Brash and swashbuckling new Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte has boldly pronounced a "pivot to China" by the longtime US ally in his just concluded summit meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing, going so far as to declare that "America has lost" in its military and economic competition with the People's Republic.
But what's really going on here? Is the US really going to get kicked out by Manila? Will the latter really revoke its official mutual defense treaty with Washington dating back to the aftermath of World War II? Will this really be replaced by some kind of new security pact with China and/or Russia (to whom Duterte has also just reiterated his intent to deal with Putin)?
There's little doubt that Duterte feels far more at home with fellow strongmen Xi and Putin than with Obama - let alone his likely successor, the first woman president of the US. He's clearly impressed by their trappings of authoritarian imperial power exemplified by the grand squares of Beijing and Moscow, tailored as they are for unabashed displays of vast and intimidating formations of military troops and hardware. One can only imagine how his ego was stroked - quite consciously by his Chinese hosts - at being given special red-carpet treatment in the very visible nerve center of the middle kingdom; it must feel great for the sheriff of a comparatively puny tropical archipelago to be treated as a fellow resolved and responsible leader of men.
But Duterte knows better than to write off the US just yet. He relishes the chance to play off the superpowers against one another - magnifying the Philippines' and his own personal importance well beyond what it would be were it still firmly in the American camp. This is his way of not only hedging his bets, but making him doubly important to please or at least mollify in Washington.
In the end, it's precisely because he wants the unprecedented moral legitimacy that only the US can confer on his controversial leadership so much that Duterte is going so far as to entreat a rival suitor. He knows just how fickle is political popularity - he may have plenty of it in this "honeymoon phase" with the Filipino people, but if he somehow wins American approbation both of his policies and his underlying governance philosophy, that gives his administration a far bigger boost to its ambitious program, greatly weakening any opposition to it.
That being said, perhaps an even bigger reason the US-Filipino alliance isn't about to be terminated is a counterintuitive one: China itself doesn't want Manila to give Washington the boot - at least not for a while. In the first place, doing so would give too strong a message of of Chinese hostility to the US that would hurt Beijing's interests. No less than Duterte, Xi is also seeking American acceptance of his nation's and specifically his own personal indispensability to any Asia-Pacific policy or initiative. In large measure he already has it; but a public pivot towards China by a close US ally, however largely symbolic, serves the purpose of lightening up the dark view long peddled by some corners of official Washington that Beijing's become all about bullying its way to regional hegemony and demonstrating American decline.
It also serves China better for the Philippines to remain in the regional US alliance network than leave it because this now potentially gives Beijing a sympathetic voice at the table of America's Asian security coalition - a welcome dissenter from the confrontational faction led by Japan. Duterte is now to Xi what president Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is to Putin: a key US partner holding a pivotal link in Washington's chain of strategic influence that has acquired a mind of its own. Over time, this could even encourage other American allies to behave more autonomously of Washington, as well.
There's little doubt that supplanting the US as the linchpin of the security order in Asia is China's long-term goal; but with the wind already blowing so favorably in its direction, Beijing needn't push the envelope now and jeopardize its recent gains. Conceding Filipino rights in Manila's exclusive economic zone (EEZ) - as long as it's done gradually and quietly, without publicly acknowledging the Filipino victory at The Hague's South China Sea ruling in July - will be a small price to pay for getting a foot in the door of one of the mainstays of America's presence in the Western Pacific. And eventually, if and when the US does actually cede regional hegemony to China, Chinese leaders would much prefer that it do so of its own accord - recognizing the obsolescence of its old alliances in a new Sinocentric environment, anyway - rather than feel it's being shoved out. In more ways than one, Duterte's reciprocated outreach to China is setting the tone for the coming realignment of maritime Asia.
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