The long-drawn-out discourse on the West Philippine Sea has gotten beyond difficult to comprehend largely because of the unhampered flow of press statements, positional views, knee-jerk responses from officialdom every time the maritime tension rears its ugly head. Extraordinarily successive and uncoordinated “rotation and resupply” missions serve as the live fuse for “rising aggression” in the disputed waters, where China and the Philippines both have sovereignty and territorial claims.

A continuing stream of rhetoric, semantics, and heuristics on both sides obfuscates the real issues behind this apparent “bullying” by a superior maritime power of another far more inferior. Most quarters call it the “battle of the narratives,” thereby operationalizing psychological warfare or black propaganda to exact their toll upon the weak rather than the strong nation-state.

Trained legal minds embrace the view that the latest case of China’s aggression is deemed to have set in motion the terms of the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty and pertinent provisions thereof. To a pragmatist, this throwing the book makes no sense, while live scenes of what transpired depict no imaginable correspondence to any condition set forth in the said accord.

Strangely, what an Executive Secretary as chairman of the National Maritime Council (NMC) earlier said in a press conference is disputed, if not conflicted, with what a Secretary of National Defense declared afterwards. If the wisdom or word of the “Little President” as NMC chair is overwhelmed by that of a line department secretary as NMC Member, what message is the government sending, pray tell?

If the President cannot as much as follow the policy recommendation of the proper cognizant authority on the matter, of what use is the office so created under Executive Order 57 and signed on 25 March 2024? Perhaps, either the incumbent chair is shown the exit or such unwanted conjuncture could logically lead to the agency’s dissolution.

There’s a perceivable pattern of high-ranking public officials being replaced and the sudden ouster of a former Senate president is no exception, with the corresponding reshuffling of committee chairmanships a chain reaction. The former finance secretary was replaced without much ado; the director of the National Bureau of Investigation of late; Vice President Sara Duterte’s concurrent positions given up, and yet, more new appointees across the bureaucracy are placed in various capacities.

If the question is on figuring out for certain where we are on the WPS issue at the moment, what would the answer be besides a waiting game? Is the current dispensation taking a hardline stand, meaning unyielding, or is it somehow “dancing” on the floor of leverage and compromise in the interregnum?

It escapes comprehension why the President, as echoed by the defense secretary, found it unsound to publish the schedule of “rore” missions precisely to preclude “intensified aggression” from happening. Is the leadership steering or rowing in the right direction or, put another way, methinks the question amounts to this, viz: “do leaders take the liberty to harm themselves or should that liberty be restrained to prevent harm to others”?

It’s unfair for the citizens to begin to dread that war between China and the Philippines is in the offing because both countries and their leaders hold diametrically opposed worldviews on how to address the maritime impasse — as if the government has ceased to be effective at getting what it wants from a long-time bilateral trade partner. A simple “bounded rationality” could have gone a long way than the rather monolithic ideological espousal of “anti-China sentiment.”

Are there gunships or aircraft, ordnance, materiel already prepositioned at Clark Air Base coming from France, USA, Japan, Australia that put the Armed Forces of the Philippines on red alert in case all hell breaks loose? Have all military retirees been informed by the AFP Reserve Command to which defense reserve group they belong in the event of war?

One lost thumb must trigger no war! Neither must one death precipitate US armed interference.