It’s Time to Suspend America's Alliance with the Philippines
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The reasons seem simple.
Ted Galen Carpenter [2]
The United States has an unfortunate history of acquiring ugly authoritarian allies even when America’s security interests do not justify making such moral compromises. Malou Innocent and I described many of those unfortunate relationships in our book Perilous Partners [3], noting that a majority of the security relationships did not involve situations in which America’s vital interests were imperiled.
Washington faces another increasingly problematic relationship: its alliance with the Philippines. As I’ve noted previously [4] on this site, Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte is the personification of a “loose-cannon” ally. Among other things, he referred to President Obama as “a son of a bitch,” and made it clear that he had no intention of necessarily following Washington’s lead on foreign policy.
Since I wrote that article, his erratic behavior, both domestically and internationally, has grown worse. After indicating that he wished to conclude alliances with both Russia and China, Duterte stated that there will be no further military exercises with U.S. forces because China objects to such exercises. Now he has compared himself to Adolf Hitler [5], affirming that he was gladly slaughtering thousands of alleged drug dealers and drug users—all without the inconvenient obstacles of due process—and would like to kill millions, just like Hitler killed millions of Jews.
Source URL (retrieved on October 2, 2016):
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/its-time-suspend-americas-alliance-the-philippines-17896
