Dennis Hollingsworth

Needed. Resented.

As one who is born of an American father and a Filipina mother, the history of America in the Philippines is endlessly attractive to me not only for the potential of personal know thyself biographical revelation, but also as a template for understanding our current geopolitical dynamic. Richard Fernandez, author of the blog The Belmont Club has published a fascinating capsule history of The Islamic Insurgency in the Philippines Part I. Sunni versus Shiite? Been there, done that.

Unlike American policymakers a hundred years later, the US colonial authorities had no intention of bringing self-rule or democracy to the Moros. With abundant models of European colonialism available for emulation, their goals were simple: divide and rule while standing off. Ironically this traditional colonial approach would come to be called "realism" in the early 21st century.

Fernandez ends the post like so:

Historically, the modern Islamic insurgency in the Philippines can be understood as a reversion to a lower energy state by the Philippine Republic. It is the consequence of the gradual inability of the Philippine elite to keep hold of the territory that Wood, Bliss and Pershing had acquired on the Republic's behalf. The elites did not lack for avarice but they lacked in capability. Ruling class corruption and sheer incompetence had, by the 1970s made the Armed Forces of the Philippines vulnerable to challenge by the Moros once again. The legacy of the US Army and the memory of its force had finally faded. A young rebel Nur Misuari knew the time had come to strike and take back from Manila what his forbears had lost to Pershing; and his establishment of the Moro National Liberation Front customarily marks the start of the modern Islamic insurgency.

The mismatch between the ambitions of the Manila elite and their unwillingness to attain it through effort is at the heart of the current and stormy relationship between America and the Government of the Philippines. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo needs the 'descendants' of Pershing to help keep parts of her territory from gradually drifting away to the Moro nation. As such America is both needed and resented. Rather than meet the Moro challenge with through the path of reform and self-reliant military strength -- which would require giving up corruption and patronage -- the Philippine political system requires a source of help that does not require them to clean up their act. And the obvious source of that help was the superpower with which it had a one-time colonial relationship. The status of forces agreement which permits American forces to provide combat support is an expedient to square the circle; an attempt by local politicians to obtain military effectiveness from external help instead of paying for it by clamping down on their own rackets. And with it comes the ultimate dilemma of "nationalists" without the means to sustain their nationalism; that the maintenance of sovereignty requires giving some of it up.

(Emphasis Mine)

To give up corruption and patronage is to give up the last remaining vestige of tribalism, a line that the Philippines has yet been unwilling to cross, probably because it is the point of no return on the road to modernity.

Needed and resented.
Resented because you are needed.
Needed because you are resented.