Failing to confuse

Failing to confuse | Daily Tribune

It’s good that our military establishment sharply sees the unseen hands behind recent calls for officials to behave diplomatically or to raise questions about where exactly the West Philippine Sea (WPS) is, like Senators Alan Peter Cayetano and Rodante Marcoleta.

“We have to understand the objective of the Chinese Communist Party. The objective of foreign malign influence and intervention is to divide Philippine society, to divide Philippine leaders, to cause us to debate among ourselves,” Rear Admiral Roy Vincent Trinidad emphatically told reporters last Tuesday.

By calling out such a barefaced manipulation of the public sphere, Trinidad says the military sees it as a sinister ploy to make us all forget the bigger issue of China’s longstanding illegal presence in the WPS.

Trinidad assures us the military won’t be confused or distracted by these concocted political discourses from its job of protecting the national sovereignty and the integrity of the national territory.

By itself, the military’s position is clearly significant. It, however, also highlights the conclusion that both Cayetano’s and Marcoleta’s curious attempts to sow confusion about the WPS and anything related to it have obviously failed.

Whether or not the two admit their failure is insignificant; though both senators rummaging for escape hatches after suffering serious blowbacks from many quarters should be interesting as there’s certainly no lack of harsh criticisms leveled at them.

Critics, for instance, are thrashing Cayetano for his selective outrage against Filipino officials lacking respect for China’s Xi Jinping when he himself zipped his mouth each time former strongman Rodrigo Duterte trash-talked other world leaders.

Neither did Cayetano, critics charge, even once hold China accountable for its aggressive actions in the WPS, nor did he formally or publicly invalidate China’s fictive “nine-dash line.”

Cayetano, going full throttle against Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela, therefore, came off not as a sincere call for diplomatic niceties but more of a sordid call to bend the knee to imperious Chinese “wolf warrior” diplomats.

By the middle of last week, the imperious Chinese diplomats obviously were still intently focused on seeing those bent knees.

Reacting to the Senate condemning recent statements issued by embassy officials, spokesman Ji Lingpeng arrogantly sneered, “No matter how many anti-China resolutions these people introduce, whether it’s 10 or even 100, it will not in the slightest weaken the Chinese embassy’s resolve to fight the malicious moves against China to the very end. Not a chance.”

For that, a number of angry senators threw out civil restraint and took turns blasting the Chinese embassy officials.

Meanwhile, in Marcoleta’s case, he also curiously didn’t deem it important to question China’s unilaterally imposed “nine-dash line” amid his infuriating skepticism about the 2016 arbitral ruling and his argument that the ruling didn’t provide clear WPS coordinates or boundaries.

Prominent legal experts have since taken down Marcoleta several notches, pointing out that while he questions the lack of coordinates for the Philippine claim, he fails to recognize that the arbitral ruling invalidated China’s “nine-dash line.”

In fending off the attacks, a chastened senator insists he isn’t pro-China but is only making sure the country has a solid legal footing against China.

Critics, however, have given him no quarter and generally accused him of undermining the government’s unified position against China and faulted his recent confusing actions as actually favoring China.

In the face of all the chastening tirades, a chuckling political wag remarked that the posturing of Cayetano and Marcoleta only elicited rave reviews from paid pro-China trolls.