Last of two parts

THE real damage in Davos last week was not Donald Trump’s public humiliation (TMT, Jan. 28, 2026). It was strategic. The world — especially Beijing — was reminded that this American era still runs on a familiar cycle: thunderous threats followed by cheap, face-saving retreats. Wall Street has given it a clinical name: “TACO” (Trump always chickens out). In the logic of Texas Hold’em poker, it is a bet on the inevitability of the fold once bluffs harden into habit and habit masquerades as doctrine.

This pattern is no longer anecdote. It is signal. And for countries whose security calculations rest on American resolve, signals matter more than speeches.

For the Philippines, the implications are profound. We have long treated Washington as the custodian of international law, the guarantor that rules would restrain appetite. Trump’s recent conduct exposes that guardianship as conditional at best, illusory at worst. The realtor’s attempt to “acquire” Greenland should be read in Manila not as farce, but as warning: An ally that treats territory as inventory may one day treat Ayungin Shoal or Bajo de Masinloc as negotiable line items in a larger bargain with Beijing.

When Arctic ice melted, Greenland revealed itself to Washington not as a people, but as a distressed asset. If the United States can threaten punitive tariffs on NATO allies over land it does not own — then abandon those threats for a vaporous framework — what, precisely, is the market value of a rusting hull like the BRP Sierra Madre?

The asterisk in the alliance

This is where the danger sharpens. Manila’s red lines now come with an asterisk. Beijing’s salami-slicing — incremental seizures via water cannons, maritime militia and administrative creep — is designed to exploit exactly this rhythm of bluff, threaten, fold without triggering war.

Each action is calibrated to remain below the threshold of automatic response, betting that ambiguity and fatigue will do the rest.

Filter a crisis at Ayungin through the TACO lens and the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) risks mutation — from deterrent into bargaining chip, tradable in a grand deal elsewhere.

Imagine a late-night Truth Social post: “Had a great talk with Chairman Xi. We’re doing a historic trade deal. On the South China Sea, we’re looking at a New Era of Cooperation. Moving the ship to save lives!”

In a transactional world, automaticity is dead. Protection becomes a subscription service — renewed only if the cost of the show does not exceed the value of the deal. The problem for Manila is not sudden abandonment, but conditionality disguised as partnership.

Europe calls the bluff

Trump’s tariff tantrums and Greenland theatrics collapsed at Davos not because of sudden wisdom or moral awakening, but because Europe found its spine. The European Union answered bluster with leverage, hinting at coordinated retaliation that would hurt where America actually listens: markets. This was value-based realism in action. Adults forcing a bully to stand down when power finally met power.

The Philippines cannot call bluffs the way Europe can. We do not move markets; we wave principles. For years, we treated international law like Vaclav Havel’s greengrocer’s sign — displaying the 2016 arbitral ruling as moral cover, a diplomatic anting-anting hung in the window to ward off coercion. But the Greenland farce reminded us of a hard truth: The strong do not obey signs. They negotiate with those who can impose pain.

From alliance monogamy to the security mesh

Surviving the TACO era requires a strategic pivot — away from alliance monogamy and toward archipelagic autonomy. If our shoals can be traded, our survival depends on weaving a security web so dense that no single thread — American included — can cause the structure to collapse.

This is not abandonment of Washington. It is insulation from Washington’s volatility.

Japan: The stealth anchor

Recent logistics agreements with Tokyo quietly complete a circuit that matters more than rhetoric: fuel, ammunition, food. Force multiplied. In a TACO scenario where Washington hesitates to resupply exposed outposts, Japanese logistics provide a secondary lifeline, reinforced by new infrastructure assistance. Tokyo is not merely helping Manila. It is defending its own southern doorstep, recognizing that Philippine vulnerability quickly becomes Japanese exposure.

Australia: Squad-ifying the shoals

As the Philippines assumes the Asean chairmanship, defense cooperation with Canberra must move from intent to permanence. Infrastructure projects across Luzon are not symbolic; they create a standing footprint. A blockade of Ayungin would no longer affront Manila alone — it would implicate Australia. This is deterrence by persistence, not performance. Middle-power solidarity that cannot be casually traded away in a late-night deal.

France: Europe’s hard power

France’s entry into the Philippine defense orbit introduces something we have long lacked: European hard power in Asian waters. Beyond patrol craft, Paris offers a pathway to undersea capability. Submarines change psychology before they change tactics. The calculus shifts when every Philippine asset is no longer trackable from orbit. Presence becomes ambiguity. Vulnerability becomes doubt.

What emerges is not a replacement for the American alliance, but a mesh — overlapping, redundant, resilient. If one ally hesitates, the others remain engaged. Exit becomes costly. Commitment becomes rational.

Asean as a survival blueprint

Europe’s defiance offers Southeast Asia a lesson it has long resisted learning: collective economic retaliation changes the arithmetic of intimidation. As chair, the Philippines must push Asean beyond its comfort zone —— from a gallery of pliant clients into a coalition of consequence. A unified trade posture transforms Southeast Asia into a market whose response is automatic and coordinated. Coercion loses efficiency when the target is not Manila alone, but a regional network.

The gray zone thrives on isolated victims. It withers under collective friction. This is not idealism. It is mechanics.

Living without illusions

The ice has melted — geographically and morally. Defense can no longer be treated as a hand-me-down from MDT 1951. It must be understood as a multilateral joint venture, assembled deliberately for an age of transactional power.

The emerging architecture is clear enough: overlapping partnerships among the United States, Japan, Australia, key European actors, and a more assertive Asean core. If one partner “chickens out,” others remain in the water. Multi-alignment raises the entry price for Chinese aggression and the exit price for American abandonment.

Manila survives not by demanding loyalty, but by making exit more expensive than commitment. We must sail with those already afloat — and build a hull that does not crack when the bluffs come roaring.

The final hurdle: The internal rot

Even the most elegant security architecture collapses when its foundations are rotten. The Philippines’ gravest vulnerability is not external pressure, but internal decay. Systemic corruption has hollowed out institutions, shattered public trust, and made strategic commitments brittle. Against this rot, American double-speak and Chinese intimidation are secondary.

Corruption masquerading as governance is the republic’s foremost national security threat. It distorts procurement, weakens deterrence, and turns strategic nodes into points of coercion. Sovereignty is not a slogan; It is the capacity to absorb pressure without fracture. So long as our internal systems remain compromised, our maritime claims rest on sand.

