To President Duterte: Seize the key link now

damn if you do, damn if you don’t. If Sison gets his objective of power sharing with the Duterte government, then with his

he becomes a stooge of the US for pushing the country into

peace talks fails, then all the more will Sison get to have a popular cause against President Duterte thereby expediting his ouster.

President Duterte must steer clear

not a matter of whether to push

over the disputed area. As far back as 2011, then US Secretary of State

- lished in said: “The future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action.”

The most pressing question for the US at this time is how

- tury policy done not in some distant future but now, when its economy is down, when even its traditional allies are beginning to reel from the impact of Trump’s trade war and when the only way to write off its $ 1 trillion

it through armed hostilities. It is just unfortunate that for America to be right at the center of the action for deciding the future of politics in Asia, the Philippines is the geographically destined fulcrum — the center of the action. The strategy declared by Esperon

- ter meeting envisaged a Philippines in the long haul, but the problem urging for solution is in the short

shooting war, how to frustrate the resolute moves of anti-Duterte forces to oust him, how to forever deny in the here-and-now mass support for the Sison fake revolution.

The Balutan wisdom

F. Balutan speaks great wisdom when he says: “The good general is one who solves a crisis. But the better general is one who prevents that crisis from happening.”

To President Duterte I say, “Be the better general.”

Never mind for the time being those two additional bridges across the Pasig River, the grand dream of a rail system spanning the entire Philippine archipelago, the envisaged water supply system for Metro Manila, and the irriga-

not, in the Philippines infrastructure development enriches first capitalists rather than the masses. Balutan: “An empty stomach knows no law.”

- nos susceptible to media propaganda, which is veritably under entire control

But feed those poor folks well while explaining to them that the noisy agitations from Sison and his clique of fake revolutionaries are there to advance the position of America in the ongoing hostili-

and America the enemy; they will be enlightened. No amount of warmongering will be able to goad them into taking up the cause of a war that is not theirs.