By Willie A. Samson, Mar 2, 2009

What you will find below is the final chapter of a book entitled, “Bound to an Empire, The United States and the Philippines” written by H.W.Brands in 1992. This chapter outlines his discussion on the issue: was the US occupation of the Philippines from 1989 to 1946 good for the Philippines and Filipinos? Although Mr Brands tries to present an objective analysis, it is still an attempt to rationally deliver a conqueror’s point of view. His conclusion is a clear “yes” American occupation was good relative to all the other colonial experiences of other surrounding Asian countries, like Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam.

But if you look at the situation from today’s (2009) perspective, and see the relative progress of say Korea, Malaysia, and even Vietnam, then new questions arise. Why has Korea progressed so much? Was it the great difficulty imposed on them by their Japanese masters that have made the Koreans so fiercely nationalistic and hardworking? Did the British and the French colonizers, through their strict rule, awaken the nationalist sentiments of the Malays and the Vietnamese that today they are able to leverage their unique cultural heritage to promote progress? The Filipino is quite different – he does not want to be Filipino, and he does not see the value of his own heritage. He is no longer nationalistic, no longer willing to put country first before his family and self. Maybe Ninoy Aquino was right. In essence, he said: The Americans killed the Filipino with Hershey bars! Can we really blame the Americans (or even the Spaniards for that matter) for what we Filipinos have become? Can we blame our past presidents for not putting the interest of the people first? Can we blame the elite for not caring enough to really raise the living standards of the people in their employ?

One position is that each individual as well as each nation (or people) is responsible for what he has become. It is no accident; we become what we choose. It is true our environment and history has a lot to do in contributing to our character and the way we think, but ultimately we are responsible for what we become. We have a choice to define what we want to become and to pursue the path to get us there. Of course life is more complicated than this black and white discourse and there will be a lot of failures and irresponsible behaviour along the way but a man can always say, “enough is enough, I will get up and go this way!” It is not politics; it is not the economy; it is not even education – it is an understanding of the choices before us, of what we can become and the guts to choose and stay on course through wind and storm that will get us there. But even this way of thinking is quite western and individualistic; should we not rather be collective and be Asian in our approach? How then can we affect our collective thinking? Should we not find a basis for unity first?

Well, it is here where we find the need to find a common root from which to build on. It is here where we need to see and understand our history as the common ground in our struggle to become a nation and one people. We need to resurrect the Filipino, in all his nobility, and inspire him to be proud of his heritage. We must take in both the good and the bad in our history. We can rejoice in the good and learn from the bad. We need to make our people understand that this is our collective struggle. Tagalogs, Cebuanos, Kapangpangans, Bicolanos, Illongos, Davaoenos, Tausugs, Ibanags, Chavacanos, etc, etc, must go beyond thier tribal mindset and come face to face with the issue of nationhood. This seems next to impossible. Any why now at this late hour?

I believe that the phenomenon of the Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW’s) will provide the experiential foundation needed for our cause. Millions of Filipinos (and growing each day) suffer the loneliness and the difficulties of being away from home and this simply crystallizes in them the need for a strong nation. It stirs up the love for nation which may not have been there in the past. OFW’s see firsthand the higher standards of living in the developed world, which they can aspire for. Many are asking and hoping that one day the Philippines will have enough jobs for its people. And many of them desire to come and stay home to help build the Philippines.

There are two other elements which I feel are necessary to have an effective platform for a collective movement toward nationhood. The first is a history written by and for the Filipino people. It must be a history broad enough for all Filipinos to relate to and a history where all “tribes” can see their contribution to the whole story. We have had three common adversaries: the Spaniards, the Americans, and the Japanese. There must be enough stories from each region to help compose the collective struggle of our people. Now we are facing the unseen enemy: ourselves and all our tribal discords. We do not need a bloodbath or a civil war to come together. We probably just need buko pies and suman and a lot of good stories from our history to jolt our collective consciousness.

What’s the other thing that we need? We need Filipino heroes. And we need to talk and talk about these heroes. And I’m not referring to movie stars in their fantasy world. We need honest to goodness heores who are at the top of their game, who stand out in the world in their respective fields. Notice the impact of Manny Pacquiao!! Everything stops when he gets into the ring. He wins as a Filipino fighter, not as a boxer from General Santos. We need heroes in science, in literature, in art, in martial arts, in sports, in chess, in business, in education, in agriculture, in fishing, in social work, in manufacturing, in government, in the military, in the church, and one day... in space! Then it will not be difficult to say, “I am proud to be Filipino!”

