CO04030 | Beyond the Iraq Hostage Crisis: Re-Assessing US-Philippine Relations

The plight of Angelo de la Cruz touched every Filipino with a family member forced to work overseas because of unemployment at home. According to official figures, there are some 8 million (registered) Filipino contract workers abroad who remit close to US$ 9 billion which keeps the country’s economy afloat, particularly in times of crisis. It was indeed telling of the sorry state of the country’s plight that even during the height of the kidnapping crisis in Iraq hundreds of Filipinos were still queuing up outside employment agencies hoping to land a job overseas, especially in the Middle East.

The heightened emotions fanned by Angelo de la Cruz’s possible decapitation could have therefore triggered a cataclysmic backlash by this massive force and would have brought down Arroyo’s fledgling administration that was and is still struggling to consolidate its hold on power after a hotly contested electoral result. More importantly, ignoring the potential risks could have also provided just the right fodder for the communist and Muslim insurgents to once again mount their campaign to destabilise the government. A quick scan of the Philippine political scene would have also revealed the possible coalition of militant labour unions, nationalist activists and many other groups who would exploit this weakness to bring down a newly-elected government that was perceived to be more concerned with maintaining international credibility rather than domestic legitimacy.

In short, the hostage crisis happened at the worst time, when the country and its government were most vulnerable. Unlike its Asian neighbours such as Japan and Korea, the Philippines is a weak state, enfeebled by the fact that it is captured by many strong interests at present. In other words, the hostage crisis showed that the Philippines cannot be an effective ally if the government in power is weak, and could not muster enough domestic support to remain committed to the US-led coalition. The picture becomes more complex when the imperatives of meeting domestic demands had to be weighed against the necessity of upholding its commitment to an international cause—especially when the basis of fighting this cause, like the war in Iraq, is increasingly put in doubt.

Hence, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s recent statement that ‘weakness is provocative’ should indeed be heeded—but, for different reasons. Indeed, it is precisely because a state is weak (not only politically but in security and economic terms) that it needs to be helped, and that rushing into punitive actions for reneging on a commitment could be counter-productive. Weak states have narrow options and any expectations of solid commitments from them by a powerful state like the US might need more circumspection, given the volatile politics that beset weak states at any time.

Wither US-Philippine Relations post-hostage crisis?

To the Philippines, the hostage crisis serves as a reality check for a weak country that has chosen to actively align itself with a superpower without careful considerations of the consequences of joining and participating in the coalition of the willing. Going by the sentiments expressed by many Filipino nationalists, the lessons of the US-Philippine Military Bases Agreement (MBA) of 1947 that allowed for the stationing of US naval and air bases in the Philippines should have been instructive. Despite Martial Law (1972-1986), the Communist Party of the Philippines (CCP) and its political arm, the National Democratic Front (NDF) were able periodically to raise the bases issue to portray the uneven and asymmetrical relationship between the two states. They could claim, at the height of the Cold War, that the military bases were going be the ‘bases of the country’s insecurity’ because the Philippines was going to be caught in great power rivalries and would be exposed to the possibility of a nuclear conflict between the United States and the former Soviet Union. The presence of US military bases in the country therefore became a useful propaganda tool for the Left to foment discord and instability in the country. As argued in a previous commentary, there is a close parallel between the national protests then and the kinds of protests and discourses heard across the country today with regard to the US-Philippine bilateral cooperation on counter-terrorism—i.e. that the renewed cooperation served as a “Trojan horse” to allow U.S. military installations back into the country and once again make the country vulnerable.