 Welcome to the final program in our fourth annual Great Decisions series, which is co-sponsored by the Mead Public Library and the Sheboygan Branch of the American Association of University Women, an organization dedicated to empowering women and girls and advancing equity through advocacy, education, and research. We are presenting our sessions virtually this year and are grateful to WSCS for filming the six programs. Great Decisions is a project of the Foreign Policy Association, which also publishes a book with information about the timely topics. We are not offering books for sale this year, but you can order one by calling 1-800-477-5836. That's 1-800-477-5836. As always, we are indebted to Mead librarian Jeannie Gartman for arranging the schedule of these programs. The Philippines and the US is the topic of the final program in this year's series. Speaker John Katska is a retired senior foreign officer with the rank of counselor of the Foreign Service. He is a Wisconsin native and UWM graduate and completed graduate work at Georgetown University and American universities. He joined the Foreign Service in 1970 with his Foreign Service and Federal Career spanning 38 years. As Foreign Service Officer John served in Thailand, Moscow, Yugoslavia, Zambia, and Romania, as well as in various Washington assignments. John also completed special envoy assignments to Kosovo, Yugoslavia, Macedonia, and Paris. He has been a regular on UWM's TV program, International Focus, and conducts programs on foreign affairs at the Cedarburg Library. Good day. My name is John Katska. I'm a retired senior foreign service officer with the Department of State. I'm here to talk to you today about US-Philippine relations. You may wonder why we would pick out a country like the Philippines as being important enough for one of the topics under discussion. Well, first of all, the United States has had a long relationship with the Philippines. It is also an important country in the South China Sea and we'll get into that. And it is also illustrative of the authoritarian governments that we're seeing and the pushback that we're witnessing not only here at home, but around the world. Let me give you an outline of what we're gonna talk about today. I'm gonna go back a bit, 30,000 years to start, but we won't stay there very long. We're gonna talk about the power of trade and religion. We're gonna talk about the colonial period that was the Spanish and the American periods. We're gonna talk about the independence of the Philippines. We'll talk about current relations and about how the Philippines fits into Southeast Asia. We'll talk a little bit about COVID-19 and how they're faring with that and how they may be affected by something called climate change. And then we'll have some conclusions. As we're looking at all of this, give me some, I'll give you some things to consider. Uh-huh. Culture generally defines a country's politics and or economics. When you wanna know a country, you need to know its culture. Colonial experiences affect relations long after independence. Ask the Brits and the French about the immigrants from their former colonies that have poured up onto their shores. Small nations have to be more clever than great powers to survive. The media is rarely kind to small nations. Watch for the kinds of stories the major media carry about small countries. It just generally has to do with disasters. And the world is defined by realists and idealists in foreign affairs. Realists look at the pragmatic, the national interest side of the equation. Idealists look at our values. What do we stand for? Neither is right or wrong. Never, we rarely have a situation where we're totally one way or the other, but we have a constant debate about which of these should dominate. And there are costing consequences to whichever action we take. If you look at the Middle East, where we had a very strong idealistic orientation, we are seeing those costing consequences. We're not going to spend a long time on the distant history, but it's useful to understand where the people who live in the Philippines came from, why they came, and what they brought with them. Until recently it was held at the last Ice Age, that during the last Ice Age, there were land bridges between the mainland and the Philippines. The issue was contested now, but for our purposes, the important point is 30,000 years ago, there was human life in the area. After the ice disappeared, all of a sudden the water pulled back and there were 7,000, or the water came up, and there were 7,641 islands, only 2,000 of them were occupied. The population is concentrated on five islands. About 5,000 years ago, things started happening. A seafaring tool using Indonesian group were among the first immigrants. Also, seafaring melees brought the Iron Age culture and became the dominant cultural group. Shortly thereafter, maybe 2,500 years later, a group broke off from the Yunnan Plateau in China and made their way to the islands. The separation of population centers on the many islands allowed a diversity of cultures and races to develop in the Philippines more so than you would have expected if you were on a single island