 

BOUND TO EMPIRE

The United States and the Philippines

H. W. BRANDS

New York Oxford, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1992

 

(This is the final chapter of the book, its conclusion.)

Conclusion

I. The dimensions of power

 

If one drew a graph measuring effective American power vis-à-vis the Philippines from the 1890s to the 1990s, it would show a sharp increase from the beginning of the Spanish-American War in 1898 through the suppression of the Filipino resistance after the turn of the century, followed by a long, gradual and occasionally interrupted decline. During the first few years of the American period the United States spared no effort enforcing its will on the Filipinos, employing direct military means, sometimes of the most brutal sort, to bring the recalcitrant colonials into line. The termination of the Philippine war placed the use of raw military power against Filipinos largely out of bounds, with the principal exception being intermittent expeditions against the Moros.

 

With the establishment of civilian government in the islands, American officials shifted from military to principally political methods of achieving American ends. Americans saw themselves as ruling in the interests of the Filipinos as well as of Americans, and this interpretation of the American role constrained what American officials felt able to do. It also led to the cultivation of a class of Filipinos as intermediaries between the American government and the masses of the Filipino people. The American decision to govern indirectly required American officials to temper their reforming tendencies and accommodate the interests of the Filipino elites. In the process, the balance of power between the United States and the Philippines shifted inexorably in the direction of the latter.

 

The shifting accelerated during the governorship of Francis Burton Harrison when Washington handed essential home rule to the Filipinos. It slowed and momentarily reversed course under Leonard Wood, though Osmeña and Quezon managed to prevent the retrogression from proceeding very far. The general trend resumed with the passage of the Tydings-McDuffie Act and the establishment of the commonwealth. American power in the Philippines temporarily dropped almost to zero after the evacuation of Corregidor and the surrender of Bataan. It rebounded with the Leyte invasion, then began to decline once more with the 1946 transfer of sovereignty to the Republic of the Philippines.

 

Independence occasioned a second transformation in the predominant mode of American power in the Philippines. If the end of the Philippine war had marked a shift from military to political means in the enforcement of the American will upon the Filipino people, the establishment of a sovereign Philippine nation produced a shift from political to chiefly economic means. In order to secure continuing American interests in the Philippines--the most important being access to military bases, the existence of a stable and friendly government willing to contribute to the fight against communism, and favorable conditions for investment--the United States relied on American aid and on concessions on trade and investment. American officials in the Philippines, from Edward Lansdale to Stephen Bosworth, provided plenty of political, diplomatic and other advice to Philippine leaders, but what gave the American words weight was the value of the grants, loans, military supplies, agricultural commodities, trade agreements and the like the United States could and did furnish to Philippine administrations that accepted the advice.

 

America's economic leverage with the Philippines, like the political leverage earlier, decreased over time. Where the shift of political power toward Manila had for the most part been deliberate, motivated both by a desire to redeem America's pledge of democracy for the Filipinos and by a wish to be rid of an unprofitable burden, the erosion of economic power was unplanned. It resulted partly from the draining influence of other claims on American resources--aid to Latin America and nonaligned countries like India, for example, and the war in Vietnam. To at least an equal degree it resulted from what might be called the de-Americanization of the Philippine political system. In the 1950s Ramón Magsaysay readily identified with the United States, out of personal conviction as well as out of knowledge that such identification would help him, or at least not hurt him, at the polls. In such circumstances a modest amount of American aid and a few concessions on trade and investment went a long way. By the 1980s Ferdinand Marcos clearly considered the United States primarily a cow to be milked for whatever it was worth, and an increasing number of Filipinos agreed with him. The relationship between the two countries was much more a business proposition than before. Not surprisingly, American dollars did not go as far as previously.

