Flip President: China in, U.S. out

sniffy

Senior Reporter
September 13 2016 - 4:02PM

South China Sea: is Philippine leader Rodrigo Duterte charting a course away from US?

http://www.smh.com.au/world/south-c...ng-a-course-away-from-us-20160913-grf22l.html

Bangkok: Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has signalled he wants to move his country away from dependence on the United States, ordering all US special forces out of the southern Philippines.
The order came after Mr Duterte boasted about snubbing his US counterpart Barack Obama at a summit of world leaders in Laos last week, after earlier labelling him the "son of a whore".

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The US has long been most important military ally of the Philippines, which Washington ruled from 1898 until 1946 apart from a period of Japanese occupation during World War II.
In January the Philippines Supreme Court upheld the validity of the defence cooperation pact that gives the US military the right to increase troops deployed to the Philippines for war games, as well as bringing equipment into military areas including Subic Bay, the former site of a US naval base.
A spokesman for Mr Duterte, a blunt-speaking former mayor of Davao, said the president's order expelling about 50 US special forces from the southern Philippines "reflects new direction towards coursing an independent foreign policy".
Mr Duterte has been openly critical of the US since taking office in June, unsettling his country's relationship with the Obama administration at a time of heightened tensions over China's aggressive claim to almost all of the strategically important and resource-rich waters of the South China Sea.
China and Russia on Monday began their first joint military exercise in the disputed waters, highlighting an increasingly close relationship that threatens to escalate tensions between the US and China.
The region has also been shaken by North Korea's recent nuclear test.
Mr Duterte's unpredictable statements, apparently often made without prior consultation to his diplomatic advisers, are causing concern among the 10 member states of the Association of South-East Asian Nations.
While declaring that he is "not a fan" of the US, Mr Duterte has made cautious remarks about China and has accepted Beijing's offer to build rehabilitation centres for Filipino drug addicts as part of his shoot-on-sight "war on drugs" that has so far left more than 2000 people dead, many of them shot by police and vigilantes.
After returning to the Philippines from his first overseas trip as president last week Mr Duterte refuted reports that Mr Obama had cancelled a meeting with him after his "son of a whore" remark.
"I purposely did not attend the bilateral talks with the president of the United States," he said.
"I really skipped that one … you cannot just [lecture] a president of a sovereign state. Even Obama. It would be wrong for him to do that. That is why I swore against him."
 
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