Duterte
After all, despite the iconoclastic, seemingly undiplomatic stance of the President, our country is rated to be the best country to invest in. And this is not just a matter of perception but is in fact matched by actual results. Foreign direct investments (FDIs) are coming in, in record numbers.
President Duterte appears to have embarked on a new doctrine in diplomacy, one that is along the line of what Joseph Schumpeter has coined to apply to economic transformation of societies. Schumpeter called this process as “creative destruction,” when economic
The President unconsciously applies this doctrine to diplomacy by consciously disturbing, assaulting and destabilizing prevailing diplomatic practices based on age-old precedents, in order to give way to new relationships, arrangements and practices. He thus creates an interruption, if not a chasm, in the prevailing global institutional arrangements, one that has been ruled by traditional power blocs. It is a global order that has long been dominated by alliances revolving around traditional powerful countries that check each other in the world arena, an arrangement that leaves countries like the Philippines into helpless pawns.
His policy of shifting to China is one bold move that seriously interrupted the status quo. It is a strategic move of dealing with a neighborhood bully more directly, instead of perpetually looking towards an absent big brother who has always assumed that our country will always be a loyal underling no matter what.
The United Nations is another global institution which became the target of the President’s diplomacy of creative destruction. He became a leading and powerful voice that articulated a critique of what the UN has become, an otherwise useful idea that was rendered somewhat useless because it allowed its otherwise noble goals to be undermined and hijacked by extreme political correctness. The concept of human rights, which is in fact one noble construct that would normally be unproblematic, was weaponized by the West to become an instrument of selective control over less powerful countries. Liberal politics, another otherwise ideal political construct that celebrated freedom and human emancipation, was reduced into becoming a new colonial discourse that - tions’ sovereignties while tolerating, if not being blind to, the transgressions of, others. The UN and other global institutions have become the bearers of what Edward Said has labeled as “orientalism,” where the non-Western world is seen by the West through a lens that is clouded by prejudice, inappropriate cultural universalism, and an air of moral, ethical and racial superiority.
We see this in the readiness of the global liberal media, and the UN and its attached organs, or the countries which are the usual suspects, to condemn alleged human rights violations in less developed countries, but not the atrocities of American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. They are quick to condemn the alleged extrajudicial killings that victimize even innocent children that they attribute to President Duterte’s war on drugs, but remain silent on the school shootings in the US that are brought about by the US government’s policy on gun control, or the lack of it, which is supported by the Republican majority.
It is in this context that one can see the creatively destructive potential that the President’s intent to withdraw from the Rome Statute, which created the International Criminal Court (ICC), can bring.
Duterte’s critics wrongly attribute this move to the President’s alleged attempt to escape prosecution by ICC. The President is not dumb nor naïve not to know him will remain. What they forget is that this move is in fact a political statement, an assault on the structured biases of the ICC, and the global discourse on human rights, in its selective prosecution of President Duterte. It is a strike against a system that entertains politically motivated complaints, but neglects its prerogative to investigate on its own initiative other countries that also launched their own wars on drugs, such as Mexico and many Latin American countries. The ICC seems to be oblivious of the fact that the United States has its own bloody drug war and has in fact committed acts that could even amount to war crimes in many parts of the world.
The thing is, if the Senate reverses the President’s intent, or our Supreme Court rules against him, then it becomes evidence of the fact that institutions work in the country, and that the Philippines is not a failed state, and the ICC has no business acting like a court allegations against the President.