Duterte. Bato. Criticized abroad. Admired at home. Crimes against humanity? We know crimes. We’ve met humanity. Some people deserve consequences. The rest of us need a functioning country.

You can have all the humanity you want. It won’t run your ports, your courts, your seas.

The ICC is mad because Duterte and Bato allegedly made criminals disappear. (Maybe the criminals disappeared because they didn’t want to be found?)

People love tough. That’s leadership. Nobody built a nation by being polite. Doesn’t happen. You need results. It comes with, well, let’s call it decisiveness.

Tone sets a country. Duterte set it. Break rules? Bad things happen. Simple. That’s leadership. You can’t have a country where everyone’s just arguing and talking and disagreeing forever like Bongbong thinks and his presidency works.

You pick people who follow the tone. Men like Bato dela Rosa who understand the vision. He sees the order, follows the order, you don’t question the boss.

The problem with this country is its morality crowd. The crybabies; people who scream “That is not right!” They can’t even run a proper family and they tell leaders how to lead. Starbucks philosophers. They think the fate of the world depends on their outrage.

“Oh, sir, maybe don’t speak that way, sir.” Perhaps you should not curse the Pope, sir.” Wrong! Can you take an advice from someone who has never carried the weight of responsibility?

Philippine courts? No institution is perfect. But they’re effective. Accountable. Legit. They are part of the culture, law, the society they serve. Makes them far more qualified than a distant international body with moral grandstanding and zero presence on the ground.

But what did Bongbong do? We have a legitimate country with legitimate institutions and an illegitimate President in charge.

That’s exactly how you get invaded by China.

You start letting other people make your decisions; a bunch of Europeans who never won a war tells you what’s right, Washington tells you what’s moral, and guess who’s watching? Beijing. And they’re laughing.

You think Xi Jinping sits around waiting for The Hague to approve his next move? He wakes up, points to a map, “We’ll take the Philippines today.” That’s power. Meanwhile, your weak President is asking “What are we going to do?”

You hand over your sovereignty to the ICC today, you’ll hand over your islands to someone else tomorrow. Once you stop believing in your own justice, your military, your own authority, you are already outsourcing your nation.

The Hague loves fancy rulings. But ask the Philippines about the West Philippine Sea, and tell us what changed. If the court of arbitration ruling protected our islands, maybe we’d listen.

Duterte being taken to the ICC is the same nonsense. Completely irrelevant to reality.

The sea proves one thing: international respect begins when you enforce your own laws.

A nation without enforcement is a nation without security. A president who hands over his predecessor is a president without will.

The ICC thinks they’re the conscience of the world, disciplining nations like students instead of negotiating with them like equals.

If the Europeans can tell us who’s guilty, then they can tell us who’s President. That’s the road they’re paving.