country or a non-island country. As you can see from the map, the movement of groups out of mainland Asia into the Pacific resulted in the settlement of the ocean's islands and possibly reached South America before the Spanish did. Enter the Spanish. With their kingdoms, Rajahats and Sultanates, the Philippines were a Spanish colony for 333 years from 1521 to 1898. It began when Ferdinand Magellan, that explorer we learned about in grade school, arrived in the Philippines during his expedition in the service of King Philip II of Spain. And yes, the Philippines were named after Philip II. I'll give you a little timetable of the Spanish rule. There is a much longer one, but I just pulled out what I thought were the most relevant components of it. In 1809, Spanish colonies, including the Philippines, were made part of Spain. Filipinos were given Spanish citizenship and representation in parliament. This was not unusual among some of the European colonizers. The Portuguese did the same in Africa. In 1872, 200 Filipino soldiers staged a mutiny and their calls were secularization and nationalism. In 1898, the U.S. destroyed the Spanish fleet in the middle of Bay during the Spanish-American War. And in 1898, Spain and the U.S. signed the Treaty of Paris and Spain ceded the Philippines to the U.S. for the payment of $20 million. Enter the U.S. timeline. 1901 was the first guerrilla action against the U.S. And it was a quick shift from military to civil rule. In 1934, U.S. Congress passed two laws, starting the process for independence, establishing the Commonwealth of the Philippines, approving a Philippine constitution and leading to Manuel Cuerzon, the elected president. As opposed to the Spanish occupation, our role in the Philippines was significantly shorter, somewhat less intrusive, and within a relatively short period of time, began the move in the colony towards independence. From taking control in 1898, we were already talking about independence in 1916, a period of 18 years. Much of this more benevolent approach reflected a general American reluctance to have colonies. In most colonial efforts, there have been significant domestic opposition. While the Spanish were persistent in promoting Catholicism, for the U.S., the tool was democracy and American values. And like most cultural values that one tries to export, there was cultural resistance to us as well. Post-independence. To the Yankee adage of, Yankee go home and take me with you, is another that goes something like, Spain gave us Catholicism and the Americans gave us Hollywood. The Philippines sense independence hasn't changed much. The old families, with their connections to Spanish rule, continued to dominate the political and economic world. They were able to acquire, during the Spanish occupation, huge tracts of land with poor peasants working the land. Many of the post-World War II leaders talked about reform and the rights of the people, but little to nothing happened. The role of the Catholic Church is important. Three quarters of the Filipinos consider religion very important. Born again Protestants are growing in number and are even more doctrinaire than Catholics on social values. The Philippines is one of the few countries where divorce and same-sex marriage are illegal. There has been exploitation of the poor and there has been pushback. The vehicle for pushback during the time of the Cold War was communism and the form it took in the Philippines was a group called the Hux. It was a blending of fed-up peasants and leftist delete. Communism provided a convenient way to express unhappiness. Of course, as a former colony of the U.S., we were not a disinterested party to this process. While we called for reforms, the combination of the war against communism that we were engaged in and the importance of the military and naval bases to our presence in Asia made it easy for us to promote the status quo. As you can imagine, there is a tension between the issue of sovereignty and then something called strategic necessity. And we in the Filipinos have wrestled with those two concepts since independence. There is a thread from the presidency of Maxase, the first Philippine president after independence in 1946, through the Marcos to Corazon Cori Aquino. The interaction among the families is shown in the fact that Maxase was the one of the sponsors of the Marcos' marriages. Marriage, just one. Our own role in those early days of the new country was very supportive. Maxase had an important advisor in Edward Lansdale, a army lieutenant colonel, but also a CIA operative. Lansdale was a pioneer in clandestine operations and psychological warfare, playing a role in suppressing that hook insurgency that I mentioned earlier. A little story about the election of Cori Aquino after Marcos was ousted by the military and how she was received by the Reagan administration. Stanley Karnoff, a journalist and author, written a very, very excellent book about the Philippines called In Our Image. From the quiet behind the scenes spouse, he says, of an outspoken and martyred critic of Marcos, Cori Aquino reached out to the US for help and found a champion in then Secretary of State