 

To a certain degree, during the entire period of American relations with the Philippines the cultural influence of the United States complemented the more direct military, political and economic forms of American power. If cultural influence is defined as the ability to shape systems of values, then cultural influence was what the American experiment in governing the Philippines was supposed to be all about. Whatever strategic and commercial benefits the United States might derive from possession of the islands, America's presence would be justified in the end only by the degree to which Filipinos embraced America's democratic and related values. To some extent the experiment worked, especially in the area of political values, and when it did it facilitated the attainment of other American objectives. Early on the Federalistas and Nacionalistas learned to play the American game, in the process creating the collaborative framework that provided the basis for America's scheme of cooperative government. Manuel Quezon proved a master gamesman, casting himself as just the person Washington needed to lead the Philippines to independence. Magsaysay rallied to the cause of Cold War anticommunism. Marcos, if grudgingly, joined the fight against aggression in Vietnam.

 

Yet as even this incomplete roster demonstrates, there was at least as much of tactical opportunism about Filipino leaders' embrace of American values as there was of considered conviction. And in this realm as in the others, American influence faded with time. Henry Adams once cited the succession of American presidents from George Washington to Ulysses Grant as refutation of the theory of evolution. The succession of Philippine presidents from Magsaysay to Marcos may or may not have refuted Darwin, but it did demonstrate the declining influence of American values in Philippine politics. (A real cynic might argue that Marcos was simply applying a different set of American values, namely those of the Grant or Harding eras. But Marcos carried his grafting much further than anything Americans had witnessed during the 1870s or the 1920s, and no American president has ever seriously considered nationwide martial law.) By the 1980s Marcos had become downright embarrassing to the United States, and to many observers in American and elsewhere he seemed living evidence of the utter failure of the United States to establish democratic values in the Philippines.

II. Comparative colonialisms

 

On the other hand, the Filipino people did eventually throw Marcos out, and in doing so they displayed a commitment to democracy that put even Americans to shame. A person determined to claim success for the American tutelary effort in the Philippines could contend that the People Power movement of 1986, rather than Marcos' misgovernment, was the more representative result of the work of Taft, Forbes, Harrison and the rest.

Maybe so, maybe not. To produce a case one way or the other would require an extensive excursion into counterfactual history. Would the Philippines have spawned a Marcos if not for the American colonial and postcolonial connection? Would the Filipino people have overthrown him? Would democracy in the Philippines have been stronger or weaker in the absence of an American connection? There is no way to know.

 

All the same, beneath these questions is a more basic question that deserves to be addressed: Did the American presence in the Philippines benefit the Filipinos? Put otherwise, did the United States deliver, at least partly, on its promise of "the Philippines for the Filipinos"?

 

Answers here run up against some of the same counterfactual difficulties as before. Because the United States did annex the Philippines in 1899, there is no way of knowing what the Philippines would have been like in 1991 had the United States refrained from annexing. The issue is not whether the Filipino people were better off in 1991 than in 1899--by most quantifiable measures they were--but whether they were better off than they would have been without the American relationship.

 

Another way to approach the question is to compare the American performance in the Philippines with the performance of other colonialists elsewhere in the neighborhood. This approach is not entirely satisfactory, since it implicitly assumes that some country would have seized the Philippines had the United States not. This is hardly a certainty. Yet, considering the graspingly competitive condition of international politics at the turn of the century and the relatively defenseless state of the Philippines, there is as much reason to believe that the Philippines would have become some great power's Indochina or Korea as to believe it would have remained its own Siam.

 

How did America's treatment of the Philippines compare with Britain's treatment of India, France's of Indochina, the Netherlands' of Indonesia, or Japan's of Korea?

 

Rather well, in fact. With the Japanese occupation of Korea and often ferocious repression of the Korean people there is really no comparison. The Japanese considered Korea a conquered territory and made no bones about bleeding its people. The Netherlands behaved better toward the Indonesians, but the Dutch had little concept of seriously developing the Indonesians for self-rule. Two years after the American Congress approved the Tydings Act the Dutch governor of Indonesia declared, "We have worked here in the Indies for three hundred years. We should expect another three hundred years before the Indies will, perhaps, be mature for a form of autonomy." Significantly, Indonesians described the Japanese conquest of their country in 1942 as "liberation" and the arrival of British troops in 1945, preparatory to the return of the Dutch, as the "reoccupation." (Filipinos, by contrast, spoke of the Japanese "occupation" of the Philippines during the war and the American "liberation" at war's end.)

