“When elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled.”

So warned Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte in his address to the UN General Assembly on September 22, 2020. He was referring to the consequences for East Asia of a conflict between the US and China.

Fast forward to October 2, 2021, about one year later, and the first patch of grass has been stomped on by the U.S. elephant, trudging stealthily about, far from home in the South China Sea.  On that day the nuclear-powered attack submarine, the USS Connecticut, suffered serious damage in an undersea incident which the U.S. Navy ascribed to a collision with an undersea object.

After sustaining damage, the submarine apparently surfaced close to the Paracel Islands which lie only 150 nautical miles from China’s Yulin submarine base in Hainan Province.   The Connecticut is one of only three Seawolf class of submarines, which are assumed to be on spying missions.  But they can be equipped with Intermediate Range (1250-2500 km) Tomahawk cruise missiles which can be armed with nuclear warheads.  It is claimed that they are not so equipped at present because the Navy’s “policy decisions” have “phased out” their nuclear role, according to the hawkish Center For Strategic and International Studies.

When a US nuclear submarine with such capabilities has a collision capable of killing U.S. sailors and spilling radioactive materials in the South China Sea, it should be front page news on every outlet in the U.S.  This has not been the case – far from it.  For example, to this day (October 30), nearly a month after the collision, the New York Times, the closest approximation to a mouthpiece for the American foreign policy elite, has carried no major story on the incident and in fact no story at all so far as I and several daily readers can find.  This news is apparently not fit to print in the Times.  (A notable exception to this conformity and one worth consulting has been Craig Hooper of Forbes.)

A blackout of this kind will come as no surprise to those who have covered the plight of Julian Assange or the US invasion of Syria or the barely hidden hand of the United States in various regime change operations, to cite a few examples

The U.S. media has followed the narrative of the U.S. Navy which waited until October 7 to acknowledge the incident, with the following extraordinarily curt press release (I have edited it with strike-outs and italicized substitutions to make its meaning clear.):

The Seawolf-class fast-attack submarine USS Connecticut (SSN 22) struck an object while submerged on the afternoon of Oct. 2, while operating in international waters in the Indo-Pacific region in the South China Sea near or inside Chinese territorial waters. The safety of the crew remains the Navy’s top priority  The crew is being held incommunicado for an indefinite period. There are no life threatening injuries. This allows the extent of injuries to the crew to be kept secret.  

The submarine remains in a safe and stable condition hidden from public view to conceal the damage and its cause.  USS Connecticut’s nuclear propulsion plant and spaces were not affected and remain fully operationalare in a condition that is being hidden from the public until cosmetic repairs can be done to conceal the damage. The extent of damage to the remainder of the submarine is being assessed is also being concealed. The U.S. Navy has not requested assistance will not allow an independent inspection or investigation. The incident will be investigated cover-up will continue.

Tan Kefei, spokesperson for China’s Ministry of National Defense although not so terse, had much the same to say as my edited version above, as reported in China’s Global Times:

“It took the US Navy five days after the accident took place to make a short and unclear statement.  Such an irresponsible approach, cover-up (and) lack of transparency .. can easily lead to misunderstandings and misjudgments. China and the neighboring countries in the South China Sea have to question the truth of the incident and the intentions behind it.

But Tan went further and echoed the sentiment of President Duterte;

“This incident also shows that the recent establishment of a trilateral security partnership between the US, UK and Australia (AUKUS) to carry out nuclear submarine cooperation has brought a huge risk of nuclear proliferation, seriously violated the spirit of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, undermined the construction of a nuclear-free zone in Southeast Asia, and brought severe challenges to regional peace and security.

“We believe that the actions of the US will affect the safety of navigation in the South China Sea, arouse serious concerns and unrest among the countries in the region, and pose a serious threat and a major risk to regional peace and stability.”

The crash of the USS Connecticut goes beyond the potential for harmful radioactive leakage into the South China Sea, with potential damage to the surrounding nations including the fishing grounds of importance to the economy.  If the US continues to ramp up confrontation far from its home in the South China Sea, then a zone of conflict could spread to include all of East Asia.  Will this in any way benefit the region?  Does the region want to be turned into the same wreckage that the Middle East and North Africa are now after decades of US crusading for “democracy and liberty” there via bombs, sanctions and regime change operations?  That would be a tragic turn for the world’s most economically dynamic region.  Do the people of the region not realize this?  If not, the USS Connecticut should be a wake-up call.

But the people of the US should also think carefully about what is happening.  Perhaps the foreign policy elite of the US think it can revisit the U.S. strategy in WWII with devastation visited upon Eurasia leaving the US as the only industrial power standing above the wreckage.  Such are the benefits of an island nation.  But in the age of intercontinental weapons, could the US homeland expect to escape unscathed from such a conflict as it did in WWII?  The knot is being tied, as Krushchev wrote to Kennedy at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and if it is tied too tightly, then no one will be able to untie it.  The US is tying the knot far from its home this time half way around the world.  It should not tie that knot too tight.

counterpunch.org

“What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?”

Langston Hughes, “Harlem”, 1951

President Rodrigo Duterte changed his tune on ending the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) with the U.S., and on July 29^th signed its extension with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. But nothing in today’s world is unrelated to the Great Reset and the slow-down of trade, and the spike in shipping costs per container from China.

This potentially changes Manila’s future military relationship with the U.S., because if the Great Reset is successful at limiting Chinese economic growth in Europe and the Western Hemisphere, then U.S. policy on Chinese containment in the South China Sea would also be wound-down if avoiding war is also a priority. This would come about perhaps as a consequence of the expected and continued policy of power shut-offs and business closures in the name of combating a mystery illness which defies reason and policy.

The logic here is clear: if China could no longer export globally, it would need to increase both national consumption and also regional exports.

And so we ask – was this renewal of the VFA the last gasp of an American dream deferred? Manila has shown particular prescience in seeing which way the wind is blowing. Duterte continues his criticisms of China’s policy on its maritime borders and use of Philippine waters as it pleases, despite seeing the writing on the wall. But this is all part of the game. China’s absolute hegemony in the region is not a matter of if, but when. Perhaps it has already arrived, and it is only for vested interests and policy wonks to catch up to the new reality.

Lloyd Austin meets with Rodrigo Duterte at the Malacanang Palace in Manila, Philippines July 29, 2021. Robinson Ninal/Malacanang Presidential Photographers Division/Handout via REUTERS

U.S. policy is what we might call ‘unrealistic realism’, it knows it cannot contain China in China’s own backyard, but continues to play the tattered and worn cards it inherited from a bygone golden age of geostrategic unipolarity, arousing false hopes among some in Taiwan and Hong Kong. It uses the language of geostrategic realism, but fudges the numbers in its American style shareholder salesmanship (and not sober thinking) to sell a vision to vested parties of its military industrial complex.

There is so much buy-in at the level of the MIC that unreality is reality. In its own magical way, the U.S. appears to be believer in ‘any wish can come true if you wish it hard enough’. And through this belief in believing it continues to pressure China in China’s own backyard.

The U.S. believes it can leverage pressure, and extract divestment in Latin America or Europe.

The Great Reset and the dubious ‘B3W’ – Build Back Better World – are signs that U.S. policy on China has changed. The U.S. will use the pandemic with aim at depriving China of a consumer base. Freedom and markets no longer privilege the west, indeed it benefits as one would suspect it would, net producers like China. The solution then, is some kind of technocratic police state. Does that mean war with China is on the horizon?

Manila has no desire to be a strike zone for China’s massive PLA, but seeing that the U.S. wants desperately to buy a dream, Manila appears happy to oblige to sell it while it can. At least for now.

The VFA – A Dream Deferred?

The VFA has been in effect since 1999 and lays out the rules for thousands of American soldiers in the Philippines and also serves as the foundation for military exercises between the two countries.

Duterte had threatened not to renew the VFA on at least two prior occasions, with last week’s renewal being the outcome of more than six months of deliberation with the U.S. that began in early 2020, as American foreign policy commitments during its coming interregnum period would remain unclear. This interval also allowed Manila to engage in serious talks with Beijing on a number of issues. While it is rarely if ever made explicit, there is clearly an overt relationship between the details of bilateral trade and the allowance of hundreds of Chinese fishing ships to remain in the Philippines Exclusive Economic Zone one the one hand, and Duterte’s about face on VFA.

Similar threats were made in 2016 after frustration with the Obama administration’s deferred payment on a poverty relief program. The effect of such deferment was collective punishment for some of the country’s most vulnerable, simply for Manila’s aim of improved relations with China. Such relations are important for myriad reasons, but their sharing of the South China Sea and China’s military and economic might most certainly summarize most of them.

Philippine bases used by U.S. forces – Source, WaPo

The situation with American forces in the Philippines has roused anger and resentment from locals, with numerous rape cases and even a failed Supreme Court case in the country. All of these are seen through the lens of the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) which the country’s left, its Islamist, and its nationalist movements have all used successfully to win hearts and minds to their respective causes. Duterte adoption of this sentiment with his particular knack for national populism and off-the-cuff swagger, is strategic and at times even convincingly heartfelt.

