The myth of Uncle Sam

There’s a certain romance in the Philippine-American alliance that refuses to die. It lives in sepia photos and war stories, in the memory of Bataan and Corregidor, when Filipino soldiers stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Americans during World War II.

It lives again in Korea, at Yultong and Hill Eerie, where Filipino troops fought under the United Nations banner alongside US forces. It even traipses into Vietnam, where Filipino medics and engineers operated in lockstep with America’s war orbit against the communist threat.

And because Filipinos and Americans fought together many times over, we like to tell ourselves that we will always fight together. And rather naively, we recite the sacred texts of how tethered we are to America.

There’s the Mutual Defense Treaty (1951), the Visiting Forces Agreement (1998), the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (2014) and now the General Security of Military Information Agreement.

We speak of these documents the way old Catholics speak of indulgences as a guarantee of salvation. But here is the uncomfortable truth the West Philippine Sea keeps shouting to us: Treaties are only as strong as the political will behind them, and political will is as fickle as elections.

Presidents come and go and with them the tone of the American commitment. The words had been reassuring enough, with Biden calling US obligations “ironclad,” Obama saying much the same thing, and Trump 1.0 insisting the MDT applies even to attacks in the South China Sea.

So what’s the problem?

It’s this. If you want a reality check on how great powers really behave, don’t look at the Mutual Defense Treaty. Look at the map. Look at what powerful states do when they believe they can, and when their leader feels like it.

Look at Trump bombing Venezuela to control its oil, and now look how frazzled Denmark and the rest of Europe are with Trump threatening to annex Greenland by force, if need be, or by buying it like America did Alaska from Russia in 1867.

Greenland, a faraway island with cold winds and warmer strategic value, should only be an Arctic curiosity for us. Instead, it has become a lesson for smaller nations like the Philippines to digest: allies are allies until assets are at stake.

When Denmark, Greenland and many other European nations like the UK, Germany and France pushed back, Trump’s response was to slap them with tariffs and more threats.

Trump did not invent this bully playbook. Russia under Vladimir Putin has Ukraine and China under Xi Jinping has the South China Sea.

Putin sees geography as destiny and neighbors as buffers. Xi sees maritime boundaries as inconveniences to be redrawn with persistence. And Trump, well, Trump sees the world as a casino floor: everything has a price, everyone can be leaned on and the loudest voice wins.

Trump doesn’t annex territory so much as he auctions off morality, then acts offended when the bidding is low. Which brings us back to our own waters.

Against China’s overreach in the West Philippine Sea, the Philippines can no longer afford the luxury of faith-based security. The idea that our defense treaties will automatically translate to American action is hogwash.

A country that cannot defend itself is not an ally; it is a liability. And liabilities get managed, bargained over and sacrificed, depending on the mood of the bigger player.

So we must do the one thing we have avoided because it is expensive, difficult and politically thankless: build a credible self-defense. Not with speeches, but with steel, with radar, with drones, with anti-ship missiles, with naval logistics, by hardening our coast guard and training our reserves for combat.

And, let’s not forget, by forging diversified alliances beyond one patron.

If we are willing to look at America without sentimentality, having been brothers-in-arms in Bataan, Yultong and Vietnam is not a blank check for the future. They are memories. Honorable, yes. But memories do not sink ships.