PH’s slavish embrace of America and reflexive loathing of China
IN his 1796 farewell address, George Washington, dubbed the Founder of the USA, cautioned the young American republic against exactly the trap that Philippine foreign policy has walked into:
“A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. It seduces a country into the illusion of an imaginary common interest, drags it into a participation in quarrels and wars without adequate inducement or justification.”
The flip side is just as corrosive: antipathy toward another nation “disposes each more readily to offense, inflaming grievances that sometimes impel to war.” Washington’s verdict on any nation trapped in this posture was blunt: It “is in some degree a slave.”
IN his 1796 farewell address, George Washington, dubbed the Founder of the USA, cautioned the young American republic against exactly the trap that Philippine foreign policy has walked into:
“A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. It seduces a country into the illusion of an imaginary common interest, drags it into a participation in quarrels and wars without adequate inducement or justification.”
The flip side is just as corrosive: antipathy toward another nation “disposes each more readily to offense, inflaming grievances that sometimes impel to war.” Washington’s verdict on any nation trapped in this posture was blunt: It “is in some degree a slave.”
The warning from America’s first president was not abstract theorizing. It grew out of a real crisis: The 1778 wartime alliance with France that helped win American independence became a liability once revolutionary France went to war with Britain in 1793. France, as well as a huge sector of the American body politic, wanted the young American republic to also declare war against its former colonizer.
George Washington’s injunction is that a republic’s foreign policy should be governed by its own interests, not by affection for one power or hostility toward another.
Read those words against the Philippines’ current posture toward Washington and Beijing, and the resemblance is uncanny. Manila has built an entire security architecture — rhetorical, military and diplomatic — around undivided fealty to the United States, matched by an increasingly reflexive public antipathy toward China.
In contrast, Vietnam, which is also in an intense dispute with China over territorial and maritime claims in the South China Sea and which even lost nearly a hundred sailors in two battles with China to defend — unsuccessfully — its claims in the area, has spent three decades refusing to make that same choice. The contrast is instructive and not flattering to us.
Ironclad
Every senior American official who visits Malacañang now uses the same word: “ironclad.” Joe Biden used it. Pete Hegseth used it in March 2025, telling Marcos the US commitment to the Mutual Defense Treaty was “ironclad” on his first Indo-Pacific stop as defense chief (Inquirer.net). Marco Rubio used it again in Manila this July, “reaffirming our ironclad alliance” days after the Second Thomas Shoal confrontation.
Marcos himself has adopted the word as his own: after his 2025 Washington visit, he declared, “We reaffirmed our ironclad commitment to the Mutual Defense Treaty,” while thanking the US “for upholding the rule of law in the South China Sea” — as though Manila’s own sovereignty required an American benediction.
This is not just rhetoric. Since 2023, Marcos has expanded the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement from five American-access sites to nine, adding Naval Base Camilo Osias and Lal-lo Airport in Cagayan and a camp in Isabela — all facing Taiwan, not the West Philippine Sea. “EDCA site” is a euphemism: These are, for all intents and purposes, military bases, less the huge costs of the old, permanent, personnel-heavy US war facilities. This raises the very real possibility that the Philippines could be dragged into a Taiwan Strait war in which it has no direct stake. This is no longer theory: The US war with Iran has dragged the Middle East countries hosting American military bases into the conflagration.
This is precisely the pattern George Washington described: infusing into ourselves “the enmities” of our favored ally, joining its diplomatic formations reflexively, treating an American security guarantee as the organizing principle of our foreign policy.
The other half of Washington’s warning is on equally vivid display. Marcos has made defiance of China a signature — rhetorically effective, but all hot air. “You give them an inch, they’ll take a mile. So, you cannot allow even the one inch,” he said in 2025. At his fifth SONA on July 27, 2026, days after the Scarborough Shoal water-cannon incidents, he declared: “We are Filipinos, and we do not yield.” He should look at what happened to Ukraine. It agreed to be the US and Europe’s proxy in encircling Russia, egged on by the promise of American military might. After four years of war with Russia, its economy and infrastructure are on the brink of collapse, 100,000 of its military men and 20,000 civilians killed. Marcos quite obviously wants us to be the Ukraine of Asia, with China the version of Russia.
