And what did that old song's lyrics said?
If Philippines so choose not to be the friend that we can share fine wine with, and to make it worse they choose to side with the jackals, what option do we have?
Since I understand Tagalog (lived in the Philippines for close to a decade) I must say that Dr.Carlos was all over the place with respect to her passionate anger, disillusionment, combative rhetoric, and dismissive towards the mostly military centric advisors that surrounds their current President. On the one hand, she does acknowledge that America is indeed needling China with respect to their most sensitive issue which is Taiwan, yet, she firmly and passionately believes that China's belligerent actions against her country must be met with a firm embrace to the U.S. and by also inviting Japan, Australia among others willing to participate in trying to squeeze, pressure China into some sort of respect of the Philippine EEZ. This idea in my opinion is not only FUBAR since it'll further invite China's stronger response contrary to the result envisions by this lady. By inviting Japan into the SCS dispute knowing or perhaps egregiously ignorant of China's bitter history with Japan (Taiwan is the bitter product of that conflict) and Australia both countries that are non-claimant of the SCS is essentially making the situation worse not better. The Philippines does not a China policy expert or historians that are expert or at least well-versed in Chinese history they can lean that their government can utilize to better understand China's historical perspective so that it can at least try to understand China's point of view?
Her trade advise is even worse than that of Mr. Navarro (Trump's genius advisor) when she (Clarita Carlos) advocates for redirecting Philippine top agricultural produce away from China and to other countries like Turkey? without putting into the account the added logistic cost, the volume of sales or potential sales based on the demand and size of that country's market, not to mention the GDP per capita of China vs Turkey which if am not mistaken are comparable.
I expected better from Dr. Carlos but it seems her understanding of geopolitics is rather limited in scope, vision, not to mention pedestrian understanding of China's history, the western and Japanese aggressions against China that's impacting China's current geopolitical environment. Why America is acting the way it is towards China since it seeks to disrupt, if not destroy China's ascent and the coming replacement of America as the number 1 undisputed economic giant of the world. The need to be hyper realistic that the Philippines is a small country, with meagre or next to nothing military conventional power, an economy that's increasingly focus on service sector, agriculture based and don't really have a strong manufacturing base even within ASEAN countries.
While I am very sympathetic to the plight and economic struggles that Philippine fishermen experience against a very strict monitoring of China's PLAN/Coastguards since "fishing plays a key role in the Philippine economy, especially for coastal communities living along its 36,289km coastline, the fifth-longest in the world, and employs 1.5 million people, contributing
PHP 196 billion to the country's Gross Domestic Product."
I am quite baffled as to why the Philippines and China can't find ways to work on this important source of economic livelihood for both the Chinese and Filipinos that would satisfy both sides.
