On Tuesday morning, the White House announced it would cancel a meeting between President Obama and the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte.
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The Philippines scrambled to defuse a row with the United States on Tuesday and its new president, Rodrigo Duterte, voiced regret for calling President Barack Obama a “son of a bitch”, comments that prompted Washington to call off a bilateral meeting.
Duterte has been under intense global scrutiny over the more than 2,000 suspected drug dealers and users killed since he took office in May.
“Time will tell whether President Duterte steps back from this episode and realizes he needs to recalibrate his choice of words in engaging US leaders”, said Amy Searight, a former senior Pentagon official now at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.
“The areas that we believe we have robust, strong cooperation with them, we are not going to just simply throw that aside”.
Duterte responded, using a Tagalog phrase for son of a whore or son of a bitch.
As a result, he said, having a US president visit Laos would have been “unimaginable”, but he noted his courage to address the historical conflict.
“We look forward to ironing out differences arising out of national priorities and perceptions, and working in mutually responsible ways for both countries”, his statement said.
The US is one of the Philippines’ largest trading partners and a key security ally in its fight against Moro bandits in the country’s south. Manila also needs Washington’s help in dealing with a more assertive China in the disputed South China Sea. When I become president, I’ll order the police and the military to find these people and kill them.
Obama abruptly cancelled the meeting, which was scheduled for Tuesday, because of the tirade.
And the Western press, on which the State Department and Obama have been basing their concerns about human rights violations under Duterte, has invariably taken the position that it needs no further proof other than anecdotal and cherry-picked evidence that its “parachuting” journalists pick up.
According to NPR, President Duterte has insulted other world leaders with the phrase “son of b***h” in his native language of Tagalog, including Pope Francis, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the USA ambassador in Manila. “Until the [last] drug manufacturer is killed, we will continue and I will continue”, he said on Monday.
Duterte has been turning heads for months over his administration’s extrajudicial actions against drug crime, and he promised to call Obama a “son of a whore” if he was confronted about that at a conference in Laos.
The tidal wave of extrajudicial and vigilante killings are devastating the Philippines.
Duterte is not particularly interested in talking about human rights – he has said as much.
For his part, Obama called Duterte “a colorful guy”.
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While tensions are likely to dissipate, this spat has brought a number of changes in the U.S. -Philippines relationship into the spotlight. The Philippines relies on the U.S. providing a balance of power against China in the South China Sea, where in recent years Beijing has grown increasingly aggressive, posing a direct threat to the Philippines’ control of its own maritime resources.