As for the French in Indochina, they were still fighting to hold onto their Southeast Asian colony twenty years after the United States had set a date for Philippine independence and nearly a decade after the United States had handed sovereignty to the Filipinos. The significant fact here was that France had to be driven out of Indochina by military force, while the United States granted Philippine independence voluntarily. (American aid to France in the fight against the Viet Minh indicated not a conversion to colonialism but an aversion to communism. The Eisenhower administration repeatedly pressed France to grant independence to the states of Indochina, both for the sake of self-determination and from fear that if the French hung on too long their heirs would be the communists.) To be sure, a successful nationalist military movement is not conclusive evidence of colonial maladministration. Indeed, in certain respects the Vietnamese and other inhabitants of Indochina appreciated France at least as much as Filipinos appreciated America. Even as committed a nationalist as General Vo Nguyen Giap, the commander who drove out the French (and later the Americans) considered the French language and education in French ways the mark of a cultured person. All the same, despite their professions of a mission civilisatrice, the French generally exploited their Southeast Asian colonies far more blatantly than Americans exploited the Philippines. No American governor of the Philippines could have written about the people of Luzon what French governor Paul Doumer wrote about the people of the central portion of Vietnam: "When France arrived in Indochina, the Annamites were ripe for servitude." 2

 

Of other colonialisms, the British experience in India most closely paralleled the American experience in the Philippines. The British transferred sovereignty to India (and Pakistan) barely a year after the United States transferred sovereignty to the Philippines. And the British left in relative peace (although India and Pakistan quickly went to war with each other) rather than at the point of a gun. Further, British officials had taken quite seriously their obligation to prepare India for self-rule. India's postcolonial record of democratic practice has at least matched the Philippines'. ( Pakistan is another story.) Even so, the British accepted the idea of Indian independence only under great duress and only at the last moment. During the previous quarter-century Britain had sought to stifle the independence movement by violence (at Amritsar in 1919 British troops mowed down nearly four hundred demonstrators) and by massive jailings ( Winston Churchill clapped some 100,000 nationalists behind bars in 1942). During World War II millions of Indians hoped the Japanese would beat the British. Thousands helped Subhas Chandra Bose organize the Indian National Army to fight on Japan's side. When Britain left India in 1947, the knowledge that British troops could not keep the independence movement bottled up much longer provided a principal impetus.

 

If a single trait distinguished American control of the Philippines from the control exercised by the other colonial powers in their colonies, it was the relative diffidence with which a majority of Americans approached the idea of colonialism. Historian Robin Winks once described colonialism as "a state of mind." If so, it was a state Americans as a group never acquired. A few individuals like Taft and Forbes and Wood came close, but they were always offset and eventually superseded by the Wilsons, Harrisons and Murphys. Theodore Roosevelt--himself a half-hearted colonialist once he recognized what colonialism meant for the United States--was right when he predicted that the American people would not long tolerate the burden of governing the Filipinos. Whether because Americans trace their own national existence to an anticolonial rebellion; because they are too attached to the notion of republicanism to deny it indefinitely to others; or because they are too self-centered to persist in efforts to do good for other people--for whatever combination of reasons, Americans never got the hang of colonialism. Lacking the hang, once they initially established American authority in the Philippines they allowed their colonial power to rest relatively lightly on the Filipino people. The Filipinos, at any rate, complained relatively little and then often for form's sake. When Philippine independence arrived, it resulted less from a Filipino desire to have done with America than from an American desire to have done with the Philippines. 3

III. Imperialism, old and new

 

If one accepts that American colonialism in the Philippines was comparatively benign, a question remains whether American treatment of the Philippines after independence was what it should have been. Did Americans exploit the enormous disparity in power between the United States and the Philippines to America's advantage and the Philippines' detriment? Did America's economic leverage leave the Philippines, though politically independent, still at America's mercy? Did the United States practice an informal kind of imperialism over the Filipinos?

 

People can debate endlessly, and have, about what constitutes imperialism. Strict constructionists define imperialism as only that which involves formal empires: where the flag waves, there lies the empire, and nowhere else. Loose constructionists have applied the term to nearly any unequal power relationship. During the last several decades imperialism as a label has acquired a pejorative connotation, rendering matters of terminology the more troublesome. (In the salad days of imperialism in the late nineteenth century many imperialists wore the badge proudly.)