Skirmishes
To be clear: We have serious disputes with China over what country legitimately has sovereignty over features in the Spratlys as well as sovereign rights in our exclusive economic zone. The Philippines’ attempts to assert its claims have led to skirmishes, although limited to Chinese ships’ blocking maneuvers and water-cannoning of our seacrafts to block these from delivering construction materials to the BRP Sierra Madre that President Estrada had caused to be grounded there and from entering Bajo de Masinloc, which President Aquino III lost in the so-called Scarborough Standoff in 2012.
My point here is not to conclude which country has legitimate claims, whether by international law or effective occupation. My point is about posture: George Washington’s warning was never that a nation should suppress legitimate grievance, but that it should not let “habitual hatred” toward one power become the organizing emotion of its statecraft, because that emotion is what a more cynical patron can exploit, and what forecloses options a calmer diplomacy would keep open.
Because of our government’s belligerent posture — for its Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro to make the shocking claim that China is an “existential threat to the country” — total bilateral trade with China, which peaked at $86.7 billion in 2022, has already fallen to $69.9 billion, even as China remains our single largest source of imports at 28.6 percent of the total. We have let the likes of the Philippine Coast Guard’s Jay Tarriela and Teodoro limit our relationship with China to narrow confrontation alone.
I do not write on this subject casually. I have been writing about our dispute with China since 1994 — when President Ramos risked journalists’ lives to undertake a helicopter flyover over the Chinese constructions in Mischief Reef — and I have written 130 columns on the issue and wrote a book heavy with sources, “Debacle: The Aquino Regime’s Scarborough Fiasco and the South China Sea Arbitration Deception.” Not a single fact or assertion of mine in these writings has been contested. In gist, the dominant Philippine justification for our claims rests on our exclusive economic zone — a claim to resource rights under Unclos. China’s rests on sovereignty, allegedly established centuries ago and formalized in the modern era. Those are two different legal categories talking past each other, but other states have negotiated their way through worse for decades.
Vietnam
Vietnam is an apt counter-example. Hanoi’s defense white paper enshrines “Four No’s”: no military alliances, no foreign bases on Vietnamese soil, no siding with one country against another, and no use or threat of one. Vietnam refused to sign the July 2026 fourteen-nation statement on the arbitral award anniversary, out of what analysts call a “speak less, do more” strategy. The late Vietnam Communist Party chief Nguyễn Phú Trọng branded this “bamboo diplomacy” in 2016: a foreign policy with roots that grip firmly to national interest but a trunk flexible enough to bend toward whichever wind serves the country, refusing to freeze any single country into the permanent role of enemy or savior.
The results speak for themselves. Vietnam upgraded relations with Washington to a “comprehensive strategic partnership” in September 2023 and, within the same year, separately committed to a “shared future” with Beijing — balancing both simultaneously rather than choosing.
China has become the war-ravaged Vietnam’s largest trading partner, with bilateral trade reaching $296 billion in 2025 — more than four times the Philippines’ declining trade with China, despite Vietnam having endured Chinese assertions of their claims as severe as ours. As former US ambassador to Hanoi David Shear observed, the Vietnamese “place much more importance on their relationship with China than they do with the US because [China] is so close” — a plain acknowledgment of geographic and economic reality. And I may add: Because China, whether we like it or not, is the emerging global superpower and right in our neighborhood. We cannot be like Cuba, which has refused to reconcile with its superpower neighbor, the US, since the 1960s.
George Washington did not counsel appeasement or neutrality toward wrongdoing; he counseled against a foreign policy driven by emotion rather than calculation. His actual prescription was “temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies” — not permanent entanglement dressed up as “family.”
The Philippines has instead allowed the US to build nine military facilities in case of a Taiwan contingency that is not our war, embraced the language of an “ironclad” and “familial” alliance that forecloses independent maneuver, and let confrontation with China crowd out the trade and diplomatic relationship that geography and economics both demand we maintain. Vietnam proves a smaller, more exposed country can stand on its legal rights, refuse to be bullied, and still not be a “slave” of the US nor have a “habitual hatred” of China.
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PH’s slavish embrace of America and reflexive loathing of China
Source: Breaking News PH
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