Winehole23
10-22-2016, 09:47 AM
After announcing his country's new alignment with China, Duterte signed a series of trade agreements worth $13.5 billion, along with a promise to continue bilateral negotiations over the South China Sea.
Dan Blumenthal, the director of Asia studies at the American Enterprise Institute, told me Friday that the Obama administration had fumbled. "After the tribunal decision, our response was to tell Duterte to tamp down tensions and talk bilaterally with China, and there was no evidence of follow-up by us in terms of our own military exercises or diplomatic initiatives to enforce the findings of the tribunal," he said. "There has been next to nothing on this. We still haven't had a Freedom of Navigation mission that actually challenges the Chinese artificial islands."
Is it any wonder then that Duterte concluded Obama wasn't serious about defending the rule of law in the South China Sea? Close watchers of the Filipino leader could have predicted this kind of thing. Before his campaign for the presidency in August 2015, he told supporters (http://globalnation.inquirer.net/126835/duterte-to-military-attaches-ph-not-out-for-war-china-should-just-let-us-fish-in-seas), "If America cared it would have sent aircraft carriers and missile frigates the moment China started reclaiming land in contested territory."
Of course America didn't do that. It didn't even send the Navy into Filipino territorial waters claimed by China in the South China Sea after an international tribunal ruled that those waters were Filipino. Instead, the Obama administration acted as if international law would implement itself. But it never works that way. The rule-based system Obama endorses requires a great power to defend it.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-10-21/the-philippines-just-blew-up-obama-s-asia-pivot
Dan Blumenthal, the director of Asia studies at the American Enterprise Institute, told me Friday that the Obama administration had fumbled. "After the tribunal decision, our response was to tell Duterte to tamp down tensions and talk bilaterally with China, and there was no evidence of follow-up by us in terms of our own military exercises or diplomatic initiatives to enforce the findings of the tribunal," he said. "There has been next to nothing on this. We still haven't had a Freedom of Navigation mission that actually challenges the Chinese artificial islands."
Is it any wonder then that Duterte concluded Obama wasn't serious about defending the rule of law in the South China Sea? Close watchers of the Filipino leader could have predicted this kind of thing. Before his campaign for the presidency in August 2015, he told supporters (http://globalnation.inquirer.net/126835/duterte-to-military-attaches-ph-not-out-for-war-china-should-just-let-us-fish-in-seas), "If America cared it would have sent aircraft carriers and missile frigates the moment China started reclaiming land in contested territory."
Of course America didn't do that. It didn't even send the Navy into Filipino territorial waters claimed by China in the South China Sea after an international tribunal ruled that those waters were Filipino. Instead, the Obama administration acted as if international law would implement itself. But it never works that way. The rule-based system Obama endorses requires a great power to defend it.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-10-21/the-philippines-just-blew-up-obama-s-asia-pivot