AS conjectured in my column (TMT, Jan. 21), Venezuela has slipped from the headlines, eclipsed by Trump’s designs on Greenland. A larger stage opened, and the world’s showman arrived — not to seek permission, but to overwhelm. Davos became theater; power became performance. Attention, not consent, is now the currency of influence.

The world of 2026 has crossed the threshold into a new order. The retreat of Arctic ice has exposed a deeper truth: The “pleasant fictions” of international law are yielding to a raw, transactional politics of power. Greenland, Davos and Manila are not separate stories but a single geopolitical parable. They reveal how sovereignty is priced and how alliances are renegotiated in public.

Small nations must relearn an ancient lesson: When rules melt with the ice, survival depends on power and resolve, not promises. The moral architecture of the postwar world is fracturing. For the Philippines, this is not distant theater — it is a mirror. What is rehearsed in the Arctic may yet be performed in our waters.

Davos debacle

The 2026 Davos World Economic Forum will be remembered not for grand bargains but for a geopolitical farce. Fresh from a campaign to “acquire” Greenland, Trump arrived with AI-generated memes of American flags draped over ice sheets. He spoke of sovereignty as if it were a deed, of territory as if it were inventory — assets to be acquired, priced and moved at will.

When Denmark and its European allies resisted, Trump responded not with diplomacy but with menace. He threatened 25-percent tariffs on eight NATO states, treating a security alliance less as a covenant than as a protection racket. It was power as reality TV: the strongman’s bluff, broadcast to the world.

Then came the collapse.

Defied by a unified Europe and credible whispers of an EU “anti-coercion bazooka” — including a coordinated US Treasury holdings sell-off — Trump abruptly folded, ruling out force, suspending tariffs in exchange for a vaporous “framework of a future deal,” which NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte diplomatically described as having “a lot of work to be done.”

TACO

Thus, was re-enforced the nickname circulating in diplomatic corridors.

The mockery is deserved. But the danger lies not in Trump’s retreat; it lies in the pattern. Bluff. Threaten. Fold. Repeat. This rhythm does more than bruise credibility; it shatters the very idea of “automaticity” in alliances — NATO Article 5. Defense becomes conditional. Commitments become bargaining chips. Guarantees acquire an asterisk.

For Manila, the implication is chilling. A presidency that treats Greenland as a property may one day treat Ayungin Shoal, or Bajo de Masinloc, as line items in a grand bargain with Beijing. An ally who prices territory can trade it. An ally who improvises strategy can improvise abandonment.

The end of pretend rules

Against this spectacle stood a quiet intellectual counterweight. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney invoked Václav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless,” likening the “rules-based international order” to the greengrocer’s sign in the window: a ritual everyone knows is hollow, yet everyone continues to perform.

Canada, Carney declared, is “taking the sign out of the window.” The old rules no longer restrain the powerful. Trade, finance, technology and supply chains are now instruments of coercion. Great powers weaponize interdependence. Pretending otherwise is not idealism; it is self-deception.

In place of illusion, Carney proposed “value-based realism,” a posture that remains anchored in sovereignty and human dignity, yet unsentimental about the decline of American reliability. It does not abandon values. It abandons naiveté.

For middle powers, his message was stark: If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.

He urged a “variable geometry,” issue-specific coalitions that bypass paralyzed institutions. Canada will double defense spending, diversify trade away from America, and weave a dense web of global partnerships. Sovereignty, in this world, is no longer guaranteed by rules. It is earned by the capacity to withstand pressure. It was not a speech of comfort. It was a manual for survival.

The Arctic as the North’s South China Sea

Greenland and the West Philippine Sea (WPS) are separated by oceans yet bound by logic. The Arctic is fast becoming the North’s SCS/WPS — a maritime frontier where geography is rewritten by presence, and legitimacy follows occupation. The parallels are haunting:

– The shield of law. Both Greenland and the Philippines rely on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos). Both discover its fragility. Just as Beijing ignored the 2016 arbitral ruling, Washington’s casual disregard for Danish sovereignty reveals that “national interest” overrides law — even among friends.

– The strategy of presence. In the WPS, China deploys maritime militias and concrete reefs into permanence. In the Arctic, Russia and China plant “scientific” outposts. The BRP Sierra Madre stands as our lonely pathetic sentinel; Greenland’s Inuit patrols play the same role. In a transactional world, unoccupied space is deemed vacant.

– Strategic real estate. Greenland is the cork of the North Atlantic. The Philippines is the hinge of the First Island Chain. Both are viewed less as nations than as buffers. Our debate over EDCA mirrors Greenland’s fear that too much military presence invites annexation by proxy.

Geography has become destiny again. The map is no longer drawn by treaties. It is drawn by who arrives first and who stays longest.

PH’s mandate: Diversify or subordinate

The Greenland climbdown teaches Manila a harsh lesson: Transactional alliances are unstable foundations. The Mutual Defense Treaty has long been treated as ironclad. Trump’s conduct suggests otherwise. Protection now comes with a price — and a mood.

The Philippines must adopt its own version of Carney’s realism. We see its outline already:

– Multi-alignment. Security ties with Japan, Australia and Europe create a flexible web of defense. No single capital becomes a point of failure. Alliance is no longer monogamy; it is architecture.

— The value of strength. Defense modernization is not just about hardware. It is about raising the cost of coercion — for Beijing and for a transactional Washington. Vulnerability rouses appetite.

– Regional solidarity. Asean must evolve from a forum of caution into a coalition of consequence. Southeast Asia must act as a collective middle power rather than a gallery of pliant clients competing for favor.

This is not defiance. It is adulthood.

Living without illusions

As Arctic ice melts, the map of power is redrawn. The age when small nations slept beneath the blanket of a benevolent order is over. Davos 2026 revealed a divided world: those who weaponize chaos, and those who build resilience.

Trump’s TACO diplomacy is not an aberration. It is a symptom of a deeper American transformation. To remain masters of our seas, we must look beyond the horizon of the 1951 MDT. We must take our own sign out of the window. Name the world as it is. Strengthen what is ours.

Weave ourselves into those who still believe sovereignty is worth defending.

In an age where ice retreats and seas rise, power belongs not to those who wait for the world they wish for but to those who learn to navigate the world that is.

