Asean is not all handshakes and photo ops

LIBERAL Party congressman Teddy B. Baguilat embodied all that is wrong about the political opposition when he mocked our hosting of the Asean summit by alleging that it was a waste of time and resources. He tweeted that we spent billions of pesos in hosting it but we did not get anything in return except “handshakes, obligated smiles and safe rhetoric.” The gentleman from Ifugao further tweeted that our country merely “hosted a giant party and photo ops.”

It is mind- boggling that a member of Congress could be totally clueless about the nature of regional meetings Asean summit.

Teddy Baguilat should know that hosting regional summits like this is rotated among member countries, and that such is a matter of duty and obligation. It is not supposed to be seen as an opportunity for the country to exact gains. And it is utterly scandalous that we measure success in terms of maximizing our gains in exchange for every peso like the we spent. That will turn us into a country of mercenaries.

But even for the sake of pleasing Baguilat, it is not as if there were no concrete gains made for the country. Kent Tangcalagan, a member of the Erasmus Mundus Association and an alumnus of the De La Salle University, in a Facebook post, posted a list which he diligently extracted from different