I ONLY watch CNN nowadays when I want to find out the world’s latest news. I got stuck Tuesday when CNN anchors and their guests discussed US President Donald Trump’s latest caper, which was a meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland. Days after the summit, it is still a hot topic in the said global network. Trump’s performance in Helsinki has been described as a disgrace.
Russia has been accused of interfering in the US presidential elections that saw the businessman Trump, the Republican bet, defeat the Democratic Party’s Hillary Clinton. An investigation is being conducted and the information gathered tended to support the claim that a Russia cyber operation helped Trump win. There is no proof, however, that Trump directly encouraged such interference.
The summit featured a one-on-one talk by the two leaders behind closed doors, meaning, with only the interpreters present. The press con that was held later was disastrous, with Trump apparently groveling before the Russian leader. That reached a point where the US president threw his own people under the bus, expressing the belief in Putin’s denial of Russian interference in the US polls over the information gathered by US intelligence agencies that tended to prove the act.
Trump’s performance in Helsinki raised suspicion of the Russian leader has some “compromising material” against Trump (the Russian word for that is “kompromat”) because he seems to cower in Putin’s presence. This is inconsistent with his behavior against the leaders of his country’s allies in Europe.
Watching the coverage of the summit had me thinking about our very own President Duterte and his behavior when in front of Chinese President Xi Jinping. There is actually not much a problem with the Duterte administration’s foreign policy of being friendlier with China than with the US, our traditional ally. The problem is when our government seems to sacrifice our own interests because of it.
Our failure to assert, or even to mention, the Arbitral Tribunal’s ruling favoring our territorial claim to a portion of the South China Sea is surprising considering how assertive the Duterte administration is in other things. It’s just like Trump refusing to criticize Putin while hitting some of the US allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato).
In the president’s case, however, the possibility of a “kompromat” has not been raised unlike in the case of Trump although social media at one time played up the Duterte visit to Beijing months before the elections to attribute ill motive to his foreign policy favoring China.
It’s more likely, though, that the Duterte groveling is merely because China is dangling loans at the president to help finance his “Build, Build, Build” program. But one interesting question that could be asked is, did the Chinese help prop up the Duterte candidacy in the 2016 elections?
There is no doubt that China has been hatching schemes to ensure that candidates friendly to it would be elected in Asian countries. One politician friendly to China was former Malaysian premier Najib Razak, who ended up being defeated by the veteran Mahathir Mohammad in the recent election. Najib was overly friendly to China.