THE global community’s limp response to America’s perversion of the rule of law in Venezuela has offered something far more dangerous than silence: a template. It has shown the American presidency what can be done without consequence. Emboldened and transparent in his intentions, Trump is executing a strategy telegraphed all along: the systematic dismantling of democratic restraint.

This is no longer the behavior of a man testing limits. It is the conduct of a leader who has perfected impunity. Trump governs through calculated chaos: each new outrage is designed to bury the last. Venezuela eclipsed Epstein. Greenland now threatens to eclipse Venezuela. The press staggers from spectacle to spectacle, never quite catching up. Scandal no longer accumulates; it evaporates in the heat of the next provocation.

What emerges is not disorder, but design.

Internal politics: The great capitulation

Most damning is the total surrender of the GOP. A party once defined by institutional pride now sits reduced, cowed — its tails between its legs — before a cult of personality. A handful still mutter about legality, alliances, and norms — faking real resistance — but they are paralyzed by MAGA primed to crush defiance. “America First” was once coded as patriotic refrain. Now Venezuela and Greenland expose it as selective aggression.

This is not a partisan turn. It is the destruction of that heirloom myth — “checks and balances” — a museum piece now displayed in a republic that governs by appetite. When institutions become inconveniences, accountability becomes an artifact. America has entered a regime where impunity is policy and self-discipline is treason.

Why Greenland?

America’s fixation with Greenland is not new. It began in the Cold War, when its location rendered it an “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” a northern shield against the Soviet Union — much like China’s co-optation of islands and rocks in the South China Sea/West Philippine Sea that have been converted into Chinese military bases astride the shipping routes. Geography was destiny (this is another topic for subsequent columns).

But the appeal of Greenland does not lie in romance but in arithmetic. The Arctic is thawing, and with it, new corridors of power. The Northwest Passage across Canada — still reluctantly an ally — the Northern Sea Route along Russia can shorten global shipping between North America, Europe and Asia by as much as 40 percent. For maritime trade, time is money made visible: fewer days at sea, lower fuel costs, faster capital turnover.

What Suez and Panama once were, the Arctic is becoming — except this time, the map is being redrawn by climate. Greenland sits astride this transformation. It is no longer peripheral. It is pivot.

Rare earths: The new strategic hunger

What has become critical in Trump-imposed world tariff is America’s near-starvation diet of rare earth minerals. These are the sinews of modern power — semiconductors, electric vehicles, renewable energy systems, and nearly every advanced weapons platform in the US arsenal.

Dependence on foreign — especially Chinese — supply chains turns this craving into a strategic vulnerability, where economic leverage can become geopolitical coercion. China dominates both the global extraction and processing.

Greenland’s Kvanefjeld mountain contains one of the world’s largest, rare earth deposits. American mining interests have salivated for it. In a tariff-fractured world, scarcity becomes strategy. Greenland is no longer ice and fire. It is leverage.

The colonial underlay: Camp Century and Thule

After the war, Washington attempted to purchase Greenland from Denmark for $100 million in gold bullions. Copenhagen rejected the offer. The compromise was subtler — and crueler: American bases on Inuit land, including Camp Century, an underground city of tunnels and missiles entombed beneath the ice.

When the ice proved unstable, the Americans left. They abandoned radioactive water, diesel and toxic PCBs, sealed inside a glacier now melting. As the Arctic warms, Cold War poison inches toward the surface — toward a people who never consented to bear its cost.

This was not merely environmental vandalism. It exposed Denmark’s colonial duplicity and America’s strategic indifference. For centuries, Greenland’s worth was calculated by outsiders — first Danish administrators, then American generals — while Inuit life absorbed the damage. Modernization fractured communities, displaced language, and suspended identity between worlds.

The cruelty became explicit in 1953, when the US expanded Thule Air Base. Inuit families were given four days to abandon ancestral homes. They were relocated to barren ground with little shelter, less dignity. In 1968, a B-52 carrying nuclear weapons crashed nearby, scattering plutonium across hunting lands. Cleanup was partial. Illness followed.

Thule became a monument to American security. For Greenlanders, it was loss made permanent.

Today’s staggering suicide rates among young Inuit men (80-120 per 100,000) are not mysteries of climate or temperament. They are the aftershock of dispossession — families uprooted, identities thinned, futures negotiated elsewhere. This is not a public-health anomaly. It is colonial trauma unfolding in real time (US and Danish rate: 14.7 and 9 respectively).

America is complicit. Denmark enabled it. And now, as the ice recedes, the vultures gather once more.

Russia’s stake: The northern empire

For Moscow, the Arctic is not a frontier — it is destiny. The melting ice unlocks the Northern Sea Route, transforming Russia’s frozen coastline into a toll-collecting superhighway between Asia and Europe. Arctic hydrocarbons and minerals reinforce Moscow’s grip on energy and strategic materials.

Control of northern sea lanes reduces dependence on southern chokepoints policed by Western navies. It extends strategic depth against NATO. In this calculus, Greenland is not land. It is a sentinel at the Atlantic gateway. Any rival presence there threatens Russia’s ambition to turn the Arctic into both engine and moat of a revived empire.

China’s stake: The frozen Belt and Road

For Beijing, Greenland is convergence — resource security, strategic positioning, future logistics. Its rare earths offer an escape from Western chokepoints. Arctic ports promise weeks shaved off trade routes to Europe and North America.

By investing in mining, research stations and infrastructure, China advances its claim as a “near-Arctic state.” The Arctic is not a frontier in Beijing’s imagination. It is a supply chain-in-waiting. Greenland is its keystone — a frozen Belt and Road.

Geopolitical implications

What appears as Trumpian absurdity is, in fact, structural. Greenland is where climate, commerce, minerals and military geometry converge. It is where colonial residue meets 21st-century power.

This is no longer about ice. It is about authorship — who gets to write the map of the next century. The Arctic is mutating into the new Mediterranean: a basin of trade, transit, rivalry and consequence. In that theater, Greenland is Malta, Cyprus, Singapore and Suez in one glacial body. Whoever choreographs its destiny will dictate the syntax of future power.

And here is the farce disguised as fate: this world-historical pivot is being entrusted to a presidency that governs by impulse over intellect, by mood rather than method. When territorial ambition is paired with impunity, strategy becomes improv. Geopolitics turns into a late-night monologue, and early morning tweets — history reduced to a punchline. The map of the century deserves a cartographer. It has been handed a showman.