Schultz. However, President Ronald Reagan was unhappy with the way the Marcos were removed by the military and was unwilling to wholly accept Cori, even though she was splendidly received in her speech to a combined US Congress in 1986. But I think the telling point is something that Karnoff relates of a conversation he had with a US Congressman at the time and the Congressman said, unnamed in his case, that he liked Cori and he liked the Philippines, but was only willing to give assistance to keep the bases. This is also a common refrained in terms of our foreign assistance internationally. Cori returned to Manila, able to show her citizens how well she was received in Washington, but with little financial support to deal with the huge deficit that the Marcos had built up in a classic case of crony capitalism, meaning that capitalism has kept among a small group of people. A practice that has been a component of most Philippine administration since independence through though the Marcos took it to new heights or maybe we should say depths. There are several components to the story of this crony capitalism. There are the old families protecting their interest with the old families of the island of Luzon, the cream of the lot. Then there was the fear of communism, especially during the Cold War. Then there was the need for access to the military and naval bases. There were our own complicated connections to various Filipino political and economic players. I mentioned the relationship between George Sholes and Ronald Reagan and Cori Aquino. And finally there were US business interests in the mix as well. It's a very complicated relationship. Every time a new group of families came to power, there were spoils to be harvested. Reminds me of a story that a Thai doctor told me when I was stationed in Chiang Mai, Thailand after the third coup by the same military leaders. Using what he called a fractured ASOP fable, he said a donkey had fallen into a cesspool. And a fox wandered by, looked down and asked the donkey if he wanted the fox to remove those flies on his back. No, the donkey said, they have had their fill. If you wipe them off, they'll only be replaced by new ones, still hungry. That is also part of this whole changing of different dynastic families. Stanley Karnoff noted that the Philippine people clamored for stability, yet they carped at Cori Aquino incessantly. He added that her behavior seemed to mirror the two opposing ingredients in the Philippine culture. An Asian reverence for authority, which I witnessed in other Asian cultures. And a Latin read Spanish, penchant for hypercriticism. Replacing Marcos wasn't a revolution, but a coup. The same kind of people with their connection to the landed gentry of the Spanish rule with their Luzon and Manila fixation came to power. To illustrate this point, Cori's assassinated husband, Nino Aquino, long a thorn in Marcos's hide, allowed that if he had been president, he would have ruled the same way as Marcos. The Philippine situation isn't happening in a vacuum. To set the stage for our discussion of the current Philippine situation, we need to look at our own troubled world. Why are we witnessing such a broad movement towards populism, tribalism, racism, authoritarianism, and a beautiful word called anti-establishmentarianism? Use that in a scrabble game sometime. Well, first of all, authoritarian regimes have been the prevailing model throughout history. Robert Kagan, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, notes that it is democracy that has to fight for its existence among this prevailing concept of authoritarian leaders. During the Cold War, with its ideological framework, we, the United States, were willing to overlook many of these more authoritarian conditions in search of a common anti-communist agenda. I was in Zambia in the early 80s and Mabuto was next door in Zaire and he was a biggest thug that you could imagine, but he was our thug and we supported him because he was anti-communist, but also because if he collapsed, if he fell, then it was going to create a very unstable area in Central Africa. That said, currently there is no compelling rationale for the United States. Since the end of the Cold War, as to why we would be willing to overlook the authoritarian's excesses. The international populist and anti-establishment reaction, especially in the developing world, flows from those who have been left out of the economic expansion of the last several decades. The liberal, and I use liberal in the European sense, meaning pro-business, the liberal international economic order, as that expansion has been called, was put in place principally by the U.S. with some West European countries after World War II. The institutions that were set up, the IMF, the World Bank and others, continue today, again, put into effect by basically us. Rising powers like China, India and Russia had no participation in those decisions. In addition to this widespread pushback, technology brought about by the information age yielded significant advances in production and efficiency. Clearly, those institutions and technological developments mainly benefited the developed world. Since the end of