Yet it is China’s rising power, both militarily and economically, and a conflict over where China’s territorial claim on the South China Sea begins and ends – with particular view of the Spratly Islands row – has greatly irritated Manila. The Philippine military’s top brass has largely been trained by the U.S., which also includes a ‘School of the Americas’ type of ideological education (indoctrination) aimed at inoculating the officer class from breaking with American interests, not by pledging allegiance to the U.S. in such an overt or vulgar manner, but rather by seeing the world’s divisions and priorities through an American lens.

The Philippines with its 109.5 million people has strategic importance to the U.S. as an iffy military ally in the region. But should a significant conflict explode, like a raisin in the sun, between the U.S. and China, Manila is sober in its awareness of its own likely extermination if it were to place itself as a strategic strike zone for the Chinese military.

Chinese President Xi Jinping shakes hands with Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte in Beijing, 2017. REUTERS

Manila’s establishment is content with Duterte’s multi-vectored foreign policy which features good relations with both the U.S. and China until now. But the western crisis that brought about the ‘Great Reset’ and its ‘Build Back Better World’ (B3W) will ultimately see the Philippines drift further into China’s permanent orbit.

Though Duterte finishes his six years and terms out in 2022, there is a consensus that he will be choosing his daughter Sara Duterte as his successor. It is likely that Manila’s elites would view this as a strong sign of stability and success of the multi-vectored policy, in light of the ‘love/hate’ relationships that the Philippines has with both China and the U.S. For the Philippine military to view this route favorably, they would insist on warm relations with the U.S.

It is a strange situation that the Philippines is indeed, that the national pastime is to wage relentless rhetorical war on the two countries which are closest to it.

And so, what happens to American dreams on controlling Asia when they are deferred? “Does it fester like a raisin in the sun, and then run?”

Belt & Road Initiative vs. Build Back Better World

Whenever the subject of the ‘Great Reset’ is broached, is about global supply lines, and supply line security. It’s also about the extent that global catastrophes, perhaps weather or perhaps sudden and mysterious pandemics, can be used as a pretext to close ports, to send port workers home, keep citizens home under threat of arrest as in Australia, and effectively shut-down supply lines.

For a number of years, there has been a widely held view that a war between the U.S. and China is all but an eventuality unless some further compromise can be struck. The Philippines has certainly flexed its own muscles in this period, showing both Beijing and Washington that it is a state which places its sovereignty front and center. Historically, Manila was under considerable pressure to bend to the will of Washington, and in return curried enough favor such that the U.S. is practically tied with Japan and China as the top importer of Philippine goods, making up some 15.2% of its total exports as of 2020.

But if global supply lines shrink in volume, then the Philippines looks forward to sustained trade in its region. Japan, China, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Malaysia make up about two-thirds of the entire export portfolio, meaning that not only is Manila decently insulated from the Great Reset slowdowns, but also increasingly reliant on China to provide regional security on the high seas and beyond.

And so it isn’t for nothing that B3W – Build Back Better World – Biden’s haphazardly organized ‘alternative’ to China’s Belt and Road Initiative was rolled out. But it’s also aiming far below the ambitions of Beijing, and has yet fully elaborate this with the kind of detail that China’s BRI has been. To wit, B3W simply rebrands that bizarre concoction of ‘economic development’ as defined by the IMF and remixed with the Sorosian NGO Newspeak and Newthink of globalized politically correct neo-imperialism received by the G7.

For example, if China succeeds in formalizing its control over the South China Sea, what would this really mean economically? If the U.S. no longer has the same access, if it must pay some additional premium to run shipping lines through this strategically significant body of water, then it actually compels the U.S. to change how it does business. And since the way the U.S. has done business with China is unsustainable for a number of reasons, reasons which so far have benefited China’s growth in recent decades, then what is the U.S.’s net benefit of challenging China in the South China Sea?

But the changes in shipping costs have already arrived, and it doesn’t appear that China has created that situation. Rather, it would suggest that the U.S. has engendered such a situation to arise, so that it can adjust beforehand to any changes that Beijing would later make unilaterally. It also may provoke a kind of ‘import substitution industrialization’ in the U.S., a longtime goal of the Trump administration which if carried on by the Biden administration would also mean that Trump’s primary foreign policy aim on trade was successful.

Like a Raisin in the Sun

The worst policy for the Philippines would be to prematurely line up with one power, and sacrifice whatever degree of sovereignty and the liberties implied with this, which it now has. Of course there are sacrifices made here, and gains made elsewhere. Perhaps security is a trade-off for sovereign liberties, but perhaps that cost is too great. After all, options in the geopolitical field are much harder to get back once they’ve been traded off, especially for something like security. The relationships built around security permeate all forms of economic and military life, even the security agencies themselves can become compromised, acting as little more than satellite agencies for the great power which ‘protects’ it.

The renewed VFA may be among the last that the Philippines signs, not because it hasn’t done well with a balanced multi-vectored policy which has used the U.S.-China great power struggle to its own strategic advantage, but because the U.S. may not desire to sustain a presence as a part of its regional policy. The U.S. empire is in a state of stinking like rotten meat, punctuated by significant explosions like the so-called ‘Great Reset’. This makes it volatile and prone to provoke conflicts it thinks it can win today, as opposed to conflicts it knows it will lose tomorrow. But a conflict with China in open military terms doesn’t appear in the cards, today or tomorrow, unless such a conflict takes place in Africa or Latin America.

If indeed a war between these great powers appeared likely in the Asia-Pacific region, it would be suicidal for Manila to align with a U.S. whose track record on both recent wars, but also wars in Asia even during its imperial zenith. The U.S. cannot win land wars in Eurasia. Final victory in Eurasia, for the U.S., has always been a dream deferred. It is as clear as day that Manila’s elite are aware of this, but they have no problem with that raisin in the sun, along the way to an eventual military pact with China.

Among his many offenses to the consciences of the press, the president stated “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.” (The full censored speech which can be read here.)

But what does that mean? What are illegal votes?

As the president lays out in that censored speech and in other locations over this past week, illegal votes means just that: votes garnered for one candidate or subtracted from another candidate through illegal means. The typical forms such illegal votes tend to take may be: 1) mail-in votes that arrived past legal deadlines and yet were counted anyway or had their time stamps changed by postal workers, 2) votes from dead people, 3) absentee votes from people who had moved from the states in registering their votes. There are others of course.

The single most important technique used in this entire business of vote fraud has come to light in the form of big tech-controlled voting machines and associated vote counting software which has come to dominate most elections around the world over the past 20 years which were exposed already 14 years ago in the 2006 documentary Hacking Democracy.

This is the system of fraud which General Flynn’s attorney Sidney Powell revealed on November 6 interview saying:

“They ran an algorithm to calculate votes they might need to come up with in specific areas. I think that explains what happened in Michigan where a computer glitch resulted in a change of votes of about 5500 in favor of President Trump just in one of 47 districts. All those districts need to be checked for that same “software glitch” that would change the result in Michigan dramatically”.

Powell went on to describe the hundreds of thousands of ballots appearing mysteriously in the middle of the night all in favor of Biden and described the software that had been developed a decade ago by CIA contractor and now whistle blower Dennis Montgomery named Hammer and Scorecard: “They were used by the forces and the democratic operatives that had access to these programs through the government access points that they have and used it illegally to change votes in this country. It’s got to be investigated probably by the president’s most trusted military intelligence officials who can get into the system and see what was done. But we do have some evidence that that is exactly what happened.”

This message was amplified by former NSA senior analyst/whistleblower Kirk Wiebe on November 7 when he described how these sister applications work together to both map the voting differentials across a system and then apply subtle changes of votes according to software smartcodes that flips votes from one candidate to another in microseconds according to the aims of the programmer.

If one is looking for smoking gun evidence that this has indeed happened, then one need look no further than the case of republican Governor Matt Bevin whose democratic opponent Andy Beshear received the same 560 votes that were removed from Bevin’s tally during a live CNN update last year.

Similar “glitches” have popped up across the nation in the 2020 elections and occurred long before 2019. In fact Whistleblower tapes released in 2015 by Federal Judge Murray Snow revealed that these programs had been used to flip Florida votes in favor of Obama in 2012 and the 600 million pages released by Montgomery implicate Brennan and Clapper in managing Hammer’s use since it was commandeered by the Obama deep state in 2009.

The Revealing Case of Dominion Systems

The best entry point into the corrupt world of faked elections run by today’s deep state can be found in the case study of Dominion voting Systems, a Canadian owned company based in Colorado which dominates the American elections landscape. Currently, Dominion’s software is used in 30 states and brags that it serviced 71 million voters in 1635 jurisdictions in the USA in 2016.

