Reality check

particularly in the manner the President has carried out his war on drugs. This is the logic that led him to pull out of the ICC, refuse to cooperate with the HRC, and block foreign aid from countries that voted against us.

This is why many diehard Duterte supporters (DDS) turned livid when a major committee of the US Senate passed an amendment that would

who had a hand in what the US senators have labeled as the arbitrary detention of Sen. Leila de Lima.

One thing that the President and the DDS need to understand, however, is that other parties in the world community of nations have reserved the right to make their own moves. While we can freely ban human rights diplomats from entering our country, other countries can have the

entering theirs. While we can decide

- sistance offered by other countries as a sign of our displeasure, they can at anytime in the future decide to impose restrictions on, if not totally cut off, that development assistance.

Only those without any clue about international relations among and between countries would express disbelief that a country like the US can impose a restriction on another country, and express outrage about the blatant intervention into the latter’s sovereignty. Anyone familiar with the realities of diplomacy and foreign relations knows that bilateral development assistance is an instrument of foreign policy. As such, the donor country can intervene in another country’s affairs not only in terms of the policy conditionality attached to the development assistance, but also in the pressure it exerts should the