All carrot and no big stick useless

While China nibbles us thin in the South China Sea, we are at wit's end on how to deal with yet another headache, this time in Sabah. On both fronts, the issues deal with sovereign territory belonging to us but claimed by others. And in both our helplessness shows.

We are reduced to helplessness because we do not have a robust military to back up our foreign policy. Filipinos are not bellicose, but it helps in real politics to carry both a carrot and a big stick.

Even the economy takes a backseat to military might. Just take a look at North Korea. It is one of the poorest nations on earth, and for the most part gets by on donations from its rich allies like China.

But you cannot sneeze at North Korea's military might. That, plus a suicidal willingness to use it. Already, the reclusive Pyongyang regime is inching toward nuclear capability, with the rest of the world able to only watch in horror.

The United States, bleeding economically, has been reduced to issuing noisy warnings it can only limp-wristedly enforce, if at all. America has simply made too many enemies it hardly has the beef to wrestle all of them down.

A United States that no longer has the consuming resolve to put things in order the way it used to see it spells double trouble for the Philippines, which has always looked to America for the resolution of its own fights.

 The aggressiveness of China does not come solely from a belief in its own might. To a greater extent, it comes from the conclusion that America is not about to go into a shooting war over somebody else's fight. The globo-cop days of the USA are over.

The tragedy is that Philippine policy makers never bothered to project this far into the future, a future that is already here. For so long, we deluded ourselves into thinking America will always be there for its little brown brother.

Well, even if America truly wanted to be there for us, the circumstances have changed such that it no longer augurs well for its own interests to fight giants on behalf of puny little midgets.

Why, even at home America is being split down the middle over such non-issues a mere two decades before such as health care, immigration and taxes. But now these are humongous domestic issues that eventually rein in US resolve to open new conflicts other than those it already has.

In a manner of speaking, therefore, the South China Sea jewels of the Philippines are lost forever, unless we can, in a matter of months, match the muscle of China. But that is, of course, throwing a fist to the moon.

Indeed it is instructive to watch the conduct of the coming election. Not one of the candidates for the Senate, that chamber of Congress in charge with foreign policy issues, has so much as raised a peep about what might be done to shore up our foreign policy posture.

And that brings us back to the beginning of this article -- that if we truly value our dignity, that if we truly need to assert our foreign policy, we need to back it up with a strong military. That is the only way.

Sad though it may be, especially for a people like us used to be nice and friendly, but we have to come to grips with the reality that in this world, the bark from a gun is the only language nations understand.

Look at the Sabah situation. We are actually pleading with Malaysia not to attack a bunch of Filipinos who have decided to reclaim what used to be their rightfully-owned land. Did you get that? We are pleading. Not with a superpower like China, but with the lightweight Malaysia.

Actually, the choice is ours. We can resolve to seriously commit to add credibility to our military, or we can do what we have always done -- amuse ourselves with politics. Just look at how merrily we rush toward May 13. It is as if China and Malaysia are not happening.