Among those states where this software runs the vote reading and counting, is included every single swing state now subject to recounts and court investigations such as Nevada, Arizona, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania.

On November 9, the Washington Examiner’s Bethany Blankley reported that “The Dominion Voting Systems, which has been used in multiple states where fraud has been alleged in the 2020 U.S. Election, was rejected three times by data communications experts from the Texas Secretary of State and Attorney General’s Office for failing to meet basic security standards.” Blankley cited Texas Secretary of State Ruth Hughs who rejected Dominions efforts to enter their state in 2019 since the systems were not “safe from fraudulent or unauthorized manipulation.”

Going further to demonstrate its partisan bias as a deep state weapon designed to overthrow Trump, Dominion is directly connected to the Clinton Foundation through the Clinton Global Initiative’s Delian Project. This project was created in 2014 and cites on their website:

“In 2014, Dominion Voting committed to providing emerging and post-conflict democracies with access to voting technology through its philanthropic support to the DELIAN Project, as many emerging democracies suffer from post-electoral violence due to the delay in the publishing of election results. Over the next three years, Dominion Voting will support election technology pilots with donated Automated Voting Machines (AVM), providing an improved electoral process, and therefore safer elections.”

Where the Clinton Foundation describes the “emerging democracies” who will benefit from Dominion’s generosity, they are actually referring to nations which have been targeted for color revolution-led destruction and reconstruction under the image of Soros’ dystopic idea of a technocratic world order. Over the past decade, Dominion has donated over $50 000 directly to the Clinton Foundation for this project and its former owner William Kennard was an Obama appointee as ambassador to the European Union (2009-2013) and was earlier a Clinton appointee when he headed the Federal Communications Commission from 1997-2001.

Moreover, when shopping for a D.C. lobbyist, Dominion had to look no further than Pelosi’s office when it hired Nadeam Elshami (Pelosi’s former Chief of Staff) in 2019.

Before jumping on the “it’s divine payback for the republicans who used the same tactics to put Bush and Cheney in power in 2000 and 2004”, it is important to be reminded that this goes far beyond party politics and strikes at the heart of the supranational system of fascism which operates above national politics. This is a supranational system that Trump has resisted since entering office when he stated that “the future belongs to the patriots not to the globalists”, and this is the system that has spread its tentacles throughout every part of the world over the past century. Sidney Powell here hit the nail on the head by saying: “they’ve used it against other entities in other countries. It’s just been turned recently against our own citizens here to change election results.”

The Case of the Philippines

As stated earlier, Dominion’s Delian Project is a reminder of the Soros-Clinton “democracy building” operations which have penetrated deeply into nations of the former soviet nations and has made an embarrassing mess out of the Philippines, where its subsidiary Smartmatic (run by arch globalist Lord Mark Malloch Brown) was revealed to be at the heart of vast vote fraud in the 2010, 2013 and 2016 elections.

When Soros pawn Benigno Aquino III was declared victorious under the 2010 elections despite a lack of popularity among the people and a mass of voting glitches, forensic analysis of Smartmatic’s voting machines was conducted by a team led by Computer specialist Al Vitangcol III and found that all systems were easily hackable through several paths: 1) hacking the memory card to infuse negative votes for one candidate or positive votes for another, 2) using the console ports and USB ports at the back of the counting machines which Smartmatic claims only existed for diagnostic purposes but which Vitangcol proved could allow a regular laptop to connect and influence the votes and software with a regular serial cable and requiring no passwords or usernames. Finally, the hacking of servers themselves containing the transmission of electoral information as was the case in the 2020 USA elections was revealed to be remarkably easy for skilled hackers on Vitangcol’s team.

The results of these and other studies conducted on Smartmatic’s systems angered President Duterte sufficiently to demand in May 2019 that the Philippine government “dispose of that Smartmatic and look for a new one that is free of fraud” giving them 3 years to accomplish the task.

So far we have established the essentials of the technical side of the vote fraud which has occurred both in the USA and internationally, and we have brushed up against some of the higher agents and operatives running the game from the top… however we have not yet begun to actually look at the beast itself in its full ugliness.

This is an exercise we will do in gory detail in the next installment which will introduce the figure of Lord Mark Malloch Brown as a leading hand behind the British effort to not only undo the Presidency of Donald Trump, but undo the republic itself and the system of sovereign nation states everywhere.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

“Just who put together these ‘international’ organizations?”

“Has America ever been sanctioned/punished by the UN and if not, then why?”

“If America’s government is so inherently (as my opponent stated) corrupt why would an international government be just?”

“By what means is some armyless ‘organization’ going to ‘punish’ the world’s only hyperpower?”

Those statements were the jabs that were winning me the fight through the first few rounds, I felt very good in my position, until I let my guard down and exposed my pessimistic glass jaw. He saw his opening and said something like “well if using international courts won’t work, how can smaller countries fight Washington? What’s the winning strategy Mr. Know-it-all?”. This was the hook that got me. In hindsight I should have been prepared with some talking points to answer this type of question, but I stood there for the longest two seconds of my life and deflected to another issue acknowledging that little can be done. To be honest I am not sure if I lost that debate, but it sure felt like I was crushed in that one moment. That is why I want to take the time to correct my mistakes and speak about what smaller countries can actually do to fight “the Global Hegemon” that the Alternative Media is so very sick of.

First, one big condition…

The following arguments assume that the government of some nation/territory actually have the power, will, and a quorum of loyal manpower to actually take action. This means that arguments like “Well Washington has half the Indian government on its payroll” do not apply as we assume that the vast majority of the governing bodies are working for the interest of their state.

This also excludes military options like using Iran’s strategy of having a navy of small cheap boats that hit hard but are expendable. Ultimately, the best small countries can hope for against the U.S. militarily is to just hold out until they get tired and go home, i.e. Vietnam.

This article also assumes that smaller nations want to resist, many of them do not.

Cameras are cheaper than guns

Although making high quality media content is certainly not cheap from the standpoint of the average citizen’s wallet, on a governmental scale it is vastly cheaper than maintaining a powerful 21st century military. Furthermore, the relative costs of making said media have drastically gone down as we have entered the digital age. For about the cost of an American car, one get can the cameras, lighting and a good computer to put together very clean almost pro Youtube news content. At best, the value of a car could equip one and a half U.S. soldiers. What could a small nation use better, one fully equipped and one partially equipped infantryman or the means to produce media content on a daily basis?

If you look at a breakdown of the cost of news media, state or privately funded, in a nation vs. the cost of their military you can see that making big time news isn’t exactly cheap but it is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of running a real military.

If you will forgive my bias, it must be pointed out that spending wise RT is completely overwhelmed by the combined budgets of NATO’s news media outlets and yet it has achieved massive success on Youtube with over 10 billion views and is able, at times, to even shift the media narrative abroad. This is a massive achievement for Russia. The fact that Russia sent Coronavirus aid to America would have never made news headlines 15 years ago, that would have been kept quiet. Now, CNN, Fox and the others had no choice but to acknowledge it and try to at least spin it in a negative way.Weak nations have the advantage that with the right ideas, hard work, and especially promotion, they can afford to compete with the big boys. On a military front the battle is simply hopeless. However, if managed correctly a few million dollars per year is all it takes for a smaller government to create its own source of Soft Power, that could compete with the West. Media costs millions, militaries cost billions, the choice is obvious for poorer countries.

In a world of nuclear standoff Soft Power is king and thankfully for smaller countries News Media has become very affordable and with the right talent\strategy it can have a real effect even against vastly “superior” opponents.

You cannot be an empire without a hit movie

Although this is very similar to the previous point, outside of the West very few are willing to acknowledge just how critical Entertainment Media is in relation to Soft Power. News Media sends a more conscious blunt message, but it is the video games and films that really impact the subconscious of the audience and are probably more influential in the long run. The fantasy worlds that the Entertainment Media builds skew our perspective of our own real world towards the creator’s liking.

As someone who works in the Russian media I can say that virtually no one in power understands this here. Their perspective of how to influence other countries remains a matter of men in suits, either reading the news off a teleprompter or speaking to selected dignitaries in broken English at very official sounding elite forums. Every Russian child is still raised from the cradle to the grave on Hollywood movies and AAA video games so if someone is winning the information war in the human subconscious, they are winning from somewhere in California not behind the walls of the Kremlin.

I have enraged many Russians personally by pointing out the fact that Russia will never be made “Great Again” until it is able to produce a major motion picture with international success. The world is connected to American culture via Hollywood and thanks to its influence a certain percent of young people in every country on Earth see themselves as more American than anything else, and are willing to act politically on this belief. Hollywood movies project an American message the world over that is heard loud and clear in the subconscious, where as Russians are still relying on a few college students to read Dostoyevsky and convert to Orthodoxy.

Powerful nations produce powerful media, although movies and AAA video games are vastly more expensive than news (but still way cheaper than militaries), smaller nations could fund these type of projects to present their own message. Smash hit videogames have come from countries that are politically impotent. This is an important Soft Power front that is winnable for any nation with the willpower to try.

