OPINION: The

incom(pe)team
Teddy Locsin Jr.
Posted at Sep 07 2016 10:28 PM | Updated as of Sep 08 2016 01:23 AM

There is no way to paint the President's insulting remarks in flattering colors. It

was a gaffe, plain and period. And the Philippines lost a golden opportunity.
Now you may think we lost the opportunity for our president to make a good, which
is to say a namby-pamby impression at his diplomatic debut.
You would be wrong to think that, if a good diplomatic debut is toeing the usual
line of ASEAN, which cannot decide if it collectively wants to be the indentured
servant class of China—which pays well and punishes severely—or of the United
States, which does not pay much and pays no serious heed to this neck of the global
woods.
First the gaffe and who is responsible.
The gaffe was insulting to the U.S. President. There is no way around that. It was
totally unprovoked by him.
Obama, believe it or not did not wipe out the American Indians. His people had a
hard enough time running away from the Ku Klux Klan.
And the insult was over human rights, which was the very last thing Duterte
wanted to be brought up at the Summit. And yet it was he who brought it up. And
he wasn’t even there yet. He was still in Manila. That guaranteed that the American
would win an argument the American was not even making.
Obama’s reaction was cold, elegant, and contemptuous. In his official matter of
fact tone, he said, “I have asked staff if a meeting with the Philippine president
would still be productive.” Then, without missing a beat, he turned to other topics.
That was all we merited: the opinion of staff.
Who is to blame? Duterte’s staff, his Communications Team.
Why did he have to deliver a going-away speech? He’s coming back anyway. Then
he will have something to talk about.
Nobody does the departure thing anymore.
And to whom was he saying goodbye?
Us!
My God, we live with this guy. Why should he have to tell us where he is going and
why? We know already. It is in the news.
And so he delivered an unnecessary speech where he might have accidentally
telegraphed serious diplomatic punches, if he had any in mind.
After the speech his in-com-pe-team asked media if there were any questions. And
yet his in-com-pe-team had earlier suggested “better no questions.” One of the
questions inevitably was, “What will you do if you get a tongue-lashing over human
rights from Obama?”
Naturally Duterte flew off the handle. Nobody takes a tongue-lashing from anyone
except maybe his wife, if she caught him.
And at that it was a “hypodermical,” as some in media would say.
Duterte lost the chance precisely to avoid the very subject he would scorn at the
summit. Yet there he was, still on the ground, running smack into the very subject
he wanted to avoid, from the worst possible angle and in the worst possible light.
If Obama had asked him about human rights it would not have been aggressively
but with the elegant not to say vapid phrasing of diplomacy. That would have had
even Mobotu Sese Seko agreeing wholeheartedly to whatever Obama was saying.
Even dictators agree with human rights. It is just their definition of human that is
so restrictive. Human is everyone who agrees with them; not-human everyone who
does not.
With his outburst, Duterte lost the stage, even before stepping on it, for far more
important and pressing issues; such as the role of the Philippines as the only
country with recognized rights instead of mere claims in the South China Sea. He
could have scorned a commitment to the rest of ASEAN, which is hostage to
Chinese power because of common frontiers. Meanwhile, he could been defiant of
China. He could have walked out of the Summit like Nehru out of a non-aligned
conference— stand alone act on a stage of pygmies: the only country able to deal
with China on the basis of legal equality.
Instead the ASEAN Summit became for the Philippines about the last thing any
ASEAN member will talk about: their sorrier records of extrajudicial killings and
outright state-sponsored terrorism. We were the only real democracy in that
Summit.
What we lost there was the chance to make history with a diplomatic debut that
formally, elegantly, and substantively made a virtue out of our geography: too far
from the United States but still a safe distance away from China.
Instead what we achieved was exactly what we feared—an ASEAN Summit that
defined us extra-judicially; and indeed extra-territorially—because he was still
here.