BEING RIGHT

What complicates the issue is the confused stance people have vis-à-vis the US: simultaneously hoping it goes away with depreciated power and yet burdening it with the responsibility of securing global peace and order.

Hence, the liberal progressive establishment and news media’s puzzlingly negative reaction to President Trump’s declaration that the US “will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism,” and that the “[US should be skeptical] of international unions that tie us up and bring America down.”

Compare this with President Barack Obama’s quite interventionist (and frankly, more violent) approach to foreign policy. As The Guardian’s Medea Benjamin reported in 2017, “the Obama administration dropped at least 26,171 bombs. This means that every day last year, the US military blasted combatants or civilians overseas with 72 bombs; that’s three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day. While most of these air attacks were in Syria and Iraq, US bombs also rained down on people in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. That’s seven majorityMuslim countries.” And yet nary a complaint in media. This considering the bombings proven overall lack of strategic success.

Thus, as Foreign Policy tersely noted, “though Donald Trump loves military parades, flybys, and the other visible trappings of military power, he seems rather leery of war.” Trump’s strikes, though more publicized, are really the exception rather than the rule.

And the relative withdrawal from the world stage that Trump seeks hark back to the US Founding Fathers’ vision. George Washington, in his 1796 farewell address, wrote: “Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course... Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?... It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world... ”

All this should urge other countries to take a more grounded view of its position relative to and its expectations of the US.

This is so particularly with regard to the Philippines, considering its recent behavior towards the US juxtaposed with its history; starting from the fact that its own 1898 Declaration of Independence was done “under the protection of our Powerful and Humanitarian Nation, The United States of America.”

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