Loyalty is bought, so buy it

One of the main reasons the USSR lost the Cold War is that the Soviets were wooed by the Materialism of Hollywood movies. The idea of forcing an ascetic lifestyle onto the elite and entire nation didn’t work out very well. Moscow was unwilling to pay its elite, so Washington took their place and this applies to every country on Earth. If you do not pay your men, be they soldiers, police, journalists, big businessmen, ministers etc., the the Global Hegemon is happy to buy them out from under you.

Most people like the culture they are raised in, most people want to be good, but when given the choice between a lifetime of poverty to serve the nation and an upper middle class salary you know what many of them are going to pick.

Washington better than anyone understands this. If you serve DC you live very well. Smaller nations need to get it through their heads that if they want to “resist” then they are going to have to pay their people to do it.

The people working in the previous examples of News and Entertainment Media are exactly the type that needs to be paid well, because their treason could completely crush any attempts of the nation to achieve anything Soft Power wise.

Paying your men well is a key means of fighting a greater power. If you allow others to buy influence in your country, that is your fault, not theirs.

The Big “Why”

The basis of philosophy, at least from a Western perspective, is asking the question “why?” and it is very important for governments, especially the smaller poorer ones, to have answers to this eternal question.

Small African nations with many nationalities and tribes with borders drawn by colonizers need to answer the question of why they are the legitimate rulers and why a member of the populace should see himself as Nigerian and not Yoruba tribesman.

South American countries like Venezuela need to explain to the population why they should continue to resist America even under sanctions and other punishments. Wouldn’t submitting to the Hegemon make life easier, why suffer? Suffering demands justification for itself.

Countries with growing new ideological movements like Hungary and Russia need to justify it is worth fighting over putting the prefix “Il” in front of “Liberal Democracy”.

A smaller weaker nation MUST explain itself itself to the population. If the logic is tight and the public understands and agrees with it than the nation will stay on its feet even under hard times, sanctions or Color Revolution attempts.

Trolling costs you nothing

Did anyone at all know who the President of the Philippines was until Duterte came around? Of course not. Because they were not provocative trolls like Duterte is. He swears, uses violent threats and issued a shoot-to-kill anti-drug dealing policy. Love him or hate him, he gets attention and the main thing we can see is that trolling comes cheap. Duterte has built a cult of personality for himself by saying what a lot of people are thinking and shocking those who don’t agree with his worldview.

Popular charismatic leaders are much harder to overthrow by the Hegemon. Public stunts, trolling and other forms of shenanigans don’t cost much but can export messages and images that work in foreign countries and build the internal strength needed for the leader to bear the brunt of Color Revolution tactics. Sure, you may hate Duterte or find him a monster, but you know who he is and you now know what the biggest problem in the Philippines is officially. That’s not too bad of a PR campaign for a shockingly poor nation.

David can only fight Goliath with soft power

The sling that is needed to deal with the global Goliath is Soft Power, it is simply cheaper and more manageable by smaller nations and their leadership. If one is going to side against the U.S. on certain issues they need to be prepared to fight… from a distance… and on the cheap.

Jason CASTANEDA

As President Rodrigo Duterte moves to boot US troops from Philippine soil through the cancellation of a key defense pact, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is quietly moving in to take their place.

Duterte’s recent decision to abrogate the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), which allowed the US to rotate troops and position equipment in the country, is opening the way for China to solidify its competing strategic position in the country.

That’s at least according to early findings of investigations into China’s undercover and illicit activities, ranging reputedly from espionage to surveillance to money laundering, now being spearheaded by Philippine Senator Richard Gordon.

Those probes have included scrutiny of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens now employed in the burgeoning online casino sector, known locally as Philippine Offshore Gaming Operations (POGOs), many of which are clustered close to key military camps and strategic bases in Manila, the national capital.

Gordon has claimed that the POGOS have been infiltrated by PLA soldiers for intelligence gathering and other activities. Those claims were validated when two card-carrying PLA members attached to a POGO were were arrested in a shooting incident in Manila late last month.

The Senate investigations have revealed a tangled web of official corruption and conspiracy which has allowed countless Chinese citizens, including allegedly between 2,000-3,000 PLA soldiers, to illegally and secretly reside in the country.

Under the so-called “pastillas” scheme, exposed by whistleblower Allison “Alex” Chiong of the Philippine Bureau of Immigration (BI), Chinese nationals pay roughly 10,000 pesos (US$200) as a “service fee” for special treatment and ease of entry into the country.

While around $40 of that fee goes to immigration officers, the rest is allegedly spread among senior officials and other allies of the president who oversee the alleged syndicate run out of Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport.

The money, according to the whistleblower, is rolled inside a sheet of bond paper, similar to how the Philippine milk candy delicacy “pastillas” is packed. That, the investigations claim, has paved the way for so-called Chinese “immersion missions” by PLA members.

Public anger against the POGOs has recently spiked, fueled by the Duterte government’s belated imposition of a travel ban on Chinese citizens amid the coronavirus outbreak that started its deadly global spread in late January.

Many believe that wayward officials who benefit from the POGOs and import of illegal Chinese workers played an outsized role in the decision to allow thousands of Chinese citizens, including from Wuhan, the outbreak’s epicenter, to enter the country even after Beijing quarantined all of Hubei province.

Senator Panfilo Lacson, chairman of the committee on national defense and security and a former police chief, said that he has recently received information from security agencies claiming that thousands of undercover PLA members are engaged in “immersion missions” in the country, with Chinese spies operating under the guise of POGO workers.

“The intelligence community should exert extra effort to gather information in this regard,” Lacson recently said.

Lacson, Gordon and Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon have all recently warned that China aims to take advantage of the new and growing security vacuum caused by Duterte’s recent abrogation of the VFA with the US, a move that has undermined the legal status of the two sides’ 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT).

The US and Philippines stage thousands of bilateral military activities and exercises each year, including war games that include mock invasions of islands that aim to send a strong signal to China in the South China Sea.

“That may confirm a yet unvalidated report that a good number of PLA members are on ‘immersion mission’ in several parts of the country, although the reason for it is still unclear,” Lascon said.

“The police as well as the intelligence community should lose no time in exerting serious efforts to authenticate the discovered PLA using sources independent of the Chinese government, for obvious reasons,” warned the senator.

Lascon has also claimed that 47 Chinese individuals recently smuggled US$446 million into the Philippines over a recent five month span, whereby the Chinese money launderers paid and made connections with bent Philippine officials.

Senator Gordon, long seen as a Duterte ally, has warned of large-scale money laundering going hand-in-hand with a potential “fifth column” infiltration of Chinese security forces.

“There is tolerance. I don’t know where it is coming from,” said Gordon, implying the Beijing-friendly president is partly responsible for the threat, according to media reports.

“The shenanigans of what we see here, all happened because of the policy decision to allow overseas gaming operations in our country,” said Drilon in directly blaming the Duterte administration.

“What is happening in our country is apparently rooted in the very presence of POGOs run by the Chinese. If there were no POGOs, all of these nefarious activities would have no purpose,” he added.

Fears of systematic Chinese espionage activities were sparked last year when netizens shared images showing the suspicious proximity of Chinese-run POGOs to security and law enforcement agencies in Manila.

Those include POGOs situated near the Philippine Air Force and Navy headquarters, Philippine National Police headquarters at Camp Crame, and Camp Aguinaldo which hosts the Philippine Army and National Defense Department offices.

“When you already see many people [at the POGOs], who are always there…it’s very easy for all these [Chinese] people to perhaps shift their activities to spying,” Philippine Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said last year. “They are near [military facilities].”

Philippine National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon, meanwhile, raised alarms last year over the entry of thousands of undocumented Chinese as a potential security “threat”, including through possible PLA surveillance and espionage.

“You’d also start getting worried when a whole building, condominium, tower is occupied by only one nationality where you would not be able to guard all their activities,” the national security adviser said. “Some unwelcome activities could transpire there so we need to prevent those.”

It’s not clear yet that Duterte’s pro-China administration will undertake any concrete measures to address these concerns and reputed threats.

“He [Duterte] told me…We really need the funds from those [POGO] operations,” presidential spokesperson Salvador Panelo said amid an escalating call for their closures. “Because the money we get from whatever [Chinese] sources is for the government, so the government can use that in any undertaking.”

asiatimes.com

On Feb. 7, the Philippine president notified the USA that a 180 day period has begun in which time American military personal will have to evacuate the territory with Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin stating “the deputy chief of mission of the embassy of the united states has received the notice of termination of the Visiting Forces Agreement. As a diplomatic courtesy there will be no further factual announcements following this self explanatory development.”

Why America’s neocons have been caught blindsided by this announcement remains a mystery as Duterte has threatened to cancel this treaty since his first weeks in office and even told RT on January 24 that “America is not the Philippines and the Philippines is not America. It ain’t that way anymore and I refuse to dovetail under American foreign policy”.