 

A way around the semantic problem is to adopt the view that imperialism is as imperialism does--or was as did. In the context of the Philippines one might compare the manner and extent of America's application of power before independence to the manner and extent of the application after. By any reasonable definition, American activities in the Philippines before 1946, and especially before 1935, whether onerous or benign, were imperialistic. If the United States exercised comparable influence over the lives of Filipinos after independence, then that influence might fairly be judged imperialistic as well.

 

By this standard American influence in the Philippines during the first decade or so after independence certainly amounted to informal imperialism. If anything, America exercised greater influence in the aftermath of World War II than it had for decades previous. The war had shattered the Philippine economy, and Washington dangled reconstruction aid before the fledgling Philippine government in order to obtain special treatment for American investment and long-term leases on land for military installations. The parity clause of the Bell Act required the Filipinos to amend their constitution--about as intrusive a non-military exercise of foreign influence as one could imagine.

 

Through the 1950s American influence diminished somewhat while still remaining strong. Edward Lansdale and the CIA were hardly responsible for the selection of Magsaysay as Philippine president, and Washington did give ground in the Laurel-Langley accord. But on matters ranging from the Manila Pact to the Bandung conference, not to mention the American bases, the Magsaysay administration delivered nearly everything the American government desired.

 

The 1960s witnessed a further decrease in American influence. American backing for political candidates carried less weight than before, and an ambitious person like Marcos could make a nationalist issue out of Macapagal's desire to send Philippine troops to Vietnam. This said, the prospect of additional American aid caused Marcos, once safely elected, to agree to send the Philippine contingent--a course he almost certainly would not have chosen nor the Philippine legislature accepted without the American bribe. American influence, though declining, still sufficed to override the nationalist scruples of the Philippine government. Not completely: the Philippine legislature after 1966 refused to appropriate funds for the Philippine Vietnam unit, and fear of a Filipino backlash caused the United States to refrain from launching combat sorties against Vietnam from bases in the Philippines. Yet through the end of Marcos' first term Washington got more of what it wanted from him than it had from Osmeña and Quezon during the 1920s.

 

The termination of the Vietnam War decreased American demands on the Philippines. By the early 1980s the demands had reduced essentially to access to the American bases. Though American influence in the Philippines had continued to decline, it remained strong enough to ensure that access. In other areas the American government had precious little pull with Marcos. His imposition of martial law and his increasingly obvious misrule made him obnoxious to most Americans, government officials included. But with a few exceptions the successive administrations in Washington overlooked his faults and paid his inflating price in order to ensure his cooperation regarding the bases.

By this time America's informal-imperialist powers had dwindled nearly to nothing. A fair argument could be made, and was, although not usually in such loaded language, that what the Philippines needed was more American imperialism. Washington had never allowed Marcos-style abuses while the Philippines had been an American colony, and though no one advocated a reoccupation of the country, more than a few thought the United States might take measures to persuade Marcos to shape up or get out. Such advice, though well intended, raised serious philosophical problems. When, if ever, is outside intervention compatible with self-determination? Is good government preferable to self-government? (An affirmative answer to the latter question formed the basis for the TaftForbes-Wood approach, as it did for most forms of professedly enlightened imperialism.) The advice also raised tactical problems, in that it would enable Marcos to wrap himself in the Philippine flag.

 

Yet the imperial bond had not vanished entirely. After the Filipino people routed Marcos from office, Cory Aquino immediately looked to the United States for support. Washington quickly pledged economic aid, and when Aquino decided that bringing the Marcoses back to Manila to try to recover the loot they had stolen was too risky, American prosecutors leveled charges against the couple. During one coup attempt the United States even resorted to military intervention, sending a squadron of American jets from Clark over Manila in a successful show of force designed to intimidate the rebels.

 

In summary, the American relationship with the independent Philippines did exhibit characteristics of an informal imperialism, with American power at times shaping Filipino behavior in a manner comparable to the manner in which American power had shaped Filipino behavior before independence. America's informal-imperialist influence diminished over time during the postcolonial period, just as America's formal-imperialist influence had diminished during the colonial period. Put differently, in the ninety-year process by which power in the Philippines shifted from Americans to Filipinos, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century and continuing into the century's final decade, the transfer of sovereignty in 1946 signaled no abrupt change. The devolution of power traced a reasonably smooth curve, with formal imperialism shading into informal imperialism, and both losing strength with passing years.