BY the close of 2025, I published two essays mapping the terrain before it shifted — one dissecting Washington’s National Security Strategy (NSS), the other tracing Beijing’s quiet, methodical ascent (TMT, Dec. 17 and 31, 2025). Both were quickly buried by scandals dominating public discourse — the flood control exposés that tainted the highest echelon of Philippine political leadership. 

I have since chosen — temporarily — to step away from the exhausting task of chronicling local betrayals. Corruption is corrosive, but global power shifts are existential. Less lurid perhaps, but infinitely more consequential. Lost amid our local noise are a series of American moves, gestating since late 2025, now erupting with the capacity to reorder global stability.

Venezuela: Diplomacy by impulse

The new year’s shock was Washington’s “invasion” of Venezuela and abduction of Nicolás Maduro, a return to overt regime change veiled as law enforcement operations against a narco-terrorist. By seizing the world’s largest oil reserves, Washington blocked Maduro’s pivot to the yuan, a shift that threatened the dollar’s global reserve status, denying China a strategic financial breach. 

The operation bypassed the US Congress, strained international law, and conveniently advanced longstanding efforts to isolate Cuba by severing its energy lifeline. It fit a broader pattern — Greenland, Panama, strategic chokepoints — erratic maneuvers aimed at obstructing Beijing’s rise. This was a high-risk wager on financial hegemony: preserve dollar dominance, deny China hemispheric access, and accept instability as collateral damage. (And it conveniently knocked Epstein off the front pages.)

For the Philippines and other allies, the lesson is sobering. Power exercised by impulse renders alliances capricious. When policy follows mood instead of institutional consensus, partnerships cease to reassure.

Liberation abroad, theater at home

There is, however, another side to Maduro’s fall, one largely erased in Western political theater. In Caracas, citizens brutalized by decades of socialist misrule surged into the streets in celebration; scenes echoing our own 1986 moment, when the Marcos dictatorship collapsed and a nation seized a fleeting breath of freedom.

Conversely, American progressives responded with ritual outrage and cries of “imperialism.” This reflex is less analysis than affliction; Trump 

Derangement Syndrome has become so consuming that Venezuela itself vanished from view. 

A once-functional country was reduced to a narco-state by corruption, hyperinflation and “equality” enforced at gunpoint. Those who fled hunger and terror now find themselves lectured by activists safely insulated from the consequences of the ideology they defend.

This does not absolve Washington from scrutiny. Trump’s claim that the US will “run” Venezuela invites legitimate fears of mission creep and administrative hubris. Strategic interests and risks are real. However, the moral divide remains stark: those who endured the dictatorship are celebrating its collapse, while those who never suffered under it are the ones mourning its end.

The Iraq warning

The Venezuelan episode inevitably recalls another American “moment of liberation” — Iraq, 2003. Then, too, statues fell and crowds cheered. “Mission accomplished” followed swiftly. What came next was occupation, insurgency and a costly lesson in what happens the day after.

The parallels are instructive. Remove the ruler and you create a vacuum. Assume foreign administrators can replace local governance and you invite resentment. Dress strategic interests as moral crusades and credibility collapses. Venezuela’s operation was surgical and greeted with relief, but history warns that the real danger lies not in the takedown, but in “who runs the trains the morning after.”

The NSS: Strategy by silence

This unpredictability is now codified in Washington’s NSS — a document best described as “Trumpism in formal wear.” It speaks of strength and sovereignty, but its subtext is blunt: America will focus narrowly on what it must, and its partners should prepare to fend for themselves.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the Indo-Pacific. The Philippines, America’s oldest treaty ally in Asia, a former colony, and a frontline state in the First Island Chain — is not mentioned at all. This omission is not oversight; it is demotion.

Manila is increasingly treated as useful in crisis, expendable in diplomacy. We remain neither equal partners nor formal vassals, merely disposable assets. EDCA sites and joint patrols provide optics, not assurance. History no longer guarantees attention. Since 1898, our relationship with Washington has oscillated between utility and neglect. The 1991 expulsion of US bases was our brief apex of self-respect — an autonomy we failed to consolidate. Today, an alliance built on episodic interest is quicksand; it appears firm until it begins to pull us under.

The quiet empire: Power that builds

While Washington convulses — tariffs, scandals, impulsive strikes — China advances as a whisper. Its strategy is the inverse of American spectacle. Where the US jolts, Beijing builds.

Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China builds ports, railways, and energy corridors; through 5G and digital platforms, it installs the operating system of future economies; by controlling critical minerals, it quietly tethers global industry to its production base.

This is structural power — durable, embedded and difficult to dislodge. Nations do not wake up one day to discover Chinese influence; they simply find themselves unable to function without Chinese systems.

Converging risks

Viewed together — the Venezuelan intervention, the NSS’ strategic silence, and China’s accelerating footprint — the arc is clear. American discipline erodes as Chinese structural power consolidates. US commitment thins and turns transactional; Beijing’s presence becomes constant. One superpower behaves like a landlord who appears only to collect rent or douse fires. The other acts like the contractor rebuilding the house. Over time, the builder owns the structure. 

In Southeast Asia, particularly in the West Philippine Sea, this is no abstraction. We duel with water cannons while the map is quietly redrawn. America drops in, makes a statement, and moves on. In geopolitics, presence — not promises — decides who stays.

PH choice: Autonomy or drift

Manila now confronts an uncomfortable arithmetic of power: an America increasingly inward-looking and fatigued by commitments, and a China patiently advancing, already embedded in the region’s future. The danger is not sudden American abandonment, but a quieter decay — Washington assumes Philippine loyalty while offering diminishing returns, as Beijing steadily compresses Manila’s strategic space.

The implications are structural. Sentiment and shared memory no longer anchors the alliance. It is drifting toward cold transactionalism, where Manila must perpetually audition for relevance before a distracted superpower. Treaty language is not leverage. Geography sharpens the reality: China lies 800 kilometers away; America remains 11,000 km distant. Distance still matters — strategically and psychologically.

A new national strategy is imperative. The Philippines must build real military and economic capacity rather than subcontract its security to promises. It must widen its strategic aperture — deepening ties with Japan, Australia and other steady middle powers. And more importantly, it must finally confront massive corruption not as scandal, but as a first-order national-security threat.

Chinese influence does not arrive with banners; it embeds through systems — quiet, structural, and with unnerving permanence. If Manila fails to adapt, it will not shape its future. It will awaken to discover that the future has already been chosen around it, for it, and without it.