This announcement puts yet another wrench in the gears of those agencies attempting to run a war plan against China as part of the Obama-era Pivot to Asia and broader full spectrum dominance agenda with a vast military infrastructure spread out around China’s perimeter. Some of the points of tension built up carefully over the years around China (any of which acting as a potential spark plug to nuclear war) include North Korea, Japan’s territorial conflict with China, Malaysia and the Philippines’ dispute with China over the resource-rich South China Sea.

With the killing of the VFA, over 300 military engagements will now be flushed as will America’s capacity to rotate U.S. troops through Philippines military bases. Its death also brings Duterte one step closer to ending the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement signed under Obama-clone Benigno Aquino III in 2014. In 2015, while leading a fight against the EDCA, Citizen National Guard founder Butch Valdez was the first analyst to state that the U.S. military installations had likely stockpiled nuclear weapons aimed. But stated that U.S. bases “may very possibly be silos of nuclear armed medium-long range rockets aimed at China.” In recent months Duterte joined Valdez in this analysis.

In March 2019, Philippines Secretary of Defense and long-time Duterte collaborator with Delfin Lorenzana stated to EIR magazine:

“We are in striking distance of Chinese medium range missiles. If U.S. forces would be stationed here, if there is a conflict between the United States and China, then we are a fair target by the Chinese.”

Although the surface excuse used to justify this act has been the American revocation of Senator Dela Rosa’s visa, the true reasons for this break from American military doctrine go much deeper as alluded to by Valdez. Dela Rosa is the former national police chief who headed Duterte’s drug war and is accused by western neo liberal circles of not respecting the human rights of the Philippines’ powerful narco terrorists- 12 000 of whom have died since the crackdown began, and which Trump has supported enthusiastically  on multiple occasions.

Trump has also separated himself loudly from war hawks in administration by giving his full support to Duterte’s decision to end the VFA stating “well I never minded that very much, to be honest. We helped the Philippines very much. We helped them defeat ISIS… I don’t really mind if they would like to do that. It will save a lot of money. My views are different from others.”

The deeper reasons for the ending of the VFA and expanded U.S. military access to the Philippines has more to do with the fact that it has become clearly evident that the American agenda for war with China over any number of Pacific hotspots would result in any host country working with America to be wiped off the map in such war. The fact that the U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Pact signed in 1951 is still active to this day, makes American military activity in the Philippines ever more dangerous. As Duterte’s enemy Senator Panfilo Lacson lamented, killing the VFA would reduce the 1951 treaty “to a mere paper treaty as far as the U.S. is concerned.”

In his EIR interview, Lorenzana went onto describe the danger of Duterte’s assassination by U.S. neocons who are in opposition to the positive relationship Duterte shares with President Trump, and also the importance of the Philippines’ turn towards a pro-China/Russia alliance since Duterte’s inauguration:

“We have been cautioned by our friends that the neocons might try to take out the President. Even President Duterte talked about that several times in his public speeches. They are watching what our President does, that if he does things that align with their interests, as the neocons see it, or if President Duterte gets closer with the Chinese, Russia and India. But China said they don’t want a military alliance with anybody. They want to have trade relations with everybody. They want to help people to improve themselves so that we can trade.”

Indeed, on November 2018, the Philippines signed onto China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and Duterte has invoked a Build Build Build strategy which relies heavily on Chinese investment into Philippines infrastructure. In his RT interview, Duterte stated “I want new open fronts with Russia and China, we have an increase in trade and commerce. It’s robust”.

Since 2016, China and the Philippines have signed historic joint resource development treaties across the South China Sea which American geopoliticians would rather see limited to a zone of conflict. Other Beijing-funded projects which synergize with the BRI include the Railway link from America’s former Clark Base to the new coastal city of Subic (another former U.S. Base), the creation of New Clark City which will relieve the population pressure from Manilla, two bridges of Pasig River in Manila and Chico Rivers, Pump irrigation projects in the north, the New Centennial Water Source-Kaliwa dam and the Philippine National Railway South Long Haul which will soon begin construction. With an aim to reduce poverty from its current 26% to 13% by 2022 while ending the drug pandemic which has resulted in a vast criminal infrastructure covertly supported by western powers for decades, Duterte said that this new alliance with China would usher in “a golden age for Infrastructure”.

The first President to start this pro-China policy (after the western-backed color revolution coup which toppled Ferdinand Marcos in 1986) was Gloria Arroyo who led the nation from 2001-2010). Arroyo initiated a historic $8 billion trade deal with China in 2004 after removing Philippine troops from Iraq to the ire of Dick Cheney and John Bolton. Arroyo recently gave a speech eloquently expressing her understanding of the Philippines’ future in this new paradigm of win-win cooperation: “China is correct in striving for partnership and growth and development with its neighbors. This enlightened attitude provides a foundation for continued friendship between China and the world and indeed within China and the Philippines.”

As long as true economic development and long-term thinking drives all discussion of bilateral relationships, rather than empty talk of “good governance” and “free trade” so popular among shallow technocratic circles today, then a new age of peace and cooperation for all nations under a multipolar world order may yet occur.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

The Philippines are a poor troubled island nation that is starting to get its house in order thanks mostly to a powerful charismatic central figure, but if we look at the country through the lens of “Geopolitics 101” then we can see that this nation has more value than one would think due to its location.

Souce: Foreign Policy Research Institute

If we can believe the maps of U.S. base locations presented to us via various forms of media then we can see that even without Manila’s blessing the U.S. still dominates the Pacific Ocean as a whole. Total control of the Atlantic and the Pacific thanks to the Allied victory in WWII has been very good for America to say the least and they need to continue to maintain it. The thing that makes losing the Philippines bad for the U.S. is that it could seriously erode the U.S.’s ability to create a naval blockade around China.

Although not stated explicitly one of the key reasons for China’s Belt and Road Initiative is the fact that at any moment Washington could completely cut off China’s sea trade. One of the reasons why Chinese goods have come to dominate the global market is due to the rise of cheap shipping costs. Loading a massive boat with cheap goods allows China to make things on the other half of the world for far less, than American workers can in their own country. But without waterways (cheap shipping), the Chinese advantage would be smashed and China as we know it today could be shattered.

The Philippines are located in the region of a potential Naval blockade, meaning that without them suffocating the Chinese from a naval standpoint becomes much more difficult and perhaps impossible. Not surprisingly, Duterte has been accused of making a pivot to China so perhaps his motivations for getting rid of the U.S. are not entirely morality based, but then again as a weak country the only way for the Philippines to matter is by playing great powers against themselves (or perhaps Chinese bribe money is sweeter). It is very possible that for this group of islands to have any sovereignty it needs bigger players to be fighting over it.

It may be too early to say because of Duterte’s bold move “the dominos are falling” but this is not the only nation that is trying to or has successfully removed U.S./NATO forces. The Kyrgyz ended foreign operations in their country most of which used their largest airport in Bishkek. (On a personal note it was very odd and humiliating to see an international airport with more foreign military planes in Bishkek than civilian, there were also many accusations of bad behavior towards locals including one alleged murder). Surprisingly even the Iraqi government which was essentially built by the U.S. has asked their forces to leave the country after the assassination of Iranian General Soleimani. Even the Mainstream Media admits that tens of thousands of Japanese have protested against U.S. bases in other country (again due to alleged abuse of locals). However, the government of Japan has made no formal requests to have U.S. forces leave, but quietly the constitutional ban on having a real military is being worn away by Tokyo as it has seen its first round of military expansion in decades.

In order for the U.S. to maintain its global military presence it needs to take a look at cases in which occupation has been seen as a positive by locals – South Korea. No matter what one’s personal feelings are about the North and South, the simple fact of the matter is that the Korean Peninsula is an all or nothing game. If the U.S. were to give up on Seoul then the North (with Chinese support) would come down and “unify” the nation. Many South Koreans are happy with the status quo and without the USA being around their lives are going to change quickly violently (and from their perspective) for the worse. This American necessity is not felt in Iraq, the Philippines or Kyrgyzstan, but if Washington wants to remain in these places they need to create it. The Cold War is over and America’s classic strategy of “side with Capitalism and you’ll get jeans and cars” is longer an option as the Chinese and to a lesser extent the Russians can also offer up plenty of Materialism.

A key factor in the Cold War division of the world was ideology. This allowed the U.S. and USSR to put foreign bases all over the planet. The collapse of America’s ideological strength will continue to allow uppity nations to one-by-one say good-bye forever. “The Russian are bad” or “we’ll give you Materialism” are no longer enough to justify foreign occupation. Washington needs to come up with a new ideological strategy and the Russians and Chinese need to be ready for this and at the same time continue to chip away at the failing Monopolar World. When locals see people they perceive as foreigners dominated their country, walking around with guns and occasionally abusing locals there needs to be some sort of grand justification for this.

