The Red Line: The Philippines (Duterte and the South China Sea)

The South China sea is the new battleground between Beijing and Washington with the winner controlling the trades routes; and therefore the future of Asia. Caught in the middle is The Philippines, now torn between their military partners in Washington and their economic partners in Beijing, with the decision-maker being a wildly popular president accused of numerous human rights abuses. Manilla is the linchpin for both sides, and we ask our guests in which direction the nation is heading. This weeks guests are Aaron Jed Rebena (Philippine Foreign Service) Sheena Greitens (Brookings Institute) Derek Grossman (RAND Corperation) Oriana Skylar Mastro (Stanford University) For more information visit www.theredlinepodcast.com Or follow the show on @TheRedLinePod Or follow Michael on @MikeHilliardAus

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Bloomberg: Putin’s Saudi Bromance Is Part of a Bigger Plan

Day by day, it becomes increasingly clear that a central fault line — perhaps the central fault line — in world affairs is the struggle between liberal and illiberal forms of government. And as this happens, geopolitical alignments are shifting in subtle but momentous ways. In particular, the bonds between the U.S. and many of its authoritarian allies are weakening, as those countries find that they have less in common ideologically with America than with its revisionist rivals. [...]

In the Middle East, Russia is not simply building its partnership with America’s sworn enemy, Iran. It is also making inroads with U.S. partners Saudi Arabia, Egypt and even Jordan, based on those countries’ perception that Putin’s authoritarian regime can act decisively in support of its friends while avoiding American-style meddling in their domestic politics. Orban leads a country that belongs to NATO, but he has a chummy relationship with Putin and his government is generally perceived to be thoroughly compromised on matters concerning Russia. [...]

A second approach would be to embrace the ideological challenge. The U.S. could double down on its relationships with liberal democracies, repairing core alliances that Trump has damaged and cultivating closer ties with democratic powers from Colombia to India to Indonesia. It might redouble investments in protecting democracy where it is endangered and promoting it — in countries such as Malaysia — where processes of liberalization are underway. It might push its authoritarian allies to be modestly more respectful of human rights and political liberties, using levers such as restricting arms sales or discontinuing military exercises. At the very least, it would make clear that its relationships with those allies are more transactional and less special than those with its fellow democracies.

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The Atlantic: The Myth of Authoritarian Competence

In truth, worries about Turkey melting down the global economy are misplaced. Unlike during the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, when the collapse of the Thai currency unleashed regional upheaval, Turkey’s problems are less an indicator of systemic weakness across developing economies than the outgrowth of factors that are specific to Ankara. These include a politicized monetary policy, the highest current account deficit among the G20 developing economies, the most foreign-denominated private-sector debt of any emerging market, and a gratuitous fight with Washington that has escalated into sanctions. [...]

The rise of strongman regimes is, of course, organically linked to the well-documented erosion of democracy that has taken place globally over the past 15 years. But the impact of the strongman model is actually broader than this, not only breathing life into sham democracies like in Russia and Egypt—where elections are held but blatantly rigged—but also reshaping unabashedly authoritarian governments like in China and Saudi Arabia. Whereas a decade ago Beijing and Riyadh were both characterized by a kind of collective, institutionalized leadership, they have since moved away from this in favor of a paramount decision maker with decisive say over the country’s direction. [...]

The seductive draw of this logic, moreover, is not limited to nationalists and populists. Plenty of Western pundits and investors—including some of the same disciples of globalization who rage at the likes of Donald Trump or France’s Marine Le Pen—have a track record of going weak-kneed in the presence of modernizing autocrats, especially those who show up at Davos with PowerPoint decks promising painful structural reforms, crackdowns on corruption, and lucrative infrastructure projects. It turns out the case for enlightened despotism can be persuasive for self-styled liberals, too, especially when the despotism is in someone else’s country. [...]

It’s worth extending the analogy, however, to recall the fate that befell the Turkish and Russian empires. Indeed, personal autocracy in both the Romanov Court in Petersburg and the Sublime Porte in Constantinople was a source of debilitating weakness, not strength, especially as these regimes entered into direct competition with the West. An idiot sultan or czar—and there were quite a few of them—could paralyze systems for decades. But even the good ones never quite figured out how to reconcile the strong, modern state they sought to build with the autocratic prerogatives they were determined to preserve for themselves.