AS 2026 dawns, I had briefly considered stepping away from my usual rhythm of dissecting geopolitical decay and institutional autopsies. Having spent six of my eight decades confronting the machinery of bad governance, a certain occupational fatigue has set in. I once believed the martial law era was the pinnacle of predatory rule, never imagining such a state of affairs could be replicated. I was mistaken; history, it seems, has no aversion to a bad sequel, as evidenced by the son’s incumbency.

The current deluge of flood control scandals and the unbridled greed of public servants — who appear incapable of moderating their systemic looting — has left me intellectually exhausted. For the coming year, I intend to recalibrate. This is not a retreat, but a shift in perspective. I will let local infamies simmer until justice is served or a political reset occurs.

While year’s end usually invites hollow resolutions, I prefer the risk of prediction — not of markets, but of political trajectories. I focus on two men who steered democracies toward spectacle: Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte.

My prediction: Trump, increasingly unmoored and erratic, will be forced from the presidency before his term concludes. Meanwhile, Duterte, currently awaiting his reckoning in The Hague, will never see Philippine shores again. He is destined to spend his final days on foreign soil, a fading shadow of a decaying legacy.

Parallel paths of erosion

I begin the year by examining two figures who have shaped my geopolitical and local commentary: Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte. Though hailing from different hemispheres, their political architectures are eerily similar. Both rose to power by treating the rule of law as an inconvenience and institutional limits as optional.

Trump, America’s theatrical legal liability, and Duterte, Davao-bred architect of “shoot-first governance,” both represent a distinct pattern of democratic erosion. Their impact on their respective nations is not just a passing phase but an indelible stain on the political fabric.

This critique is not aimed at their followers — MAGA or DDS — but at the leaders’ shared imprudence. When heads of state transform institutions into mirrors of their own ego, accountability fractures. Whether it manifests as comedy or tragedy, the result is the same: democracy quietly hollows out from within.

Authoritarian by accident, felon by verdict

Trump treated his presidency like a reality show that never stopped filming. What started as a branding move ended in a long list of legal battles. He is the first US president to become a convicted felon, having been found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records in New York.

Beyond that, he was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation and faces charges for trying to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents. While he claims these legal troubles are just unfair attacks for “loving America,” the records tell a different story. He has managed to bridge the gap between commander-in-chief and criminal defendant, spinning serious felony charges as if they were a badge of honor.

Trump’s authoritarianism is not ideological. It is incidental. It is what you get when a man with no respect for rules is handed an office built entirely on rules. He didn’t seek to dismantle democracy on purpose; he just didn’t think the rules applied to him.

This behavior did real damage. He turned basic facts into political food-fights and made people lose faith in elections. Instead of following the law, he governed through personal grievances and demanded total loyalty. He treated the Constitution like a suggestion rather than a boundary. In the end, he behaved like an autocrat not because he studied history — he is history-illiterate — but because he followed his own unchecked instincts, leaving the country more divided and cynical about the truth.

Authoritarian by design, now in The Hague

Duterte is a different strain of strongman. While Trump used chaos, Duterte used cold, calculated methods. He is currently under International Criminal Court custody for “crimes against humanity” in connection with the thousands of deaths in his war on drugs. Unlike leaders who use metaphors, Duterte’s public calls for violence were treated as official policy.

If Trump chipped away at democracy, Duterte took a chainsaw to it. He turned fear into a tool of the state, using the police and bureaucracy to normalize the killing of suspects without trial. Under his rule, neighborhoods became crime scenes.

The main difference is efficiency: Trump’s mistakes often slowed him down, but Duterte’s competence made his authoritarianism faster, deadlier and immediate. Even so, he remained popular. He convinced many that “strong leadership” meant a government that could act as judge, jury and executioner before breakfast.

Similar deadly styles

Trump and Duterte both weakened the systems meant to keep leaders in check. Trump attacked the courts and the press, while Duterte targeted human rights groups and the judiciary. Both demanded personal loyalty over the law, valuing their own authority more than legal rules.

They also used fear to control the public. Trump focused on outsiders and national decline, whereas Duterte focused on crime. By creating their own versions of reality and questioning facts, both leaders convinced people to fear external threats more than the loss of their own democratic rights and freedoms.

Strongman paradox, flourishing even when failing

The tragedy of modern strongmen isn’t just that they rise, but that they never truly leave. Even after losing elections or facing legal trouble, leaders like Trump and Duterte remain powerful figures. They survive by creating an illusion of order. Trump provides emotional order, where his followers feel like winners in a world of conspiracies. Duterte offers physical order, using intimidation and violence to make the streets feel “safe.”

One comforts his base with theories, the other with force. Both convince their supporters that democracy is actually safer in the hands of a leader who doesn’t respect it. They turn their personal power into a permanent part of the political landscape.

Legacy of weakened institutions

The true legacy of Trump and Duterte is a landscape of damaged institutions and broken civic trust. In the US, election faith has eroded and political violence has increased. In the Philippines, state-sponsored killings have become an accepted tool of power. Both nations are now struggling with a culture where the rules of democracy have been fundamentally altered.

Trump weakens democracy through constant falsehoods and spectacle, while Duterte erodes it through force and coercion. One acts through improvisation, the other by deliberate design. Despite these different methods, both lead their countries toward a lack of accountability.

Their rule serves as a warning: Democracies cannot survive when citizens trade their rights for performance or fear. While the institutions might still stand, the civic spirit required to sustain them has been deeply wounded. The cost of their leadership isn’t found in their speeches, but in the lasting damage done to their countries’ political fabric.

Trump and Duterte prove that democracy is fragile. Whether through spectacle or force, they convince citizens to trade accountability for the illusion of order. Their lasting legacy is a wounded civic culture where fear often outweighs the rule of law.

Last of three parts

WHILE Washington gnaws on its own obsessions — Epstein’s shadow, Trump’s visible mental erosion, MAGA’s hairline fractures, and the TACO’s soft retreat on tariffs — history has slipped the room. Power did not vanish; it relocated. Beijing is no longer “rising.” It has arrived.

What is taking shape is a “Quiet Empire”: industrial, technological, logistical — engineered for endurance while Western democracies squander time on scandals and spectacles.

What rotten ecosystem emboldened Co, the Discayas and Gardiola?
As 2025 closes, so too, by chance, does my three-part series on America’s waning primacy. The year 2026 opens with the contemporary Middle Kingdom stepping onto the world stage, unannounced — and unapologetically prepared.