In the Philippines there is not such justification. There is no reason from Manila’s or the man-on-the-street’s perspective that American troops should be in their country. The ideological erosion of American values after the U.S. victory in the Cold War must be stopped if the U.S. wants to remain the only global hyperpower.

For a decade and a half, the U.S. Army waged war on fierce tribal Muslims in a remote land. Sound familiar?

As it happens, that war unfolded half a world away from the Greater Middle East and more than a century ago in the southernmost islands of the Philippines. Back then, American soldiers fought not the Taliban, but the Moros, intensely independent Islamic tribesmen with a similarly storied record of resisting foreign invaders. Precious few today have ever heard of America’s Moro War, fought from 1899 to 1913, but it was, until Afghanistan, one of America’s longest sustained military campaigns.

Popular thinking assumes that the U.S. wasn’t meaningfully entangled in the Islamic world until Washington became embroiled in the Islamist Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, both in the pivotal year of 1979. It simply isn’t so. How soon we forget that the Army, which had fought prolonged guerrilla wars against tribal Native Americans throughout the nineteenth century, went on — often led by veterans of those Indian Wars — to wage a counterinsurgency war on tribal Islamic Moros in the Philippine Islands at the start of the new century, a conflict that was an outgrowth of the Spanish-American War.

That campaign is all but lost to history and the collective American memory. A basic Amazon search for “Moro War,” for instance, yields just seven books (half of them published by U.S. military war colleges), while a similar searchfor “Vietnam War” lists no less than 10,000 titles. Which is curious. The war in the Southern Philippines wasn’t just six years longer than conventional American military operations in Vietnam, but also resulted in the awarding of 88 Congressional Medals of Honor and produced five future Army chiefs of staff. While the insurgency in the northern islands of the Philippines had fizzled out by 1902, the Moro rebels fought on for another decade. As Lieutenant Benny Foulois — later a general and the “father” of Army aviation — reflected, “The Filipino insurrection was mild compared to the difficulties we had with the Moros.”

Here are the relevant points when it comes to the Moro War (which will sound grimly familiar in a twenty-first-century forever-war context): the United States military shouldn’t have been there in the first place; the war was ultimately an operational and strategic failure, made more so by American hubris; and it should be seen, in retrospect, as (using a term General David Petraeus applied to our present Afghan War) the nation’s first “generational struggle.”

More than a century after the U.S. Army disengaged from Moroland, Islamist and other regional insurgencies continue to plague the southern Philippines. Indeed, the post-9/11 infusion of U.S. Army Special Forces into America’s former colony should probably be seen as only the latest phase in a 120-year struggle with the Moros. Which doesn’t portend well for the prospects of today’s “generational struggles” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and parts of Africa.

Welcome to Moroland

Soldiers and officers streaming into what they dubbed “Moroland” at the turn of the century might as well have been entering Afghanistan in 2001-2002. As a start, the similarity between the Moro islands and the Afghan hinterlands is profound. Both were enormous. The Moro island of Mindanao alone is larger than Ireland. The more than 369 southern Philippine islands also boasted nearly impassable, undeveloped terrain — 36,000 square miles of jungle and mountains with just 50 miles of paved roads when the Americans arrived. So impenetrable was the landscape that soldiers called remote areas the “boondocks” — a corruption of the Tagalog word bundok — and it entered the American vernacular.

The Moros (named for the Muslim Moors ejected from Spain in 1492) were organized by family, clan, and tribe. Islam, which had arrived via Arab traders 1,000 years earlier, provided the only unifying force for the baker’s dozen of cultural-linguistic groups on those islands. Intertribal warfare was endemic but more than matched by an historic aversion to outside invaders. In their three centuries of rule in the Philippines, the Spanish never managed more than a marginal presence in Moroland.

There were other similarities. Both Afghans and Moros adhered to a weapons culture. Every adult male Moro wore a blade and, when possible, sported a firearm. Both modern Afghans and nineteenth-century Moros often “used” American occupiers as a convenient cudgel to settle tribal feuds. The Moros even had a precursor to the modern suicide bomber, a “juramentado” who ritualistically shaved his body hair and donned white robes before fanatically charging to his death in blade-wielding fury against American troops. So fearful of them and respectful of their incredible ability to weather gunshot wounds were U.S. soldiers that the Army eventually replaced the standard-issue .38 caliber revolver with the more powerful Colt .45 pistol.

When, after defeating the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay and forcing the quick surrender of the garrison there, the U.S. annexed the Philippines via the 1898 Treaty of Paris, the Moros weren’t consulted. Spanish rule had always been tenuous in their territories and few Moros had even heard of Paris. They certainly hadn’t acceded to American rule.

Early on, U.S. Army officers deployed to Moroland contributed to the locals’ sense of independence. General John Bates, eager to focus on a daunting Filipino uprising on the main islands, signed an agreement with Moro tribal leaders pledging that the U.S. would not meddle with their “rights and dignities” or “religious customs” (including slavery). Whatever his intentions, that agreement proved little more than a temporary expedient until the war in the north was won. That Washington saw the relationship with those tribal leaders as analogous to its past ones with “savage” Native American tribes was lost on the Moros.

Though the Bates agreement held only as long as was convenient for American military and political leaders, it was undoubtedly the best hope for peace in the islands. The limited initial U.S. objectives in Moroland — like the similarly constrained goals of the initial CIA/Special Forces invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 — were so much wiser than the eventual expansive, futile goals of control, democratization, and Americanization in both conflicts. U.S. Army officers and civilian administrators couldn’t countenance for long Moro (and later Afghan) practices. Most advocated the full abrogation of the Bates agreement. The result was war.

Leadership by Personality: Different Officers, Views, and Strategies 

The pacification of Moroland — like that in the “war on terror” — was run mostly by young officers in remote locales. Some excelled, others failed spectacularly. Yet even the best of them couldn’t alter the strategic framework of imposing “democracy” and the “American way” on a distant foreign populace. Many did their best, but due to the Army’s officer rotation system, what resulted was a series of disconnected, inconsistent, alternating strategies to impose American rule in Moroland.

When the Moros responded with acts of banditry and random attacks on American sentries, punitive military expeditions were launched. In the first such instance, General Adna Chaffee (later Army chief of staff) gave local Moro tribal leaders a two-week ultimatum to turn over the murderers and horse thieves. Understandably unwilling to accept American sovereignty over a region their Spanish predecessors had never conquered, they refused — as they would time and again in the future.

Colonel Frank Baldwin, who led the early campaign, applied brutal, bloody tactics (that would prove familiar indeed in twenty-first-century Afghanistan) to tame the Moros. Some younger Army officers disagreed with his approach, however. One, Captain John Pershing, complained that Baldwin “wanted to shoot the Moros first and give them the olive branch afterwards.”

Over the next 13 years of rotating commanders, there would be an internal bureaucratic battle between two prevailing schools of thought as to how best to pacify the restive islands — the very same struggle that would plague the post-9/11 “war on terror” military. One school believed that only harsh military responses would ever cow the warlike Moros. As General George Davis wrote in 1902, “We must not forget that power is the only government that [the Moros] respect,” a sentiment that would pervade the book that became the U.S. Army’s bible when it came to the twenty-first-century “Arab mind.”

Others, best personified by Pershing, disagreed. Patiently dealing with Moro leaders man-to-man, maintaining a relatively light military footprint, and accepting even the most “barbaric” local customs would, these mavericks thought, achieve basic U.S. goals with far less bloodshed on both sides. Pershing’s service in the Philippines briefly garnered attention during the 2016 presidential campaign when candidate Donald Trump repeated a demonstrably false story about how then-Captain John Pershing (future commanding general of all U.S. forces in World War I) — “a rough, rough guy” — had once captured 50 Muslim “terrorists,” dipped 50 bullets in pig’s blood, shot 49 of them, and set the sole survivor loose to spread the tale to his rebel comrades. The outcome, or moral of the story, according to Trump, was that “for 25 years, there wasn’t a problem, OK?”

Well, no, actually, the Philippine insurgency dragged on for another decade and a Muslim-separatist rebellion continues in those islands to this day.

In reality, “Black Jack” Pershing was one of the less brutal commanders in Moroland. Though no angel, he learned the local dialect and traveled unarmed to distant villages to spend hours chewing betel nut (which had a stimulating effect similar to modern Somali khat) and listening to local problems. No doubt Pershing could be tough, even vicious at times. Still, his instinct was always to negotiate first and only fight as a last resort.

When General Leonard Wood took over in Moroland, the strategy shifted. A veteran of the Geronimo campaign in the Apache Wars and another future Army chief of staff — a U.S. Army base in Missouri is named after him — he applied the scorched earth tactics of his Indian campaigns against the Moros, arguing that they should be “thrashed” just as America’s Indians had been. He would win every single battle, massacring tens of thousands of locals, without ever quelling Moro resistance.   