the Cold War, that divided the world along ideological lines, there has been a strategic, there has not been a strategic foreign policy for the United States or basically for anyone else. The war on terror doesn't cut it. How do you know if you won? And how do you know who's your enemy? Building democracies has been a historic U.S. model. Mabach of the rest of the world has failed to endorse it. At the same time, regional powers like China, Russia and Turkey and Iran have been filling the vacuum to varying degrees of effectiveness. The U.S. embroiled in the Middle East has lacked a foreign policy other than fighting terrorism, building democracy or tactically taking on Iran, North Korea, China or Russia with modest effect. Back in the 1970s, while the U.S. and the Soviet Union were trying to divide up the planet, the developing world came up with a model to resist the superpowers and to try to take advantage of both. It was called the non-aligned movement. We are seeing evidence of this in several places in the world. In the Philippines, it is China, that is the driver, more so than the U.S. And its Belt and Road Initiative is the carrot. An aggressive action in the South China Sea is the stick. China appears to be more in tune with Philippine needs and concerns. And China doesn't comment on human rights abuses. Rodrigo Duterte, the current president, comes from the establishment, from a privileged and wealthy family, though not a mainline Manila family. However, he saw his future rebelling against the establishment, sort of the way our own president has done it. Duterte comes out of a highly volatile area, the island of Mindanao, with the most Muslims in the Philippines, though they are not a majority there. It was a crime-infested and drug-ridden area. Duterte became a prosecutor and took a rather extreme law and order position and wrote it to become the mayor of Davao City and from there to the president of the country, earning him the nickname Duterte Harry, for those of you who remember the Clint Eastwood movies. Duterte is controversial, but he continues to enjoy broad public support as do many authoritarian leaders in other parts of the world. India, Turkey, Brazil, to name a few. He rejects organized religion, accused several priests of homosexuality, called the popes and bishops sons of whores, mostly because they oppose the way he has cracked down on drugs and crime. Philippine presidents are limited to one six-year term. His only term ends in 2022. How does he keep his legacy going? Well, it is possible he will use his daughter, Sara Duterte-Colickbill, the current mayor of Davao City to keep the family in power, the device he used when he was mayor, when he also had term limits and after his was up, his daughter went in and then he came back in to be the mayor. To give you a sense of his political control, after the last year's elections, he increased his control of the Senate, where he has the support of 20 of the 24 senators. As we talk about the presidency and about the old line families, sometimes called oligarchs, all the presidents have come from those families. Part of a reform program that he has championed includes an anti-dynasty provision which, if passed, would eliminate his daughter's chances. One does wonder if that will actually see the light of day. As we watch Duterte-Colickbill, we see three factors at play. He is ruthless in his anti-crime program and against those who oppose him, too. He is reacting to our foreign policy which is highly critical of his human rights record. And three, he is willing to play us off against China and possibly Russia, trying to get as much as he can for the Philippines. Tactically, he has been successful in getting Chinese support for a number of projects which are part of that ambitious Chinese foreign assistance program called the Belt Road Initiative, the BRI as it's called also. So far, China has offered 26 billion in aid loans and investments to assist Duterte's infrastructure-building project. There is very little information about the implementation of those programs. Other than the relationship is broadening with the Philippines joining China's Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, encouraging currency swap deals and tourist exchanges. The degree of interactivity suggests a longer-term Chinese interest in assuming a stronger role in Philippine affairs. On the other hand, the U.S. has been averaging about 150 million a year on a range of projects, about 25 percent of which goes to human rights democracy promotion, which are considered by Duterte as interference in internal Philippine affairs. Further, the U.S. Congress has placed the Philippines on a restrictive list with Russia, Venezuela, and others. The restriction requires a review of all assistance. There is a brighter spot on the military side. Our military enjoys close relationship with the Philippine military, and assistance and sales are much larger than civilian aid. However, there is some concern on the Philippine military side that our military support does not improve the Philippine militaries to deal with a range of issues internally and in the South China Sea. Our current major issue with