And here in his recent opinion piece. And there will be more as the public want some answers from those person involved and it must include the Mainstream media for being complicit in hiding the truth.
Why the US fooled the ‘Bajo 3’ into losing PH territory
By
May 17, 2021
BY “Bajo Three” I mean the three very high-ranked Philippine officials who lost Bajo de Masinloc (also known as Scarborough or Panatag Shoal) because they naively believed in early June 2012 a US official’s lie, he got the Chinese to agree to a simultaneous withdrawal of Chinese and Filipino vessels from the shoal, to end a 10-week stand-off in the area. The three believed him and had our vessels vacate the shoal, leaving the Chinese in control of the shoal — forever as it were.
These three were:
– Our ambassador to the US,
, who had been told by US assistant state secretary for
an agreement with the Chinese had been reached
– Then foreign affairs secretary
, to whom Cuisia relayed the claim, after which del Rosario ordered, by one account, the Philippine vessels to vacate the area
– Then President
3rd to whom del Rosario relayed Cuisia’s claim and who, according to the foreign secretary, had the sole authority to order the vessels out
That this actually happened and was kept secret for so long by a powerful Yellow-controlled media with the help of the smokescreen that was the arbitration case filed in 2013 against
, is beyond doubt. Cuisia and del Rosario have practically confirmed they relied totally on Campbell’s say-so and neither of them had talked to a Chinese official, even just by telephone, about the agreement.
The US diplomat who fooled Cuisia, del Rosario and Aquino is now Biden’s ‘Asia czar.’ FROM ASIA.NIKKEI REPORT
Campbell has kept mum about the incident, and in his 2016 book,
The Pivot: The Future of American Statecraft in Asia, the only mention he made of that episode which had far-reaching consequences for the
geopolitics — China’s occupation of a shoal so close to the Philippine mainland — was a single sentence: “The
’ ten-week standoff with China ultimately resulted in its loss of the Scarborough Shoal, which is claimed by both countries.”
Campbell is not just any ordinary US official. He is considered to be the architect of America’s “Pivot to Asia” policy launched by President Obama in 2009. New US president
on day one appointed him “Asia czar.”
Silence
If Campbell had brokered a deal, which the Chinese reneged on, shouldn’t he have been shouting it to high heavens denouncing China? His silence on this is deafening as he doesn’t hide his disdain for China. In a recent
Foreign Policy article, he wrote: “China’s growing material power has indeed destabilized the region’s delicate balance and emboldened Beijing’s territorial adventurism. Left unchecked, Chinese behavior could end the region’s long peace.”
The loss of Scarborough — in my book the Yellow regime’s biggest crime against country — is a classic case, if not of gullibility and incompetence of Yellow officials then of a puppet mindset: Uncle Sam takes care of us, he can never betray us, the Bajo Three must have thought.
There are three major reasons why the US fooled the Aquino government into surrendering control of Scarborough Shoal, an understanding of which should be a lesson in our foreign policy.
First, the US had to prevent at all costs a battle between Chinese and Filipino forces over Scarborough Shoal.
After a 10-week stand-off, the Americans got worried the Aquino regime — especially with the belligerent language of his generals and personalities like then Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio — would provoke a military skirmish in a desperate attempt to regain control of the shoal. The Philippines would then invoke the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty with the US.
Unpalatable
This would force the US to respond in two different ways, one unpalatable and the other way too risky.
The first option, an unappealing one, was for the US to claim the MDT refers to an attack only on the Philippines’ mainland and forces there, not to an attack on a disputed territory and to Filipino forces there. In fact, Marcos had in 1976 backed out of a project to get foreign companies to explore the
when US officials explained this “fine print” in the MDT to him. And that was even the era when Marcos had a trump card: the US military bases in the country, critical during the Vietnam war.
But such a hands-off stance would portray the US as weak, or even interpreted as the start of a US retreat from Southeast Asia. For US anti-China hawks, that would embolden China to enforce its claims in the entire South China Sea, even totally drive away not just Filipinos, but Vietnamese and Malaysians out of the Spratly.
The second option was to go to the Filipinos’ defense in a military conflict. But this would almost certainly trigger a war between the US and China. The Chinese Communist Party would not be able to withstand domestic outrage in China if it backed down from a confrontation with the US, which in the first place has been viewed by the Chinese as attempting to continue its hegemony in Asia. It is not an exaggeration that it could have escalated into an all-out nuclear war.
The Americans of course had no way to get the Chinese to leave the shoal and thus prevent a military situation. They could think with the Philippines with its gullible and submissive diplomats. Why, its ambassador was a very close friend of America, having been the chairman of Philam Life owned by the American AIG Insurance and was currently (while he was ambassador) chairman of the Philippine distributor of Chevrolet cars.
Propaganda
Second, the US decided to trick the Bajo Three because it calculated the loss of Bajo de Masinloc to the Chinese would bolster its propaganda that China’s strategy has been to control the South China Sea gradually and in increments. This would convince the Philippines and other Southeast Asian nations to move closer to the US and allow it to have a bigger naval presence in the South China Sea region.
This propaganda has been quite successful the most vehement anti-China (but apparently pro-Vietnam and pro-US) propagandist Carpio has been incessant in mouthing the American line of China’s “creeping invasion.” No matter of course, the last feature China occupied in the South China Sea before Scarborough was Mischief Reef in 1995, which was in retaliation against the Ramos government’s move in 1994 (cleared reportedly by Carpio who was the president’s legal counsel) to grant oil exploration rights in the Reed Bank to the US-affiliated firm Alcorn Petroleum.
Third, the US calculated if the Chinese took over Scarborough, it could easily scare the wits out of the Aquino government that it would quickly restore US military bases here that were terminated in 1991, although in a more modern form, as a means of fending off Chinese expansionism.
This was through the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), signed by the Aquino 3rd government in 2014, which gives the US permission to station its troops and war materiel readying for battle in five military camps in the Philippines.