In the process, he threw out the Bates agreement, proceeded to outlaw slavery, imposed Western forms of criminal justice, and — to pay for the obligatory American-style roads, schools, and infrastructure improvements — imposed new taxes on the Moros whose tribal leaders saw all of this as a direct attack on their social, political, and religious customs. (It never occurred to Wood that his taxation-without-representation model was also inherently undemocratic or that a similar policy had helped catalyze the American Revolution.)

The legal veneer for his acts would be a provincial council, similar to the American Coalition Provisional Authority that would rule Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion. That unelected body included Wood himself (whose vote counted twice), two other Army officers, and two American civilians. In his arrogance, Wood wrote to the American governor of the Philippines, future President William Howard Taft: “All that is necessary to bring the Moro into line and to start him ahead is a strong policy and vigorous enforcement of the law.” How wrong he would be.

Career advancement was Leonard Wood’s raison d’être, while knowledge about or empathy for the Moro people never ranked high on his list of priorities. One of his subordinate commanders, Major Robert Bullard — future commander of the 1st Infantry Division in World War I — noted that Wood exhibited “a sheer lack of knowledge of the people, of the country… He seemed to want to do everything himself without availing himself of any information from others.”

His tactical model was to bombard fortified Moro villages — “cottas” — with artillery, killing countless women and children, and then storm the walls with infantrymen. Almost no prisoners were ever taken and casualties were inevitably lopsided. Typically, in a campaign on the island of Jolo, 1,500 Moros (2% of the island’s population) were killed along with 17 Americans. When the press occasionally caught wind of his massacres, Wood never hesitated to lie, omit, or falsify reports in order to vindicate his actions.

When his guard came down, however, he could be open about his brutality. In a macabre prelude to the infamous U.S. military statement in the Vietnam era (and its Afghan War reprise) that “it became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it,” Wood asserted: “While these measures may appear harsh, it is the kindest thing to do.” Still, no matter how aggressive the general was, his operations never pacified the proud, intransigent Moros. When he finally turned over command to General Tasker Bliss, the slow-boiling rebellion was still raging.

His successor, another future Army chief (and current Army base namesake), was a far more cerebral and modest man, who later would help found the Army War College. Bliss preferred Pershing’s style. “The authorities,” he wrote, “forget that the most critical time is after the slaughter has stopped.” With that in mind, he halted large-scale punitive expeditions and prudently accepted that some level of violence and banditry in Moroland would be the reality of the day. Even so, Bliss’s “enlightened” tenure was neither a morality play nor a true strategic success. After all, like most current American generals addicted to (or resigned to) “generational war,” he concluded that a U.S. military presence would be necessary indefinitely.

After his (relatively) peaceful tour, Bliss predicted that “the power of government would, stripped of all misleading verbiage, amount to the naked fact that the United States would have to hold the larger part of the people by the throat while the smaller part governs it.” That vision of forever war haunts America still.

The Bud Dajo Massacre and the Limits of “Enlightened” Officership 

Behind the veil of road-building, education, and infrastructure improvements, American military rule in Moroland ultimately rested on force and brutality. Occasionally, this inconvenient truth manifested itself all too obviously, as in the 1906 Bud Dajo massacre. Late in 1905, Major Hugh Scott, then the commander on Jolo and another future Army chief, received reports that up to 1,000 Moro families — in a tax protest of sorts — had decided to move into the crater of a massive dormant volcano, Bud Dajo, on the island of Jolo. He saw no reason to storm it, preferring to negotiate. As he wrote, “It was plain that many good Americans would have to die before it could be taken and, after all, what would they be dying for? In order to collect a tax of less than a thousand dollars from savages!” He figured that life on the mountaintop was harsh and most of the Moros would peacefully come down when their harvests ripened. By early 1906, just eight families remained.

Then Scott went home on leave and his pugnacious, ambitious second-in-command, Captain James Reeves, strongly backed by outgoing provincial commander Leonard Wood, decided to take the fight to the Jolo Moros. Though Scott’s plan had worked, many American officers disagreed with him, seeing the slightest Moro “provocation” as a threat to American rule.

Reeves sent out alarmist reports about a bloodless attack on and burglary at a U.S. rifle range. Wood, who had decided to extend his tour of duty in Moroland to oversee the battle to come, concluded that the Bud Dajo Moros would “probably have to be exterminated.” He then sent deceptive reports, ignored a recent directive from Secretary of War Taft forbidding large-scale military operations without his express approval, and issued secret orders for an impending attack.

As word reached the Moros through their excellent intelligence network, significant numbers of them promptly returned to the volcano’s rim. By March 5, 1906, Wood’s large force of regulars had the mountain surrounded and he promptly ordered a three-pronged frontal assault. The Moros, many armed with only blades or rocks, put up a tough fight, but in the end a massacre ensued. Wood eventually lined the rim of Bud Dajo with machine guns, artillery, and hundreds of riflemen, and proceeded to rain indiscriminate fire on the Moros, perhaps 1,000 of whom were killed. When the smoke cleared, all but six defenders were dead, a 99% casualty rate.

Wood, unfazed by the sight of Moro bodies, stacked five deep in some places, was pleased with his “victory.” His official report noted only that “all the defenders were killed.” Some of his troopers proudly posed for a photograph standing above the dead, including hundreds of women and children, as though they were big game trophies from a safari hunt. The infamous photo would fly around the world in an early twentieth-century version of “going viral,” as the anti-imperialist press went crazy and Wood faced a scandal. Even some of his fellow officers were horrified. Pershing wrote his wife: “I would not want to have that on my conscience for the fame of Napoleon.”

The massacre would eventually even embarrass a president. Before the scandal broke in the press, Theodore Roosevelt had sent Wood a congratulatory letter, praising “the brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag.” He’d soon regret it.

Mark Twain, a leading literary spokesman for the anti-imperialists, even suggested that Old Glory be replaced by a pirate skull-and-crossbones flag. Privately, he wrote, “We abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother.” The photograph also galvanized African-American civil rights activists. W.E.B. Du Bois declared the crater image to be “the most illuminating I’ve ever seen” and considered displaying it on his classroom wall “to impress upon the students what wars and especially wars of conquest really mean.”

The true tragedy of the Bud Dajo massacre — a microcosm of the Moro War — was that the “battle” was so unnecessary, as were the mindless assaults on empty, booby-trapped Afghan villages that my own troop undertook in Afghanistan in 2011-2012, or the random insertion of other American units into indefensible outposts in mountain valleys in that country’s far northeast, which resulted, infamously, in disaster when the Taliban nearly overran Combat Outpost Keating in 2009.

On Jolo Island, a century earlier, Hugh Scott had crafted a bloodless formula that might, one day, have ended the war (and American occupation) there. However, the careerism of a subordinate and the simplistic philosophy of his superior, General Wood, demonstrated the inherent limitations of “enlightened” officership to alter the course of such aimless, ill-advised wars.

The scandal dominated American newspapers for about a month until a sensational new story broke: a terrible earthquake and fire had destroyed San Francisco on April 18, 1906. In those months before the massacre was forgotten, some press reports were astute indeed. On March 15, 1906, for instance, an editorial in the Nation — in words that might be applied verbatim to today’s endless wars — asked “if there is any definite policy being pursued in regard to the Moros… There seems to be merely an aimless drifting along, with occasional bloody successes… But the fighting keeps up steadily and no one can discover that we are making any progress.” This conclusion well summarized the futility and hopeless inertia of the war in the southern Philippines. Nonetheless, then (and now, as the Washington Post has demonstrated only recently), the generals and senior U.S. officials did their best to repackage stalemate as success.

Corners Turned: The Illusion of “Progress” in Moroland 

As in Vietnam and later Afghanistan, the generals leading the Moro War perennially assured the public that progress was being made, that victory was imminent. All that was needed was yet more time. And in Moroland, as until recently in the never-ending Afghan War, politicians and citizens alike swallowed the optimistic yarns of those generals, in part because the conflicts took place so far beyond the public eye.

Once the larger insurgency in the main Philippine islands fizzled out, most Americans lost interest in a remote theater of war so many thousands of miles away. Returning Moro War veterans (like their war on terror counterparts) were mostly ignored. Many in the U.S. didn’t even realize that combat continued in the Philippines.

One vet wrote of his reception at home that, “instead of glad hands, people stare at a khaki-clad man as though he had escaped from the zoo.” The relatively low (American) casualties in the war contributed to public apathy. In the years 1909 and 1910, just eight regular Army soldiers were killed, analogous to the mere 32 troopers killed in 2016-2017 in Afghanistan. This was just enough danger to make a tour of duty in Moroland, as in Afghanistan today, terrifying, but not enough to garner serious national attention or widespread war opposition.