China’s rise was not fate; it was design — patient, engineered and deliberate. It came without fanfare, not by proclamation but by accretion, like a tide advancing while others debate the weather forecast. As Western capitals debated intentions, Beijing built — ports, platforms, supply chains, code — with monastic focus. This moment cannot be read without its two defining figures, avatars of opposing creeds. Their contrast is not decorative. It is the hinge on which this decade turns on.

The shouter and the strategist

On one end of the global stage stands Donald Trump — ringmaster of America’s unraveling — wielding decibels as doctrine and bravado as substitute for strategy and a relationship to truth so casual it qualifies as malpractice. He declares victory before negotiations end, massages facts into theater, and treats diplomacy as a personal stage. In Trump’s universe, noise is policy, repetition is method, and fiction, shouted often enough, graduates into truth — shades of Goebbels!

Across from him stands Xi Jinping — quiet by resolve, methodical by instinct. Where Trump jolts markets with stochasticity, Xi reshapes continents in silence. One proclaims “historic deals” that evaporate by dusk; the other unveils modest moves that, almost unnoticed, reroute the world’s arteries — and its future.

Trump approaches geopolitics like a casino he once owned — managed to bankruptcy. Xi treats it as a Confucian chess match played on a thousand-year clock. One craves global recognition; the other behaves as if his victory is already guaranteed. History rarely recollects who shouted the loudest. It remembers the one who endured.

One builds, one boasts

The world tilts not by accident but by contrast. One superpower governs through spectacle; the other through structure. Washington’s statecraft has collapsed into performance art — Oval Office theatrics as prime-time content, pronouncements masquerading as policy, shows of strength whose shelf life depends on how long allies are willing to play along. Diplomacy becomes theater: loud, brittle and increasingly ignored.

Beijing governs differently. It does not sermonize; it builds. Roads across Central Asia, tunnels through Southeast Asia, anchorages along contested coastlines — influence poured into concrete and steel. China embeds power into geography itself. Nations eventually discover a sobering truth: they need China far more than China needs their applause.

While America claims power, China builds its physical foundations. In geopolitics, as in engineering, the builder eventually owns the house.

The Belt and Road – an imperial blueprint

Washington waved off the Belt and Road as “debt-trap diplomacy” — a soothing slogan that masked a deeper anxiety: America’s irrelevance. While it argued semantics, China rewired continents. Ports in Sri Lanka, rail lines across Africa, fiber-optic spines in the Pacific, highways binding Central Asia into a single market — these were not projects but anchors.

Loans became leverage; infrastructure became presence. The Global South, in particular, noticed the contrast: one superpower offers lectures on governance, the other delivers a bridge — on time, under budget, and impossible to ignore.

The core of this empire is industrial. In a global economy dictated by production and markets, control resides with the nation that dominates the supply chain. China currently sits at the chokepoints of the 21st century: rare earth minerals, lithium-ion batteries, pharmaceuticals and solar technology.

Trump’s tariffs were sold as liberation — a MAGA fantasy that factories would march home draped in flags. Instead, they left China only to surface in Vietnam, Mexico and Malaysia, still wired to Chinese capital, components and logistics. The map shifted; dependence didn’t.

America spoke of decoupling. China tightened the bolts. The world merely sublets China’s factory — a quiet power no speech can dismantle.

The digital frontier

While the United States remains embroiled in legislative battles over social media platforms like TikTok, Beijing has quietly built the digital architecture of the future. By exporting 5G networks, e-commerce platforms and AI-driven surveillance systems to Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, China is embedding itself in the data flows of the developing world.

This is “systems capture.” Influence in the modern era is found in the networks through which a society functions — its payment systems, its communications grid, and its security infrastructure. This form of conquest is invisible and systemic, making it far more durable than traditional military alliances.

The new geopolitical math

China’s strategy is not to dethrone the United States. It is to make the world less dependent on Uncle Trump and the volatility of the American political system.

Beijing has succeeded in this through a methodical diversification of trade routes and currencies. While the US dollar remains the world’s primary reserve currency, it is no longer the only option. The global order is shifting from a system of rigid alliances to a transactional marketplace. China’s triumph lies in providing nations with an alternative. In the logic of power, the nation that offers choices gains influence, while the nation that demands exclusive loyalty often loses it.

As Beijing constructed the scaffolding of this new order, the American political class engaged in what can be described as “political interpretative dance.” Congress held hearings, cable news cycles generated outrage, and social media platforms became the primary stage for chaotic discourse. Throughout this, China performed one thing the West forgot how to deliver: results!

China never concealed its ambitions; it printed them in ports, railways and trillion-dollar credit lines. What failed was Western arrogance — the assumption that destiny was a monopoly. Beijing picked up the tools the West abandoned and built the future, while Washington lingered, lecturing on a past already expired.

The age of the Quiet Empire

History does not trumpet new eras; it whispers them. And this epoch arrived quietly, built brick by brick by a nation that perfected patience while its rival perfected noise and bluster. Trump promised to Make America Great Again. Xi pursued a far less theatrical mission: to make China inevitable. One man built an audience; the other built an empire.

The Quiet Empire advances without banners or bravado. Its instruments are contracts, systems and time. It wins the long game because it plans beyond the next election — and beyond the next regime convulsion — 50 years out, methodically. The last decade delivers a blunt lesson: Conceit is not strength.

As this century hardens, influence will belong not to those who shout, but to those who arrive, build and endure. Time — indifferent, unsentimental, relentless — always sides with the patient.

The Quiet Empire has entered the stage. It did not declare its arrival. It simply took its place — and when the lights finally go out, it will be the last still standing.

THE Philippine budget has always been political, but rarely has it been so systematized. Behind the 2025 General Appropriations Act (GAA) lies an internal mechanism known as the BBM Parametric Formula — “baselined, balanced and managed.” Framed as a technocratic solution to rationalize spending, it now sits at the intersection of three destabilizing developments: the death of its alleged architect, a constitutional challenge pending before the Supreme Court, and mounting allegations that money has been distributed not only for projects but even for political acts — such as signatures for the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte.

Taken together, these point to a disturbing pattern: the conversion of governance into a marketplace where ceilings, signatures and silence all have a price at the start of the Marcos administration.

