Noise is like pain
To me, the rhetoric is just rhetoric. Duterte himself knows there is no way he can unilaterally "separate" the Philippines from any military ties with the US. As a lawyer, he knows that treaties are the province of the Senate. As to joint military exercises, if these are what he meant, there's no need to "separate" from them because they are just exercises, not treaties. Sometimes they are held, sometimes they are not. Put another way, exercises are dates, treaties are marriages. So there.
Economically? I think what Duterte had in mind was preference, or too much dependence, on the US, which is actually good since the global marketplace consists of roughly 200 countries, not just a few "suki" or preferred partners. Besides, maybe we need to pinch ourselves in order to remember that the economic action is now in Asia. Or have we forgotten that it was even the US that made the phrase "pivot to Asia" famous?
Having said that, I think the rest of what is coming out of Duterte's mouth is just noise. Even noise hides a message. To me, Duterte's noise is like pain. To doctors, pain is not the ailment or the disease but rather a symptom or a signal that something is wrong. Duterte's noise, like pain, is a call for attention. It might even be a call for help.
The relationship between the Philippines and the US has always been called special by either side. Whether both sides believe in it or not, I do not know. What I do know is that, if both believe in it, the depth and intensity of the belief is never equal. Even in tested and proven marriages, it is entirely possible that one just loves the other more than the other can reciprocate.
Unfortunately for US-Philippines relations, there can never be a strong and perfectly equal reciprocation even if both sides wanted to. As the smaller country, the Philippines tends to be more dependent on the bigger and more powerful partner. The US, on the other hand, being bigger and more powerful, will naturally have more outside interests and far bigger concerns. Its sphere of attention cannot be focused on one partner alone.
The Philippines, of course, understands this perfectly. No need to raise a fuss. And for so long, there was really no need to. But then, something like China happened. China began flexing its muscles and intruded into places not its own. Some of these places belong to the Philippines. As a tiny bleep on the US radar, whose scope includes bigger and more insistent bleeps like terrorism and the Middle East, there was almost no way for the Philippines to be noticed on a busy day.
Have you ever wondered why an Iraqi reporter threw both his shoes at then US president George Bush taking questions from the podium? Or why men sometimes run naked across the field in a football game? Because they are too puny to attract attention if they did not do anything drastic. A small president from a small country cannot attract the attention of a giant short of making a scene or a lot of noise.
Now America is paying the Philippines unprecedented attention. If it is getting unsettled by the noise, the consolation is that it is now trying to understand what the noise is all about, as if a doctor is now checking what is causing the pain. And that places things on the right track, where they ought to have been in the first place. Sometimes, when you are in a special relationship, you have to insist on the special — like ordering "halo-halo."
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