Philippines, US election and a multipolar world

However the US election on Tuesday turns out one thing is sure – we are headed towards a changed world in which the US will cease to be the lone superpower.

Political analysts are now looking to a multipolar world. This would have implications for the Philippines which has been seen as tied to America’s apron strings and it is true with its leaders as it is with ordinary Filipinos. This persisting colonial relationship has not been good for us and one of the reasons the Philippines is not taken seriously either by its own neighbors and the rest of the world.

It would take more than a column to trace how the Philippines developed a foreign policy that is no more than an echo of the American’s. It is time we confront the fact that we have not developed our own, and why we are regarded as pitifully subservient to what America says is good for us. Some of our leaders have tried to develop a more independent foreign policy but this is immediately cut down and penalized by withdrawing support from the incumbent government.

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It is this perspective that may be more relevant to us whoever wins in the US elections. How should the Philippines regard its relations not only with the US but with other countries as well in a multi-polar world. To my mind, it cannot be bad for us. In a multipolar world, there would be more room to cobble our own foreign policy without fear of American displeasure as it has been since we became independent in 1946.

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In that coming multi-polar world, Filipino leaders should start looking at new directions in this changed world. Here is a piece written by Michael Lind for the Financial Times sometime ago that I have excerpted:

“The US is not considered the “leader of the free world” in any meaningful sense by anybody outside its borders. Thus, the US no longer commands global hegemony — BUT, it is still the world’s most powerful nation.

What struck me on my return to the UK was not “anti-Americanism” but the relative invisibility of America and things American. For instance, the only major new American presence I could detect was a proliferation of Starbucks in London…

What’s more, what surprised me was just how invisible the Iraq War was in the media. Simply, I think the Iraq War is not really something the British public feels it “owns” in the way I think it is something that the US public “owns…”

In a second inaugural address tinged with evangelical zeal, George W. Bush declared: “Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world.” The peoples of the world, however, do not seem to be listening. A new world order is indeed emerging — but its architecture is being drafted in Asia and Europe, at meetings to which Americans have not been invited…

Consider Asean Plus Three (APT), which unites the member countries of the Association of Southeast Asia Nations with China, Japan and South Korea. This group has the potential to be the world’s largest trade bloc, dwarfing the European Union and North American Free Trade Association. The deepening ties of the APT member states represent a major diplomatic defeat for the US, which hoped to use the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum to limit the growth of Asian economic regionalism at American expense. In the same way, recent moves by South American countries to bolster an economic community represent a clear rejection of US aims to dominate a western-hemisphere free trade zone….

The participation of China in Europe’s Galileo project has alarmed the US military. But China shares an interest with other aspiring space powers in preventing American control of space for military and commercial uses. Even while collaborating with Europe on Galileo, China is partnering Brazil to launch satellites. And in an unprecedented move, China recently agreed to host Russian forces for joint Russo-Chinese military exercises.

 The US is being sidelined even in the area that Mr. Bush identified in last week’s address as America’s mission: the promotion of democracy and human rights. The EU has devoted far more resources to consolidating democracy in post-communist Europe than has the US.

A decade ago, American triumphalists mocked those who argued that the world was becoming multipolar, rather than unipolar. Where was the evidence of balancing against the US, they asked. Today the evidence of foreign co-operation to reduce American primacy is everywhere — from the increasing importance of regional trade blocs that exclude the US to international space projects and military exercises in which the US is conspicuous by its absence... It is true that the US remains the only country capable of projecting military power throughout the world. But unipolarity in the military sphere, narrowly defined, is not preventing the rapid development of multipolarity in the geopolitical and economic arenas — far from it. And the other great powers are content to let the US waste blood and treasure on its doomed attempt to recreate the post-first world war British imperium in the Middle East...

That the rest of the world is building institutions and alliances that shut out the US should come as no surprise. The view that American leaders can be trusted to use a monopoly of military and economic power for the good of humanity has never been widely shared outside of the US. The trend toward multipolarity has probably been accelerated by the truculent unilateralism of the Bush administration, whose motto seems to be that of the Hollywood mogul: “Include me out.”

In recent memory, nothing could be done without the US. Today, however, practically all new international institution-building of any long-term importance in global diplomacy and trade occurs without American participation.

In 1998 Madeleine Albright, then US secretary of state, said of the US: “We are the indispensable nation.” By backfiring, the unilateralism of Mr. Bush has proven her wrong. The US, it turns out, is a dispensable nation…

The bullying approach of the Bush administration has ensured that the US will not be invited to take part in designing the international architecture of Europe and Asia in the 21st century. This time, the US is absent at the creation.”