Asia's Cauldron (20 page)

The invasion of the Philippines marked the first time that the United States had deliberately set out to conquer a large piece of territory overseas and ended up occupying it. That would not happen again until the invasion of Iraq more than a century later. Though it began with Commodore Dewey's glorious overture, the first major conflict for the United States outside its continental limits descended within a few months into a military nightmare, as well as a domestic trauma of a kind not to be seen again until Vietnam.
³

Following Dewey's successful entry into Manila Bay, the American military assisted Filipino insurgents in their takeover of the Spanish-run archipelago. But just as they would in Iraq and elsewhere, the Americans wrongly assumed that because local elements welcomed the ouster of a despotic regime, they would automatically remain friendly once the regime was toppled. After the Spanish were defeated, tensions mounted between the new Philippine government headed by a young ethnic Tagalog, Emilio Aguinaldo, and the American liberators, even as Aguinaldo was losing control over his own faction-ridden forces. By February 1899, Philippine anarchy and misplaced American idealism ignited into a full-scale war between American troops and a host of indigenous guerrilla armies.
⁴

On July 4, 1902, when President Roosevelt proclaimed the Philippine War over, 4,234 American soldiers had been killed in the conflict and 2,818 wounded.
⁵
Overall, 200,000 people died, mainly Filipino civilians.
⁶
Fighting in the Muslim south of the Philippines would go on for years. One could well argue that it was all unnecessary in the first place, a political blunder of the first magnitude by the McKinley administration, in which America's idealism and naïveté led it on a path of destruction and brutality.
⁷

The military victory, however messy and brutal, was followed by decades of American rule that the journalist and historian Stanley Karnow calls a “model of enlightenment” compared to European colonialism.
⁸
Samuel Tan, a Filipino historian who is critical of American policy in other respects, concurs, describing American rule as the historical engine that brought a modicum of modernity to the Filipino masses.
⁹

The Americans forbade themselves to buy large tracts of land. They avoided schemes like opium monopolies. They redistributed land to peasants from wealthy church estates, and built roads, railways, ports, dams, and irrigation facilities. American expenditures on health and education led to a doubling of the Filipino population between 1900 and 1920, and a rise in literacy from 20 to 50 percent within a generation.
¹⁰

The Philippines, in turn, affected the destiny of twentieth-century America to a degree that few faraway countries have. Ohio judge William Howard Taft's leadership of the Philippine Commission propelled him to the presidency of the United States. Army Captain John “Black Jack” Pershing, who would head the expedition against Pancho Villa in Mexico and command American forces in World War I, was promoted to brigadier general over nine hundred other officers after his stellar performance in leading troops against Islamic insurgents in the southern Philippines. Douglas MacArthur, son of Army General Arthur MacArthur, came to the Philippines to command an American brigade and returned for a second tour of duty as the indigenous government's military advisor. One of Douglas MacArthur's aides in Manila was a middle-aged major, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who honed his analytical skills for World War II by attempting to organize a Philippine national army. The Japanese victory over General Douglas MacArthur's forces on the Philippines, MacArthur's last stand on Corregidor in Manila Bay before retreating to Australia, the subsequent Japanese atrocities committed against both American and Filipino prisoners of war during the Death March on the nearby Bataan Peninsula, and MacArthur's triumphal return to the Philippines in the battle of Leyte Gulf, all became part of the Homeric legend of World War II that bound Americans to their military, and gave the American and Filipino peoples a common historical inheritance.
¹¹

This is to say nothing of the deep involvement of American policymakers in supporting Philippine governments with aid and advice ever since World War II, especially the critical role the Americans played in ushering dictator Ferdinand Marcos peacefully from power
in 1986. And it wasn't just grappling with Marcos's dictatorship that engaged American officers and diplomats from the 1960s to the 1980s: for there was, too, the task of supporting Manila against communist and Islamic insurrections right up through the present.

Indeed, anyone who doubts that America is, or was, an imperial power should come to the Philippines, where the white baronial U.S. embassy fronting Manila Bay occupies the most beautiful downtown real estate in the same way that British and French high commissions and embassies do in their former colonies; where the Americans have their own hill station for cool weather retreats, like British hill stations in India; where leading local military officers, businessmen, and politicians are graduates of West Point just like the leading personages of former British colonies have been graduates of Sandhurst; and where the country's romantic hero is not a Filipino but the protean figure of Douglas MacArthur, who in the Filipino mind rescued the country from the butchery of the Japanese occupiers.
¹²

Imagine Iraq, nine decades hence, if the United States were still deeply involved with the problems there as a reigning outside power. That would be the Philippines. The Philippines was for much of the twentieth century an American colony in all but name, whose pro-American defense and foreign policy has been taken for granted for too long.

Given this legacy, arguably the fate of the Philippines, and whether it eventually becomes Finlandized by China, may say more about America's trajectory as a great power than the fate of Iraq and whether it continues under the sway of Iran. Make no mistake, the Philippines is crucial: it dominates the eastern edge of the South China Sea as much as Vietnam does the western edge and China the northern one. With a population of nearly 100 million, the Philippines is more populous than Vietnam even.