the Philippines revolves around something called the Visiting Forces Agreement. Experts suggest that cancelling the agreement would be a big deal, threatening joint military exercises, U.S. troop rotations, and our Enhanced Defense Cooperation Treaty with the Philippines. This crisis isn't the first. In 1991, the Philippine Senate rejected an extension of the 1947 agreement for the Subic Bay and Clark Air Base sites. The end of the Cold War allowed to let those assets go, and we saved a lot of money in the process. There was a 180-day discussion period for the abrogation of that agreement before anything drastic happened. The discussion has been suspended in June of this year, suggesting that the Philippine military were able to influence the process. Some believe that one of the drivers of Duterte's decision to cancel the agreement relates to our refusing to give a visa to one of his administration because of that person's involvement in Duterte's drug and anti-crime activities. Some of the back-and-forth between the U.S. and the Philippines gets rather petty. What Duterte has to be aware of is that another Philippine president, President Marcos, was removed by the military. Duterte will be judged partly by how successful he is dealing with the law and order issues, but also how well he redistributes development assistance. This chart, covering 2016 to 2018, suggests that he is moving in the right direction, especially in his home area around Davao City, that red area down at the bottom there. The Chinese reality. The Philippines, like most countries, has a number of foreign policies issues. At the top of the list for them is the South China Sea. The chart on the slide illustrates the competing claims, principally by China, the Philippines and Vietnam, control of the South China Sea. Why important? Well, it has to do with a secure sea transport route, and there are energy resources in that area. The Nine-Dash Line is a historical Chinese claim that is not recognized, I believe, by anyone else. In 2016, the permanent court of arbitration in the Hague attempted to harness China's exploitation of the South China Sea's reefs and atolls, finding in the Philippines' favor. This was under a previous Philippine president. China rejected the Tribunals' findings, and has continued to develop military-like structures on those reefs and atolls in an attempt to extend its sovereignty to the Nine-Dash Line. International nautical law has been evolving since the 18th century, when it was the range of a cannon shot that determined sovereignty. In 1982, there was the Law of the Sea Conference, which established 12 nautical miles as the sovereignty limit, but it added then a 200-mile exclusive economic zone. Well, you can see within that area in the South China Sea the overlapping of that economic zone, certainly, and there is some in terms of the sovereignty issue. When Duterte came to power, he ignored the Tribunals' findings, deciding to work with China on a bilateral basis, a policy device that Xi Jinping, the president of China, prefers. Quickly show you this chart that shows the location of various U.S. military bases in Asia, with the visiting forces agreement sites in the Philippines identified in the dark-colored boxes. It is easy to see why those Philippine bases are so important for addressing our interests in the South China Sea as we ever make the shift to Asia that we've been talking about for a long time. Well, how does the Philippines fit into Southeast Asia? Continuing with this broader look at the region, Southeast Asia is a collection of countries with very little in common. Those differences include numerous ethnic groups, several religions, geopolitical realities, and differing cultures. This chart focused on the minimum wages, the playground of groups like the Communist during the Cold War, and ISIS today. Note that the Philippines is in the middle of the wage group, with Indonesia and Vietnam more vulnerable. The Philippines is not the only country to be careful with their relations with the U.S. and China. Singapore has recently backed away from efforts to get them, Singapore, to criticize China and its policies in Southeast China. Where most of these countries are just watching and waiting to see how we begin to respond to these kinds of questions. The picture on the right shows the devastation after the 2017 siege of Marawi on the island of Mindanao. A new threat to Southeast Asia is militant Islam. The Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia have histories of insurgencies. ISIS groups being forced out of Iraq and Syria armed with doctrine, organization and experience are a very unwelcome addition to Southeast Asian countries' issues. ISIS has taken a varying approach to the region, tailoring its approach to each of the countries' cultures and issues. In the Philippines, the approach was focused on the poor. In Indonesia, recruiting is through the mosques in Madrasahs, in Malaysia, the government controls the mosque, so ISIS is using the internet. I'm going to introduce you to a term that you may or may not have heard of. It's called a black swan. A black swan is an unpredictable or unforeseen event, typically