At its core, the BBM Parametric Formula determines how much each congressional district can access in DPWH projects. Before Congress debates priorities, a ceiling is already computed. Lawmakers are then invited to choose from a pre-approved menu of projects — roads, flood control, slope protection — provided they stay within their “allocable.” This is sold as order and discipline. In reality, it is pre-authorization masquerading as reform.

Unlike the pork barrel of old, this system leaves no obvious fingerprints. No line item bears a legislator’s name. No envelope changes hands in public view. Instead, power is exercised upstream — through ceilings set by planners, through lists filtered before reaching the National Expenditure Program, and through approvals that occur outside the glare of plenary debate.

Investigative reporting has pointed to former DPWH undersecretary for planning Maria Catalina “Cathy” Cabral as the official who crafted the BBM Parametric Formula, allegedly upon instruction from then Public Works and Highways secretary Manuel Bonoan. Cabral reportedly acknowledged being told to design a parametric system. Her death has since closed off the most authoritative source who could explain, on record, how the formula truly worked. And there is another personality who has to be investigated, as he was the point person at the legislative branch of the 19th Congress. Today, he is chairman of the committee on public works.

That loss of institutional memory would already be alarming. But it becomes more troubling when placed against the backdrop of the 2025 GAA’s constitutionality still pending before the Supreme Court. The issue is no longer just technical compliance. It is whether the budget process has been so intermediated by formulas and informal approvals that it has drifted away from constitutional design.

The diversion/insertion happened in 2023 at P300 billion, in 2024 at P500 billion and in 2025 at P400 billion, or a total of P1.2 trillion.

The Constitution vests the power of the purse in Congress. While the executive proposes, Congress disposes. But if lawmakers are effectively confined to pre-set ceilings, and if real discretion lies with a small planning circle that decides which projects survive the filtering process, then Congress is no longer exercising power — it is ratifying outcomes.

This is why the demand to release the full proponents list is critical. Former budget officials, including neophyte Rep. Leandro Leviste, have stated publicly that proponents’ lists attached to infrastructure projects include not only legislators but also even private individuals. If private names appear as proponents of public projects, the implications are staggering for both Marcos Jr. and his administration.

And now, into this already fragile ecosystem, comes another allegation that cannot be ignored: that fees, in the form of infrastructure projects, were given to secure signatures for the impeachment of Vice President Duterte. If true, this represents the logical extension of a system that has normalized transactional politics. When budget ceilings can be managed, when projects can be traded, it is not a leap — but a slide — toward monetizing legislative acts themselves.

An impeachment signature is not a policy preference. It is a constitutional act of the highest order. If signatures were purchased — directly or indirectly — using access to funds, projects, or outright cash, then impeachment ceases to be a safeguard. It becomes a commodity.

Control over infrastructure allocations creates leverage. Leverage creates compliance. Compliance, in turn, can be mobilized not just for budgets but for political objectives: silence, alignment, or signatures.

The administration may dismiss these concerns as speculation. But in a democracy, the answer to doubt is not denial — it is disclosure. Publish the formula. Release the proponents list. Identify who endorsed which projects and why. Clarify whether budgetary leverage was used to influence impeachment proceedings.

Budgets are moral documents. Impeachment is a constitutional safeguard. When both are reduced to transactions, the Republic itself is put on layaway.

The Supreme Court’s review of the 2025 GAA is therefore about more than numbers. It is about whether technocracy has been allowed to eclipse accountability, and whether political power has quietly migrated from institutions to intermediaries.

Can the 20th Congress be able to redeem itself? Not with the way the GAA 2026 bicameral conference went. In full public glare, the porks and perks have been restored and some actually increased, all lumped in a Standby Fund, the new name of Unprogrammed Funds.

And still, not one legislator moved for the abolition of liquidation by certification. Not one opened the budget of Congress. No one wants to be transparent and accountable in an institution directly created by the mandate of the people.

In the end, the question Filipinos must ask is not only how much was allocated, or who signed. It is far more unsettling — and far more necessary: How much does a decision cost now, and who is setting the price?

Second of a series

SEVERAL weeks ago, I began a series analyzing the tectonic shifts in global trade triggered by President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariff initiatives. The sweeping duties on 120 nations launched in April 2025, were framed as a “patriotic economic defense” — a blunt instrument designed to force the world to play by Washington’s rules. However, as the dust settles, the ledger tells a different story. These tariffs did not extract the promised concessions from rivals; instead, they functioned as a massive tax on American consumers and a catalyst for the erosion of America’s soft power.

The policy has ironically undermined the very goal of restoring American strength. While Trump trumpeted “trade war victories” — China promises to purchase soybeans and rare earths — the reality on the ground was starkly different.

Beijing delivered empty promises while quietly shifting its supply chains to Brazil and Central Asia. Today, US exports sit uncompetitive in silos and warehouses, while Chinese reserves remain at record highs. America finds itself economically strained and geopolitically diminished, while China has used the chaos to consolidate a massive strategic advantage.

Today, across global capitals, a quiet shift is under way. Alliances, markets and ambitions are being rewired not through revolutions but through recalibration. The international order, once anchored by Washington’s predictability, is loosening. Trump’s “America First” policy, delivered through tariffs and confrontational rhetoric, promised renewed dominance. Instead, it accelerated the arrival of a multipolar world where nations no longer defer to a single superpower but shop for the best deal.

The unraveling begins

The unraveling did not begin with a bang. It began with hesitation among its oldest friends. Allies watched Washington impose tariffs on friends and foes alike, threaten to withdraw from alliances, and treat diplomacy as a sentimental relic. What began as “tough negotiation” soon exposed itself as erratic governance wrapped in nationalist slogans.

America, once the conductor of the global orchestra, began playing solos that no longer matched the rhythm of the rest of the world. Washington turned inward, the rest chose not to wait. And this is the quiet tragedy: China didn’t engineer America’s decline; it was self-inflicted.

In Southeast Asia, the Philippines has felt this shift more acutely than perhaps any other nation. Long accustomed to relying on the steady, if sometimes heavy-handed, presence of America, Manila found itself navigating a landscape where American attention wavered, and security commitments seemed increasingly conditional. That uncertainty created strategic openings that Beijing was more than happy to exploit with a mixture of “checkbook diplomacy” and maritime pressure.