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The Guardian: With criticism of May's Brexit, Trump detonates a diplomatic grenade

His outburst to the Sun – a Eurosceptic tabloid newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox News channel supplies many of Trump’s views and staff – could certainly be seen as bad manners, perhaps an act of revenge for the baby blimp set to take to the London sky on Friday. [...]

He is aware that May, like Merkel, is weakened and vulnerable domestically, and his past record suggests that he despises weakness. He has consistently expressed admiration, by contrast, for dictators such as Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un and Rodrigo Duterte.

More than a year into his presidency, no one is quite certain whether this is due to an instinctive fascination with autocrats and the great man theory of history – or a deeper, more sinister effort to reorder the world in favour of rightwing demagoguery. [...]

May, meanwhile, standing before the media and live TV cameras, will face calls to emulate Hugh Grant’s prime minister in the 2003 film Love Actually, who informs the American president: “A friend who bullies us is no longer a friend. And since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward I will be prepared to be much stronger.”

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The Atlantic: The Price of ‘Machismo Populism’ in the Philippines

Displays of sexism are nothing new for the 73-year-old Duterte, who often flaunts his machismo. During the 2016 campaign, he was often photographed with young women sitting on his lap, and sometimes kissed them on the cheek or lips. Later, he drew repeated condemnation for his insults and misogynistic remarks: A rape joke about an Australian nun, and another joke about ordering soldiers to shoot female rebels in the vagina because “they are nothing without it,” an assurance to soldiers fighting ISIS affiliates in southern Philippines that they could rape up to three women and he would protect them. [...]

Duterte’s blatant sexism and misogyny, and the way his supporters applaud it and other Filipinos seems to tolerate or ignore it, come into direct tension with the advancements of women in Philippine society. Two women have served as president of the Philippines, an achievement that many developed nations cannot claim. (Both came into power by overthrowing a sitting male president.) A recent McKinsey Global Institute report also showed that the Philippines leads the Asia-Pacific Region on gender equality in the workplace. The country has also consistently ranked among the top 10 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report, which recognizes gender equality in labor force participation, education, health, and political empowerment. [...]

Duterte capitalizes on this.“Duterte’s brand of machismo is familiar to many Filipinos. It is combination of a tough father who would fight until the end for his family and a drunk uncle who is usually charming but would make people uncomfortable in family reunions for his inane comments. The president's personality is both complex yet familiar, which perhaps explains why some people give him a free pass because they have given a lot of other men a free pass before,” explained the sociologist Nicole Curato.

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Jacobin Magazine: Russia Was a Latecomer to the Cyberwar Game

“Authoritarian regimes tend to learn from democracies, and really all this stuff started with the United States in 2010” — three years before Russia’s Internet Research Agency was founded — says Samantha Bradshaw, a researcher on the Computational Propaganda Project at Oxford University, who co-authored a report last year titled “Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation,” documenting such manipulation by governments in twenty-eight countries. [...]

Other governments have no qualms with using such tools to manipulate both their own and other countries’ populations, China and Russia being foremost among them. The Philippines’ Duterte, meanwhile, is renowned for heading a virtual army that uses Facebook to promote the president and attack his critics, especially potent given the powerful position social media has in the country. [...]

The best evidence we have for this are the NSA files leaked by Edward Snowden. In a series of stories in 2014, the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald exposed the array of capabilities at the disposal of UK and US intelligence agencies. A “menu” of cyber tools used by the GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), for instance, included a system for using complaints to sites like YouTube about offensive comment to get material removed, the ability to change the outcome of online polls, the manipulation of a website’s internet traffic and search ranking, the ability to “masquerade Facebook Wall Posts for individuals or entire countries,” and much more. The latter two are particularly notable, given the recent SMIC-funded research into the effects of the different ordering of content on social media and the web. [...]