IV. Power and responsibility

 

One does not have to accept the full imperialist rationale to concede that formal imperialism has one important advantage, for both the imperialists and the imperialized, over informal imperialism: it establishes a clear connection between power and responsibility. Before 1946, and even more so before 1935, if something went wrong in the Philippines there was no doubt where ultimate responsibility lay. The Filipinos who helped American officials govern the country might share the burden of responsibility, as they certainly did in some of the fiascos of the Harrison era, but the buck finally stopped in Washington.

 

The transition from formal to informal imperialism in 1946 produced a sundering of the connection between power and responsibility. (In fact, one can take this sundering as defining the difference between the two forms of imperialism: formal imperialism equals power with responsibility, while informal imperialism equals power without responsibility.) The disconnection between the two allowed American officials to disclaim responsibility when Philippine presidents like Quirino and Marcos raided the public treasury or otherwise abused their authority, even as Washington retained the power to ensure preferential treatment for American investment and access to military bases.

 

To gain perspective on the relation between power and responsibility, one might look to the United States' treatment of the countries of Central America and the Caribbean. With the exceptions of Puerto Rico and later the Virgin Islands, the United States never possessed a formal empire in the Caribbean basin. Instead it acted on a strictly informal basis. The region was spared wars of American conquest comparable to the Philippine war, but it did not escape the frequent use of American military force. During the first third of the twentieth century--corresponding to the pre-commonwealth period in the Philippines-American troops invaded and occupied many of the countries of the area, sometimes staying for several years at a time. The invasions and occupations did next to nothing to improve living conditions for the Central Americans and Caribbean islanders. On the contrary, American soldiers, and American political and economic policies in later years, tended to foster autocratic regimes far more violent and oppressive than Marcos'. America's irresponsible exercise of power in the region also generated a deep-seated distrust of the United States and helped create a variety of anti-American revolutionary movements.

 

By comparison to this situation, America's treatment of the Philippines, at least after the suppression of resistance to annexation, was gentle and well received. Quezon used to complain that the United States did not sufficiently oppress the Philippines. "Damn the Americans!" he said. "Why don't they tyrannize us more?" American rule offered Quezon no hard surface to strike against, no irrepressible nationalist issues to turn to account. Benigno Aquino put the same complaint slightly differently. "The United States really kills you with love," Aquino asserted. "A fire starts and they smother you with foam. They kill you with Hershey bars." 4

 

Aquino spoke in 1968. By the time he was really killed, not with Hershey bars but with bullets, for returning to a country controlled by a regime underwritten by American dollars, he might have had a different view. It is significant that the United States enjoyed greater popularity in the Philippines in the early aftermath of the colonial period than it did forty-five years later. Magsaysay counted it a political plus to be identified with the United States, and when Douglas MacArthur returned to the Philippines in 1961 Filipinos filled the streets of Manila in an outpouring of affection and gratitude unmatched in Philippine history. By the beginning of the 1990s the glow had faded dramatically. Cory Aquino's evident dependence on the United States diminished her prestige in many quarters, and Filipino politicians of nearly all stripes felt obliged to speak out against the continuing American presence in the country. On the streets of Manila and in the neighborhoods of Clark and Subic Americans sometimes walked in danger of their lives.

 

While a variety of factors accounted for the decline in pro-American sentiment, probably none mattered more than the perceived--and actual--irresponsibility of American power in the postcolonial period. Before independence the United States had exercised power in the Philippines, but it had acknowledged its responsibility to use that power for Filipinos' good as well as for Americans'. Often the Americans delivered less than they promised, but most Filipinos conceded that the United States did not egregiously misuse its power. The objective and honest among them would have granted that during the major portion of the colonial period the Americans delivered reasonably good government, perhaps better than Filipinos would have. Eventually Filipino leaders came to value self-government more than good government: Quezon said he would prefer "a government run like hell by Filipinos to one run like heaven by Americans." But Filipinos who knew conditions elsewhere in Asia recognized that in comparison their country was well treated. 5

 

After independence the United States no longer recognized any significant responsibility for the welfare of Filipinos. As the hearings and negotiations preceding passage of the Tydings-McDuffie Act demonstrated, that was much of the point of granting independence. To be sure, among some Americans there existed a residual desire to do right by America's former dependency, but the American government found it distressingly easy--distressing to those who had hoped for better--to act as though the Filipinos' problems had nothing to do with the United States. From this attitude came the willingness to tolerate Marcos' hijacking of the Philippine treasury and his subversion of the political and human rights of Filipinos, so long as he let the United States keep Clark and Subic.