The vacuum that Washington created

For over seven decades, US leadership rested not just on military strength but on trust. From Berlin to Seoul, allies aligned with Washington because they valued its consistency, strategic grounding and the security umbrella that enabled global trade. Trump upended that compact, treating power as a zero‑sum contest of volume — believing that speaking louder and threatening more would force others to fall in line.

The world largely tuned him out. As the “Tariff War” expanded from steel to soybeans and semiconductors, countries moved to insulate themselves from America’s domestic volatility.

The structural consequences of that retreat are now visible across key regions. Europe, rattled by repeated threats to NATO, accelerated its push for “strategic autonomy,” striking trade deals with Beijing and securing Gulf energy without US mediation. Asia, wary of being dragged into a trade crossfire, quietly forged economic side arrangements with China through the Asean bloc. In the Middle East, Gulf monarchies — once pillars of US influence — deepened ties with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), treating Washington’s warnings as passing weather rather than binding directives.

The Philippines, caught between its treaty obligations and its geographic vulnerability, watched this unpredictability with growing unease. When the US began taking Manila’s alignment for granted, it weakened the very trust that had anchored the alliance for generations.

Sensing this hesitation, China intensified its pressure in the West Philippine Sea, testing the limits of how far Washington would actually go to defend a partner it had recently snubbed in trade negotiations.

China’s procurement strategy

While Washington treated the global stage as a theater for confrontation, Beijing treated it as a procurement exercise. China’s “quiet ascendancy” is not built on emotional volatility or late-night Truth-Social posts. It is built on manufacturing discipline, logistical dominance, and the gradual accumulation of dependencies.

The Belt and Road Initiative, mocked in Washington, quietly became the spine of a new economic geography. Latin America now treats Beijing as a co-equal partner. Africa’s railways and hospitals have Chinese steel in their bones. Southeast Asia performs diplomatic tai chi, balancing a rising China with a retreating America. Even Mexico, America’s economic twin, expands trade with China despite Washington’s attempts to isolate Beijing.

Trump swung at Beijing with tariffs, imagining China would buckle. Instead, China reached for its abacus. That difference — between a power that performs and one that plans — defines the new century.

The psychological shift: A ‘post-American’ world

The most significant change is psychological. For decades, America was the “steady variable” in global affairs. America First revealed a country whose commitments rose and fell with one man’s temperament.

Nations have stopped aligning instinctively. They now practice what financial managers call “strategic ambiguity.” They hedge, they triangulate, and they treat their relationship with Washington as one piece of a diversified portfolio.

The world is not “anti-American”; it is simply post-American. It is a world that has accepted the reality that the US may no longer be the reliable guarantor of global order.

In the Global South, this awakening is palpable. From Brazil to Pakistan, nations are seeking stability over ideology. They want trade without lectures and infrastructure without the threat of sanctions. As Washington turned inward to debate its own identity, Beijing stepped outward, offering “predictability” as its most valuable export.

The ledger of history

History does not judge with a gavel; it records with a ledger. And as we head toward the conclusion of this series, the ledger is remarkably clear. While Trump relied on slogans, Beijing built systems. While Washington imposed tariffs that raised the price of a washing machine in Ohio, China was signing contracts for the ports that would ship those machines to the rest of the world.

The empire that once wrote the rules of the global game is now spent arguing with the referees. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is playing a new game entirely — one designed, financed and moderated by Beijing. “America First” was meant to elevate the nation to new heights. Instead, it revealed a world that was ready and willing to move on without it. For the first time in living memory, the America is not the protagonist of the global narrative, but its loudest bystander.

The tragedy for Manila is that this vacuum isn’t just a matter of trade — it’s a matter of territory. As the US vacillates, the Philippines is left to navigate a dangerous middle ground, a frontline state in a century being rewritten by those who measure power in contracts, not applause.

To be continued next week

MANILA, Philippines — The House of Representatives approved House Bill 6636 which aims to institutionalize the Assistance to Individuals in Crisis Situations (AICS) program of the Department of Social Welfare and Development.

The bill hurdled third and final reading during plenary session on Tuesday with 270 lawmakers voting for it and eight against. Two abstained.

THE Department of National Defense (DND) on Tuesday denounced the “dangerous and inhumane” actions of the Chinese maritime forces against Filipino fishermen in the vicinity of Escoda (Sabina) Shoal over the weekend.

The DND reiterated that China’s claims of indisputable sovereignty over the feature are illegal and unfounded as “neither an international tribunal nor international law-abiding state has ever recognized Chinese sovereignty over the Escoda Shoal.”

According to the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG), the Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) and Chinese maritime militia (CMM) ships attacked the Filipino boats with water cannons and used dangerous blocking maneuvers near Escoda Shoal, a water feature well within the Philippine exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

“Water cannoning, aggressive maneuvering, and the cutting of anchor lines resulting in physical injuries of Filipino civilians are wholly inconsistent with the duty of all nations to ensure the safety of human lives,” Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. said.

The DND reiterated that maritime entitlements in the area are governed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos) and that the 2016 Arbitral Award is final and binding.

“Claims and actions that disregard these legal principles undermine the rules-based international order and erode regional peace and stability,” Teodoro said.

China’s recent aggressiveness has earned condemnation from close defense partners of the Philippines, including the US, Japan, Australia, and Canada.

Despite drawing criticisms, China’ Foreign Affairs Ministry Spokesman Guo Jiakun still stood ground that they have “indisputable sovereignty over Nansha Qundao (Spratly Islands), which include Xianbin Jiao, and their adjacent waters.”

In an interview, Jiakun accused the Philippines of having taken organized and orchestrated moves of sending large numbers of ships to provoke tensions in the waters off Xianbin Jiao (Sabina Shoal) infringing upon China’s sovereignty, rights and interest violating international law and sabotaging maritime peace and stability.

“It is legitimate, lawful, and professional, restrained and beyond reproach for China to do what is necessary to safeguard our territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests. The Philippines needs to immediately stop its infringement, provocations and vilification, stop its endless self-directed stunts at sea, and refrain from challenging China’s firm resolve to safeguard our sovereignty and rights and interests,” Jiakun said.

Teodoro slammed Jiakun’s remarks, saying states aspiring for regional leadership “should act responsibly.”

“The attempt by the spokesperson of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to justify these actions by invoking ‘indisputable sovereignty’ and peddling blatant lies like “knife-wielding” fishermen are not supported by facts and evidence. We call on China to stop spreading false narratives and engaging in state orchestrated disinformation campaigns,” Teodoro said.