There’s evidence that the United States is engaged in similar activities. In 2014, the Associated Press revealed a secret effort by the US government to foment anti-government unrest in Cuba by creating a clandestine, Twitter-like service on mobile-phone networks called ZunZeo. The plan was to first build up a critical mass of subscribers by promoting “noncontroversial content,” then start introducing political material that would provoke Cubans into organizing protests and, eventually, a mass uprising.

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America Magazine: How the Catholic Church is fighting the drug war in the Philippines

But apartheid between Europeans and indigenous Filipinos grew such that by the 19th century the latter were still obliged to kiss the hand of any passing Spanish clergyman and were forbidden to break bread at the same table.[...]

That everyman image is a key reason Duterte became president last June. The Philippines is deeply corrupt and economically divided. In 2011, 40 families, most of whose wealth stems from the Spanish era, reaped 76.5 percent of its GDP growth. Since the turn of the century, the country has moved 32 places on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, which surveys citizens on how problematic they consider day-to-day malfeasance to be. The Philippines moved from 69th to 101st of 176 countries. [...]

The police have recorded 6,000 deaths under investigation. The Philippine Alliance of Human Rights Advocates has recorded at least 12,000. Over 100,000 people have been arrested, and prisons are packed like slave galleons. Duterte has pledged to kill 100,000 “drug personalities.” Duterte is like the movie character Dirty Harry, one Manila taxi driver told me, holding his fingers up like a gun. “You do something bad now you have two things: the cemetery and the hospital.” [...]

“The sheer number of killings during martial law will pale in comparison with the records of killings in the war on drugs,” Edwin A. Gariguez, of Caritas Philippines, told me. “And the authoritarian rule of Duterte is beginning to become even worse than the martial law of Marcos, which he tried to disguise through some semblance [of] legality. Duterte is more brazen, unreasonably vindictive, with little or no regard for accountability.”

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openDemocracy: Global politics at a crossroads

Even in our fraught and imperfect world, the idea of the politics of compromise and accommodation – the bedrock of democratic politics  – can just about survive. Political compromises are made, negotiations continue, rhetoric rises and falls with the ebb and flow of democratic politics. Barring some extreme examples, legislators from different sides of the aisle can still talk and have tea across most, if not all, democratic countries. While all ideologies regard their views as right, in the politics of accommodation, opposing views are at least considered valid.

This is no longer is the case in several countries, with opponents and opposing views increasingly delegitimised and discarded, and their advocates mocked, dehumanised and even threatened. Recent examples range from Trump’s America to Brexit Britain, from Orbán’s Hungary to Modi’s India, and from Erdoğan’s Turkey to Duterte’s Philippines. When political systems become tolerant of falsehood and deceit on seismic levels, and when they even offer promotion to those who champion lies, democracy becomes vulnerable and highly fragile. And when those who oppose this are ridiculed and cast aside, the politics of accommodation begins to fracture. [...]

There are four reasons for this blockage, or four pathways to gridlock: rising multipolarity, harder problems, institutional inertia, and institutional fragmentation. Each pathway can be thought of as a growing trend that embodies a specific mix of causal mechanisms. [...]

We see such trends across many different kinds of countries. But the anti-global backlash is heterogeneous and rife with contradictions. It encompasses terrorism in the name of Islam, and Islamophobic discrimination against Muslims. It includes leftist rejection of trade agreements, and right-wing rejection of environmental agreements. The powerful tie that unites these disparate movements is a rejection of global interdependence and collective efforts to govern it. The resulting erosion of global cooperation is the fourth and final element of self-reinforcing gridlock, starting the whole cycle anew.  

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The New York Review of Books: The Chinese World Order

Mann’s prediction turned out to be true. China took advantage of the growing potential of unrestricted global commerce to emerge as the number one trading nation and the second-largest economy in the world. It is the top trading partner of every other country in Asia, not least because of its crucial position assembling parts that have been produced elsewhere in the region. Sixty-four countries have joined China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) infrastructure initiative, which was announced in 2013 and consists of ports, railways, roads, and airfields linking China to Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe—a “New Silk Road” that, if it succeeds, will greatly expand China’s economic and diplomatic influence. Twenty-nine heads of state attended Beijing’s OBOR conference in mid-May. [...]

