Casus Belli-aching

Casus Belli-aching | Daily Tribune

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has very recently talked tough against China, warning her that if “a Filipino citizen is killed (by the Chinese in the West Philippine Sea) in a willful act… we would respond accordingly.”

Fighting words, and one that might surely be appreciated during times like these when many are of the impression that we are getting the shorter end of the stick when it comes to skirmishes with the China Coast Guard (CCG) and naval militia.

Critics of the President were quick to pounce on his latest pronouncement as “warmongering” and “saber-rattling,” with a general of the People’s Liberation Army, one He Lei, calling the speech “belligerent,” without discerning that one must be “cap xiao” to think that the principle would be followed through in its plain import. They fail to conceive that as Commander-in-Chief, Mr. Marcos must be the first to project an image of strength in the face of heightened high-handedness by China, whose maritime authorities have lately threatened to detain Filipino fishermen who ply their traditional fishing routes.

Seasoned statesmen both locally and abroad, of course, know better than to take those words literally. War is serious business and not one to be entered into lightly, especially when our foe is a Goliath to our David, and we do not even have a slingshot, let alone water cannons. And I doubt that using the Philippine Coast Guard’s Jay Tarriela’s nose for a battering ram would be the appropriate response the Chief Executive has in mind once another encounter with the CCG degenerates into a ship crashing contest.

The point is that proper context must be taken, considering that the words were uttered at an annual regional defense summit, the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, in the presence of high-level representatives of Asia-Pacific countries whose militaries are considerably stronger than ours.

Perhaps it was thought advisable that tough talk on our part should compensate for weak armed forces, especially since there may be a subtle subtext about the Philippines having a Mutual Defense Treaty with the United States, on which we are counting to keep the Big Red Dragon from taking on our challenge.

After all, it has been said that after Winston Churchill made his stirring speech in 1940 to the British Parliament before the outbreak of World War Two, where in the face of an impending German invasion he bravely intoned that “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the streets,” he whispered to a fellow Member of Parliament, “and we’ll fight them with butt ends of beer bottles because that’s bloody well all we’ve got!”

The nuances become more layered after President Marcos, previous to his fighting speech, reportedly had a nice tete-a-tete with Singaporean Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong (son of Lee Kuan Yew), who recently famously articulated the caveat about the Philippines being wary of entering into a war where its territory and people would be at the frontline.

At any rate, history teaches us that wars are never started due to one person’s death. A smart ass would probably point out that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and his wife in Sarajevo in 1914 started World War One, but that would be oversimplifying things. Any decent history student knows that prior to that killing, tensions had been seething amongst the then great empires in Eurasia for years. Besides, Archduke Ferdinand was hardly “any Austrian,” he was the heir to the throne of the Austria-Hungarian Empire.

To provide even a proximate analogy to that event, Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez would have to be a passenger in a ship sailing the West Philippine Sea, which would have to be hit by a Chinese water cannon, causing the Speaker to fall into the sea and be eaten by sharks for a war to start between the Philippines and China. The chances of that happening are, of course, infinitesimally small. Thus, such rhetoric from the President is naught but diplomatic bellyaching.