In the style recently revealed by Craig Whitlock of the Post when it came to Afghanistan, five future Army chiefs of staff treated their civilian masters and the populace to a combination of outright lies, obfuscations, and rosy depictions of “progress.” Adna Chaffee, Leonard Wood, Hugh Scott, Tasker Bliss, and John Pershing — a virtual who’s who in the Army pantheon of that era — repeatedly assured Americans that the war on the Moros was turning a corner, that victory was within the military’s grasp.

It was never so. A hundred and six years after the “end” of America’s Moro War, the Post has once again highlighted how successive commanders and U.S. officials in our time have lied to the citizenry about an even longer war’s “progress.” In that sense, generals David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal, Mark Milley, and so many others of this era share disturbing commonalities with generals Leonard Wood, Tasker Bliss, and company.

As early as October 1904, Wood wrote that the “Moro question… is pretty well settled.” Then, Datu Ali, a rebel leader, became the subject of a two-year manhunt — not unlike the ones that finally killed al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and ISIS’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In June 1906, when Ali was finally caught and killed, Colliers magazine featured an article entitled “The End of Datu Ali: The Last Fight of the Moro War.”

After Bud Dajo, Tasker Bliss toned down Wood’s military operations and oversaw a comparatively quiet tour in Moroland, but even he argued against any troop withdrawals, predicting something akin to “generational war” as necessary to fully pacify the province. In 1906, he wrote that the Moros, as a “savage” and “Mohammedan” people “cannot be changed entirely in a few years and the American people must not expect results… such as other nations operating under similar conditions have taken a century or more to accomplish.”

As Pershing lamented in 1913, the 14th year of the war, “The Moros never seemed to learn from experience.” And the violence only continued after his departure, even if American troops took an ever more advisory role, while the Filipino army fought the ongoing rebellion.

The Moros, of course, continue to combat Manila-based troops to this very day, a true “generational struggle” for the ages.

Missing the Big Picture, Then and Now

The last major American-led battle on Jolo in 1913 proved a farcical repeat of Bud Dajo. When several hundred intransigent Moros climbed into another crater atop Bud Bagsak, Pershing, who’d criticized Wood’s earlier methods and was once again in command, tried to launch a more humane operation. He attempted to negotiate and organized a blockade that thinned the defenders’ ranks. Still, in the end, his troops would storm the mountain’s crest and kill some 200 to 300 men, women, and children, though generating little of the attention given to the earlier massacre because the vast majority of Pershing’s soldiers were Filipinos led by U.S. officers. The same shift toward indigenous soldiers in Afghanistan has lowered both (American) casualties and the U.S. profile in an equally failed war.

Though contemporary Army officers and later military historians claimed that the battle at Bud Bagsak broke the back of Moro resistance, that was hardly the case. What ultimately changed was not the violence itself, but who was doing the fighting. Filipinos now did almost all of the dying and U.S. troops slowly faded from the field.

For example, when total casualties are taken into account, 1913 was actually the bloodiest year of the Moro conflict, just as 2018 was the bloodiest of the Afghan War. Late in 1913, Pershing summed up his own uncertainty about the province’s future in his final official report: “It remains for us now to hold all that we have gained and to substitute for a government by force something more in keeping with the changed conditions. Just what form that will take has not been altogether determined.” It still hasn’t been determined, not in Moroland, not in Afghanistan, and nowhere, in truth, in America’s Greater Middle East conflicts of this century.

The Filipino government in Manila continues to wage war on rebellious Moros. To this day, two groups — the Islamist Abu Sayyaf and the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front — continue to contest central government control there. After the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. Army again intervened in Moroland, sending Special Forces teams to advise and assist Filipino military units. If few of the American Green Berets knew anything of their own country’s colonial history, the locals hadn’t forgotten.

In 2003, as U.S. forces landed at Jolo’s main port, they were greeted by a banner that read: “We Will Not Let History Repeat Itself! Yankee Back Off.” Jolo’s radio station played traditional ballads and one vocalist sang, “We heard the Americans are coming and we are getting ready. We are sharpening our swords to slaughter them when they come.”

More than a century after America’s ill-fated Moro campaign, its troops were back where they started, outsiders, once again resented by fiercely independent locals. One of the last survivors of the Moro War, Lieutenant (and later Air Corps General) Benny Foulois published his memoirs in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam insurgency. Perhaps with that conflict in mind, he reflected on the meaning of his own youthful war: “We found that a few hundred natives living off their land and fighting for it could tie down thousands of American troops… and provoke a segment of our population to take the view that what happens in the Far East is none of our business.”

How I wish that book had been assigned during my own tenure at West Point!

tomdispatch.com

Speaking to Fox on August 21^st, Esper said: “We want to make sure that we, as we need to, have the capability to deter Chinese bad behavior… China is the number one priority for this department. It’s outlined in the national defense strategy, why we think it’s a long term strategic competitor and one that is pursuing a maximization campaign, if you will, throughout the indo-Pacific theater, whether its politically, economically or militarily…”

Echoing a little Dr. Strangelove, Esper stated that there is “a coming shift” from “low intensity conflict that lasts 18 years to high intensity conflicts against competitors such as Russia and China.”

While American military exercises in the Pacific have played out on China’s doorstep at an accelerating rate since the Pivot to Asia was announced in 2011 with the most recent US-Australia Talisman Sabre bi-annual exercise and US-South Korea Ulchi Freedom war games this month, China has not remained idle.

In response to America’s vast array of military infrastructure built up on China’s border, China has responded by the unveiling of cutting edge anti-ballistic missile technologies, including hypersonic weaponry to counteract the American threat. A large part of China’s defensive response includes the Russian S400 anti-missile system which is also being adopted by India, Turkey, Syria and the United Arab Emirates as a unified system which renders the American THAAD and ABM systems impotent and obsolete. Although unconfirmed, American generals have freaked out that China is building a joint China-Cambodia naval base in Preah Sihanouk Province that gives China easy access to coastal waters on the Gulf of Thailand and ready access to the South China Sea.

America’s military impotence when faced with the new cutting edge technologies unveiled by Russia and China was outlined in a recent report released by the US Studies Center at the University of Sydney which stated that “America no longer enjoys military primacy in the indo Pacific and its capacity to uphold a favorable balance of power is increasingly uncertain.” Referring to China’s advanced anti-aircraft weapons, the report says “Chinese counter-intervention systems have undermined America’s ability to project power in the Indo-Pacific region” which the authors say, could be rendered impotent within the first 8 hours of conflict.

Rather than use this information to propose a new security doctrine premised on cooperation and dialogue as China has offered on countless occasions, the report’s authors join the fantasy world of Esper calling instead for a “collective defense” strategy akin to a Pacific NATO, whereby all of America’s Pacific allies could join in an anti-Chinese military alliance together, and relieving America of the burden of carrying WWIII on its own.

We know that this Pacific NATO has been discussed for some time and was at the heart of recent Pacific Vanguard naval drills conducted between the USA, Australia, Japan and South Korea in May 2019 which saw the participation of 3000 soldiers, two Japanese destroyers, a South Korean destroyer and two Australian frigates in their first joint war game. This outlook was also behind the August naval drill played out by Malaysia, USA, New Zealand and Australia in Guam. The USA has 54 000 troops in Japan and 28 000 in South Korea.

When China and Russia conducted their first long range joint air patrol in the Asia Pacific in July 2019, South Korea and Japan scrambled jets to intercept the Chinese and Russian aircraft, with South Korea firing hundreds of warning shots. Backed up by the USA, both Asian countries screamed loudly (and without evidence) that their air space had been violated.

In response to the belligerent comments by Esper and the Australian report, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said “China is firmly on a path of peaceful development and our national defense policy is defensive in nature”. China has gone further by providing a cooperative framework under the Belt and Road Initiative which is built around the brilliant political agenda of providing diplomatic solutions to geopolitical points of tension through economic development strategies that enrich all participants. This approach has provided China great payback through the defusing of tensions with other nations claiming territory within the South China Sea- especially under the pro-BRI orientation of Malaysia’s Dr. Mahathir Mohammed and the Philippines’ President Duterte.

Not feeling at ease being caught in the crossfire of a nuclear exchange, Japan and South Korea have also gone so far as to create a new trilateral cooperation agreement with China on August 21 premised on “next generation exchange projects in three countries… We hope to discuss future-oriented partnerships and regional affairs, including North Korea.” The agreement also enables international join investment in all countries operating under the BRI framework. Together the three countries account for over a quarter of the world’s productivity and have everything to gain by working together.

Those American military officials promoting the obsolete doctrine of Full Spectrum dominance are dancing to the tune of a song that stopped playing some time ago. Both Russia and China have changed the rules of the game on a multitude of levels, and can respond with fatal force to any attack upon their soil with next generation weaponry beyond the scope of anything imagined by ivory tower game theorists in the west.

The ship of world history has changed course away from the rapids of war and economic collapse, as the Belt and Road Initiative has grown to proportions not imagined possible just a few years earlier and the coming months will be decisive as the west does some soul searching and decides which future it would like to have.