That has not happened. Instead, the state has continued to control the Chinese economy in its effort to expand the market share of Chinese enterprises both in China and abroad. Beijing has carried out industrial espionage to acquire advanced Western technology, forced the transfer of technology from Western to Chinese enterprises through joint ventures and merger agreements, and, for a time (although not now), suppressed the exchange value of its currency in order to stimulate exports. Since 2006, Beijing has used various forms of regulation that are not banned by the WTO to make it difficult for foreign businesses to enter and compete in its domestic market, and to give an advantage to Chinese enterprises—especially in cutting-edge fields like semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, and information and communications technology. [...]

President Barack Obama sought to strengthen US alliances in Asia in the hope of keeping China’s rise in check. By contrast, President Trump has questioned the value of alliances with Japan and South Korea, withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and for a time put a hold on American Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPS) in the South China Sea. At the Mar-a-Lago summit in April, Trump embarrassingly acted like Xi Jinping’s pupil on the question of North Korea’s growing nuclear menace, stating, “After listening [to Xi] for ten minutes, I realized it’s not so easy.” He then cast aside his campaign commitments to raise tariffs on China and challenge China on currency manipulation in what turned out to be the vain hope that China would solve the North Korea problem for him. To the contrary, the threat has only grown, with Pyongyang’s successful July 4 test of a long-range missile that may be capable of reaching Alaska. [...]

But in Stuenkel’s view, these efforts are not likely to lead to the creation of a US-style global military empire. It would be difficult for China to defend its far-flung, fragile network of economic interests by chiefly military power. China’s enormous investments in resources and infrastructure abroad can pay off only if peace is maintained across these turbulent regions by political means, including respect for international law. According to Stuenkel, China wants nothing more than to preserve the main elements of the world trading order from which it has benefited so much, while gaining greater influence in the institutions that enforce and develop this order.

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Al Jazeera: Thousands of Filipinos slam Duterte's drug war

Thousands of people have protested in the Philippines on the 45th anniversary of the declaration of martial law in the country, while denouncing what they say are President Rodrigo Duterte's authoritarian tendencies and his bloody crackdown on illegal drugs. [...]

A group calling itself a "Movement Against Tyranny" used the anniversary to highlight human rights violations under Duterte's so-called drug war on drugs.

According to police statistics, more than 3,000 suspects have been killed in anti-drug operations since Duterte became president on June 30, 2016.

Another 2,000 more have died in drug-related homicides, according to government figures. [...]

"Marcos, Duterte, no different, they both kill," the activists chanted, referring to the late leader Ferdinand Marcos who imposed military dictatorship for eight years in 1972, citing the threat of communism.

Marcos' martial law era, which ended in 1981, was marked by massive human rights violations and the muzzling of civil liberties.

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The Conversation: We frown on voters’ ambivalence about democracy, but they might just save it

We often equate ambivalence with indecision or indifference. But it’s a more complex and more spirited idea than that. Ambivalence reflects our capacity to say both “yes” and “no” about a person or an object at the same time. [...]

Ambivalence is even rational, in that it requires an awareness of mutually exclusive choices and a refusal to choose; just as wanting a bit of both is also rational. [...]

Yet, as Zygmunt Bauman noted, the more we try to eradicate ambivalence by calling it ignorance and “mere opinion”, the more the opposite is likely to occur.

Furthermore, people who have been reduced to decision-takers will be more likely to see radical, revolutionary, even destructive change as the only way to resolve their ambivalence.

Democracy and ambivalence, rather than being antithetical, may be strange bedfellows. At the heart of the democratic idea is a notion of “the people” as both the source and guardians of power. [...]

The trouble is that the 21st-century democratic state has little tolerance of our scepticism about power. Citizens are pressured to turn their trust over to a bureau-technocratic order led by “experts” in order to deal with complex, contemporary problems. The role of voters is transformed into that of passive bystanders, prone to chaos and irrationality, and not to be trusted.

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