 

Had the United States possessed no influence with Marcos, no one could reasonably have blamed the United States for Marcos' excesses. Doubtless many of Marcos' opponents in the Philippines and elsewhere overestimated Washington's ability to get him to change his ways. Further, as noted above, there were philosophical as well as tactical problems associated with any overt American intervention in Philippine affairs. Yet it was not unreasonable to suggest that after nearly fifty years of colonial rule, and while Washington still paid many of the Philippine government's bills, the United States had certain obligations to the Filipino people. If the United States could not actively intervene to restore democracy, then at least it should not collaborate in democracy's destruction.

 

As a group, American officials engaged in foreign policy are neither stupid nor venal--the stupid don't last and the venal quickly learn that other fields pay better. American officials involved in policy toward the Philippines during the Marcos era understood the trade-offs dealing with Marcos entailed. With their eyes open they decided that America's security interests in the Philippines outweighed--for the United States--the interests of the Filipino people in good government and national development. For awhile they did not consider the goals incompatible, but even after the Marcos regime degenerated into unvarnished despotism they chose access to the bases over democracy for Filipinos.

 

Was the choice justified?

 

An answer to this question requires answers to two subsidiary questions. First, did the United States in fact have any residual obligations to the Filipino people? Phrased another way: Was American raison d'état sufficient basis for determining American policy? Second, assuming it was sufficient basis, did American raison d'état require winking at Marcos' misdeeds? Alternatively: Were the bases all that important?

 

Obviously these questions have no easy answers. The first requires a moral judgment about the proper role of government. "Realists" have held that governments act morally only when they pursue the collective self-interest of the individuals they represent. Anything more is vanity and delusion. "Idealists" grant greater scope for action on behalf of other nations and peoples.

 

Whatever the merits of the opposing arguments in the realist-idealist debate as it applies to international affairs generally, it would appear that the Philippines occupied a special position vis-à-vis the United States. By no choice of their own, Filipinos fell under American rule at the end of the nineteenth century. For almost five decades the United States professed to govern the Philippines in the interests of Filipinos. Had American power in the Philippines disappeared in 1946, perhaps American responsibility could be said to have disappeared too. But power persisted, and so, one would think, did responsibility.

 

The second question--whether American interests dictated acquiescence in dictatorship--is no easier. American governments from the 1940s to the 1990s valued the bases in the Philippines for the ability the bases provided the United States to project American power into Southeast Asia and adjacent regions. Was this ability crucial? Assuming the wisdom of the containment premises of American Cold War policies, it might have been. On the other hand, in light of the fact that the bases received their heaviest use in support of the tragic American war effort in Vietnam, a case can be made that whatever might have discouraged the United States from making that effort would have been to America's advantage (not to mention the advantage of the Vietnamese and everyone else drawn into the maelstrom). Certainly the fading away of the Cold War in the late 1980s indicated a need for reconsidering premises that for long seemed almost unchallengeable.

 

The problem of balancing power and responsibility has lain at the heart of American international affairs for a century. During the 1890s Americans had more power than their history had prepared them for. In the ebullience of their power they seized the Philippines. Simultaneously they launched on a career of globalism that within two generations afforded them power unmatched by any nation in world history. Meanwhile Americans' sense of responsibility also increased, though not at the same pace as their power. With respect to the world at large, the sense of responsibility lagged behind the power through two great wars, catching up only during the second. For a time after the second, power and responsibility ran a close race, as the United States committed itself to defending half the planet against communism. Eventually power faltered, leaving Americans with responsibilities, most dramatically in Southeast Asia, they could not fulfill.

 

In pondering their path down from the summit of world power and responsibility, American leaders might have looked to their country's experience in the Philippines. The issues of power and responsibility between the United States and the Philippines were not identical to the issues of power and responsibility between the United States and the rest of the world, but similarities existed. If Americans had not always succeeded in matching power and responsibility in relations with the Philippines, their failures, as well as their successes, furnished lessons potentially applicable elsewhere.