capacities: The tribunal did not rule over the Chinese sovereign claim over the Spratlys and Scarborough Shoal.

Let us be clear at the outset. The senators who declined to sign the resolution did not even say that Chinese claims should be accepted, or that the country should bow before Beijing. The refusal was procedural and substantive: objections to language, timing, diplomatic prudence, and the Senate’s proper role in foreign policy signaling. That is not treason. That is parliamentary judgment.

To call it otherwise is either ignorance or bad faith.

Senate resolutions are not laws. They bind no one. They create no rights, impose no duties, and alter no treaties. They are expressions — sometimes useful, often theatrical. To treat a refusal to sign such a document as a loyalty test is to reduce foreign policy to a crude plebiscite: clap or be condemned.

And yet, that is exactly what happened.

Senators Sotto and Lacson should know better. The Constitution they have sworn to uphold does not require unanimity of opinion on foreign policy gestures. It protects freedom of speech, including within the halls of Congress. Senator Ejercito, younger and more impetuous, may be excused for rhetorical excess. The two elder statesmen have no such excuse.

What they did was worse than grandstanding. Especially because of their (much-undeserved) stature as senators, they normalized the idea that dissent on China policy is suspect, that caution is cowardice, and that legal reasoning is somehow a cloak for betrayal. This is a dangerous idea in any democracy. In the Philippines — where the word “traitor” has historically preceded censorship, harassment, and worse — it is lethal.

Patriotism

One would think that senators who have spent decades in public life would understand the difference between patriotism and noise. Apparently not.

Consider the irony. Many of those who declined to sign are lawyers — trained precisely to parse language, to weigh consequences, to ask whether words harden positions rather than advance interests. In contrast, those most eager to hurl accusations of treason include men whose public careers were forged in performance and policing, not jurisprudence. That is not a slur; it is a statement of fact. But it matters when the issue at hand is international law, diplomacy and the calibrated use of state power.

Foreign policy is not karaoke. You do not win by singing louder.

The South China Sea dispute is not a morality play with heroes and villains neatly assigned. It is a multi-layered contest involving overlapping legal claims, power asymmetries, alliance management and economic exposure. Every word uttered by the Philippine Senate echoes beyond domestic politics; it is parsed in Beijing, Washington, Hanoi and Tokyo — and in recent years by the masses through social media. To insist that every senator must sign a single text — or be branded a traitor — is to demand performative unity at the expense of strategic flexibility.

History offers painful lessons here. Nations that mistake rhetorical purity for strategic wisdom tend to discover, too late, that they have boxed themselves in. Diplomacy works not because everyone agrees, but because disagreements are managed without public anathematization.

What Sotto, Lacson and Ejercito did instead was to inflame passions, to turn a legislative difference into a loyalty purge, and to encourage a mob logic in elite discourse: with us or against us. That is the language of revolutionary committees, not constitutional republics.

There is another hypocrisy that must be named. Some of the loudest voices demanding a Senate resolution have been curiously silent — or even accommodating — when it came to China on other matters: investments, infrastructure financing, trade dependencies. Selective outrage is not patriotism; it is convenience. It is easy to posture against China in a nonbinding resolution. It is harder to rethink economic policies that deepen dependence or to confront allies when interests diverge.

Asymmetry

The senators who refused to sign understood this asymmetry. They understood that symbolic condemnation, unmoored from a coherent strategy, is often worse than silence. It hardens positions abroad while delivering no tangible benefit at home.

To call that judgment “treason” is to trivialize treason itself.

Treason, under Philippine law, is narrowly defined; I don’t think Ejercito has really any clue what it is. It involves levying war against the state or adhering to its enemies, giving them aid and comfort. Disagreement over a Senate resolution does not come close. When senior senators casually fling the word around, they degrade the legal vocabulary of the Republic. They also invite future abuse: today China policy; tomorrow budget votes; next week impeachment arithmetic.

Once you normalize the idea that dissent equals betrayal, there is no principled stopping point.

One is tempted to ask: what is really being defended here? The national interest — or the ego of those who want to be seen as the loudest anti-China voices in the room?

The Senate’s strength has always lain in its pluralism. Some senators speak to the masses; others to markets; still others to diplomats. That cacophony, when disciplined by rules and respect, is a feature, not a bug. It allows the Philippines to signal resolve without rigidity, firmness without fanaticism.

By publicly shaming colleagues and hurling accusations of treason, Sotto, Lacson and Ejercito weakened that institutional advantage. They told the world that internal debate is suspect, that nuance is unwelcome, and that conformity is prized over competence. This is not how serious countries behave, nor serious, trustworthy senators.

The tragedy is that the Philippines and China both have claims in the South China Sea — with the latter being a superpower the US wishes to contain, and has been using our disputes with China to demonize it. Confronting this issue is unity of purpose, not enforced unanimity of expression.

Intimidation

Unity imposed by intimidation is not unity. It is fear.

The Senate should pull back from this brink. Its leaders should apologize — not for opposing China, but for impugning the motives of colleagues who exercised their judgment in good faith. They should reaffirm a basic democratic truth: that loyalty to the Republic is not measured by signatures on a resolution, but by fidelity to the Constitution and the national interest.

If they cannot do that, then the real danger to Philippine sovereignty does not lie in Beijing. It lies in Manila, in a political culture that mistakes noise for courage and conformity for patriotism.

Indeed Sotto, Lacson and Ejercito have demonstrated the truth of that 18th century adage by the British author Samuel Johnson: “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

I salute the magnificent nine thinking senators who refused to bow down to faked patriotism, who aren’t gullible to the US Cold War type of anti-China propaganda: Alan Peter Cayetano, Pia Cayetano, Imee Marcos, Rodante Marcoleta, Bong Go, Ronald de la Rosa, Francis Escudero, Robinhood Padilla and Joel Villanueva.

To call these three senators stooges may seem harsh, and I apologize, but it is a perfect description of a person wittingly or unwittingly serving the interests of a master, in this case the United States of America, which has left no stone unturned to demonize China that is eclipsing its hegemony. Look closely: No other Asean nation is being a stooge of America.

On Wednesday, I debunk each and every stupid, out-of-ignorance statements of these three. I will also point out that our ambassador to the US who, because of the misinformation he has been spreading on our disputes with China, an issue totally beyond his responsibilities, in effect has been sidelining for the White House, or Pentagon propaganda department. Is he too dense he can’t see that of all countries in the world, he shouldn’t be commenting on China as the US, which has declared it the biggest threat to its five-decade-old hegemony?

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Three stooges on the South China Sea issue
Source: Breaking News PH