And yet, despite a century's worth of vast annual outlays of American aid, the Philippines has remained among the most corrupt, dysfunctional, intractable, and poverty-stricken societies in maritime Asia, with Africa-like slums and Latin America-style fatalism and class divides. Indeed, the Philippines has been described as a “gambling
republic” where politicians “hold power without virtue,” dominating by means of “capital” and “crime.”
¹³

The early-twenty-first-century Philippines, as corrupt as it is, constitutes to a significant degree the legacy of one man, Ferdinand Marcos, who manifestly represents the inverse of Lee Kuan Yew, and to a lesser extent the inverse of Mahathir bin Mohamad and Chiang Kai-shek. Whereas those other men left behind functioning states with largely clean institutions, primed to become well-functioning democracies, Marcos left behind bribery, cronyism, and ruin. Marcos and the Philippines, unlike Singapore, Taiwan, and to a smaller extent Malaysia, were not at all enriched by Confucian values. While those other men complexify the thinking of the great political philosophers by showing how restricted authoritarianism in some cases can lead to political virtue, Marcos represents the greater majority of cases in which authoritarianism leads, well, to crime and political decay. The other three men were each extraordinary in their own right, whose early life made them especially attuned to unpleasant truths about their own societies that needed correcting. They pierced the miasma of convenient rationalizations to always see the harsh reality that confronted them: especially so in Lee's and Mahathir's cases, less so in Chiang's. That was their particular genius; whereas Marcos's world became one of self-delusion. Lee and Mahathir were efficient, corporate-style managers; Chiang strived for that in his latter years in Taiwan. But Marcos stood all of that on its head. Listen to arguably America's greatest journalist-historian of late-twentieth-century Southeast Asia, Stanley Karnow:

Marcos and his wife, Imelda, did not steal hundreds of millions of dollars during their more than two decades in power: they stole literally billions. Cultural genius is when a leader isolates the strongest attributes of a given culture in order to raise society to a higher level. Lee did this with overseas Chinese culture; Mahathir did it with Malay culture merging it as he did with the disciplinary attributes of global Islam. But Marcos represented the worst of Spain's legacy of absolutism, fatalism, and the pre-Reformation, and thus he did nothing revelatory or interesting with the Philippines, except postpone the day when it might, too, become an Asian tiger.

And yet Marcos is no longer universally hated here, given the directionless malaise of the post-Marcos era. “During the early years of the Marcos dictatorship we dreamed big,” one of the country's leading lawyers told me. “Marcos had a real chance to change the culture, there were possibilities. But his sense of power was Javanese: he believed power inhered in his physical person. This was not the Machiavellian sense of power, where virtue is not about charisma, but about deeds and tough choices.” Ever since Marcos, this lawyer went on, “our democracy has merely democratized corruption. There is no Confucianism” that accounts for the strong, self-regulating societies of much of East Asia; nor is there the “Islamic discipline” that helps the rest of the Malay peoples in Malaysia and Indonesia. “We are an easygoing culture: we don't embarrass one another; rather than punish we accommodate and look the other way. This is our tragedy.” And it is this lack of discipline, so I was told by a group of Filipino journalists, that makes them skeptical about their country's ability to sustain a strong and united front against China.

Such cultural characteristics certainly can change, and they can change dramatically. But it requires the maintenance of good policies, which, in turn, requires exceptional leadership.

Beyond Marcos, the Philippines' central dilemma is geographical. Prior to the arrival of Spanish explorer Ferdinand Magellan on the island of Cebu in 1521, the Philippine archipelago did not exist as a coherent political entity. The contrast with a country like Vietnam, whose sense of nationhood goes back millennia, could not be more stark. The Philippine archipelago roughly consists of three island groups that had little in common prior to Magellan's arrival. Luzon in the north is inhabited primarily by Tagalog speakers whose roots go back to Southeast Asia. In the south is Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago, occupied by Muslim Moros who have much more in common culturally and ethnically with the peoples of Malaysia and Indonesia than they do with those of Luzon. This has led to Islamic terrorism and insurgency, met in turn by a counterinsurgency campaign mounted with direct help from the United States. Luzon in the north and Mindanao in the south are tenuously connected by a far-flung island group, the Visayas, which includes Cebu. Securing these 22,000 miles of coastline, beset with internal threats that are, in turn, a product of its ethnic and religious diversity, makes the Philippines particularly vulnerable to penetration by an outside power like China. The Philippines is less a country than a ramshackle empire ruled from Luzon. Indeed, the fact that despite being an archipelagic nation, the Philippine army is three times the size of its navy in manpower, proves just how internally insecure this country really is. Thus, ultimately because of geography, the Philippines has no choice now but to seek the patronage of the United States against China.
¹⁵

It is true that the Philippines closed America's Subic Bay Naval Station in 1992, with Clark Airfield (also on Luzon) closing the same year. But that was before China's naval power became truly demonstrable. Only two years later, China would move to occupy Philippine-controlled reefs in the Spratlys, and from the mid-1990s forward China would undergo a vast expansion of its air and sea forces, accompanied by a more aggressive posture in the South China Sea. China's increasing geopolitical sway over Manila is helped by the fact that China is the Philippines' third largest trading partner. There is also the extreme wealth and influence of China's émigré community in the Philippines.