one with extreme consequences. It can be positive or negative. In the case of COVID-19, it's quite negative. As we know from our own experience with the virus, there are more than two health issues involved. Economic, social, educational to name the obvious. The Philippines have faced similar issues and the ability to cope with the health and economic political dimensions of the virus are affected by its less robust health infrastructure. The picture of Manila on the slide shows the contrast between the modern skyscrapers and the sprawling, shanty towns of the poor. Imagine the health issues trying to control the virus under those conditions. Currently, COVID-19 statistics have almost 190,000 confirmed cases in the Philippines and 2,998 deaths. However, it is the fear of the virus that often causes a more severe price economically. This is one of the major areas affected by the virus, with exports to China by countries in Southeast Asia severely reduced. Additionally, there is the issue of remittances sent home from the multitude of Filipinos living abroad. And a number of those have been forced to return to the Philippines as the virus was affected in those countries where they were living, though not exactly a front burner issue in the Philippines, other than the fact that it has been hit by two disastrous typhoons in the last few years. Wait for the slide to catch up. The changing world weather patterns and the threat of rising levels of the ocean likely will have a serious impact on the 7,600 islands of the Philippines. Some to many of them are actually disappearing. The problem is that we neither have a timeline on these rising sea levels, nor do we know how long we'll have to deal with more dangerous weather patterns, nor if they will not indeed get worse. That said, island countries like the Philippines are going to become much more vocally internationally about these threats. The Chinese curse that goes may you live in interesting times. There might be a relationship there. Our relations with Duterte and the Philippines are at a crucial point. The visiting forces agreement and defense cooperation agreement are important, but there doesn't seem to be much enthusiasm on our side to renegotiate the issues. Trump's earlier comment was that the U.S. president said a few months ago that it will save us money, could be our position, or it could be another one of his throwaway lines. It is safe to say that we do not want to get dragged into a war with China because of the Philippines. Longer term, I believe the threat of China in the South China Sea will force the U.S. with other affected Southeast Asia countries and Asian powers like Japan and possibly India against China. Does that sound like the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Obama Administration proposal that President Trump and candidate Hillary Clinton both opposed? Apparently they didn't appreciate it, it was to be more of a political than a mainstream China. Pushback against the existing order and establish elite spreads. In the Philippines, we find the anti-establishment hero comes from the elite. That is often the model. We should not be surprised that authoritarian regimes are on the rise. As I mentioned earlier, it is historically the model of choice. We chose to ignore the factor in the Cold War because fighting communism was the important issue. Now communism is not the important paramount issue, so human rights and democracy promotion are more important. Relationships among countries are in flux and becoming more bilateral. The strength of regional powers like China, India, Turkey and Russia is eroding this. Climate change will affect the Philippines in foreign affairs in general, and all change has new winners and losers, and in the case of climate change, the Philippines is likely to be a loser. As we look at our relationship to the Philippines, we have to balance our national interests and our values mindful of the cost and consequences of either approach. One of those consequences, costs and consequences, is when the policy is formed, not after we are run into issues like we have in the Middle East. Since this won't be aired for a while, I'm going to mention a late breaking story that may still have currency when you get to see this. There is the possibility of a revolutionary government movement coming out in the Philippines, which would give President Duterte complete power to govern. He made reference to something like this in 2017. Should it be true, it would have a definite effect on our relationship. Now, my last thought before we close is if you want to know another country, you really have to try to understand our culture. Not how it relates to our culture is important too. But what drives them, what mindset do they have as they look at the world and not try to make them, pigeonhole them into the kinds of pegs and holes that we like to have in the United States. With that, I thank you very much. Thank you, John, for that very interesting program. And thank all of you for joining us for this series. We hope you will keep us in mind next year and we hope to be able to do it live in the Roka Room at Mead Library again. Thank you much.