During the government of Thailand’s crackdown on the drug trade in the early 2000s, Time Magazine did a cover story. The heavy-handed police action, which then resulted in thousands being killed, is being used as a comparison to the current Philippine “war on drugs”.
The Time cover carried the headline “Speed Demons: An inside look at Asia’s methamphetamine culture.” The March 5, 2001, article began talking about Thailand: “Jacky talks about killing him, slitting his throat from three till nine. He deserves it, really, she says, for his freeloading, for his hanging around, for how he just stands there, and just begs for another hit. She has run out of methamphetamine, what the Thais call yaba [mad medicine], and she has become agitated and irritable.”
On September 15, 2016, the Time cover read: “Night falls on the Philippines.” Previously, on August 25, 2015, an article was titled “Inside Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s War On Drugs.” The article reads: “As the body count soars, some say the real threat to the Philippines is not drugs but the President himself.”
Granted, there were several Time magazine articles highly critical of Thailand’s war on drugs. But, unmistakably, the United States publication has a different perspective now that it is about the Philippines.
US President Barack Obama “pivoted” his foreign policy toward Asia several years ago, and it has been nothing less than a disaster. Half of Japan’s citizens want US bases off Japanese soil. The current Japanese government in part has so little confidence in the military protection and resolve of the US government, it is changing its constitution to allow a fully prepared standing army.
North Korea builds and tests nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles at will, and the best the US can do is fly its most advanced bomber over South Korea, perhaps, to show Kim Jong-un that the US can spend more on warplanes than the value of the North Korean economy.
China treats the US president like an unwelcomed and uninvited guest at the Group of 20 nations summit. Vietnam, arguably the biggest beneficiary of Obama’s signature Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty, has decided to wait another year before voting to ratify. Fifty-seven countries, including all of the European Union and Southeast Asia, are joining China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in another slap to US hegemony.
Now the Philippines—former colony and exceptionally agreeable ally—appears to want to chart its own course, both domestically and internationally, without US interference.
Ambassador to the US Jose Cuisia Jr., who was recently interviewed, said it is critical that the Philippines maintain very close relations with the US, since three of the seven islands that China reclaimed are part of Philippines’s exclusive economic zone. The irony is almost unbearable since the US did nothing before, during, or after the Chinese “island-building” to protect Philippine interests.
The US does not now have any close friends in Asia. The only way to describe the Philippine-American relationship is “it’s complicated,” and it is going to remain that way for some time.