MISREPRESENTATION of history and utter disregard of diplomatic finesse seem to have conspired to make China react angrily to President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.’s pronouncements in his exclusive interview with Firstpost managing editor Palki Sharma during his state visit to India on Aug. 6, 2025.

Bongbong played much on what he called close friendly relations between the United States and the Philippines. He said that the Philippines has been an American commonwealth, that Filipinos have had parity rights with Americans in the exploitation of Philippine natural resources — as if these were not as atrocious as the half-century American colonization of the Philippines which killed 200,000 Filipinos; the merciless Douglas MacArthur’s bombardment of beautiful Manila in 1945 to render it the second most ravaged city in World War II and accounting for another 200,000 Filipino civilians killed; the lopsided military treaties (the Mutual Defense Treaty [MTD] of 1951, the Visiting Forces Agreement [VFA] of 1998 and the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement [EDCA] of 2016) that to this day tie the Philippines to the apron strings of America.

The interviewer asked: “Another flash point in the neighborhood is Taiwan, and most experts fear that Beijing will invade Taiwan before the end of this decade. If that were to happen while you’re still in power, would you be open to allowing the US to use resources and bases in the Philippines to defend Taiwan or would you rather stay out of it?”

In the context of diplomacy in which the interview took place, extreme circumspection was expected of Bongbong, just like what the ambassadors of Japan and the United States practiced in their meeting as late as Dec. 6, 1941: they continued to talk peace. For that reason, America was caught flatfooted when Japan conducted its sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941.

Japan is Asiatic in any case and must have been quite familiar with Sun Tsu’s Art of War and its foremost principle of deception: “Make your plans be as dark as night, and when you move, strike like thunder.”

In Bongbong’s case, replying to the interviewer’s question, he already proclaimed intervention in a war not of his making but America’s.

He said: “To be very practical about it, if there is a confrontation over Taiwan between China and the United States, there is no way that the Philippines can stay out of it simply because of our physical geographic location. To understand how close Taiwan is to the Philippines, the large city of Kawong in Taiwan is a 40-minute flight away from the capital of my province in northern Philippines, Laoag. That’s how close it is. And so if you think about it, if there is an all-out war, then we will be drawn into it, and I assure you with the greatest hesitation…, we will have to defend our territory and our sovereignty. Furthermore, there are many, many Filipino nationals in Taiwan, and that would immediately be a humanitarian problem. We will have to bring our people home as we do whenever they find themselves in areas of conflict. And that for me would be the most considerable concern for us at least in the early days. And that’s not an easy thing to do considering that you are in the middle of a combat zone.”

Bongbong’s reply was spontaneous. It was a mindset. He never realized that he was actually giving away what he really was to America from the very beginning: a puppet — and that’s by his own terms in the interview. He went to great lengths to defend his position of relying on the support of allies, as he said he was now proposing with India, in the matter of defending territory. By that reasoning, he hoped to absolve himself of the popular indictment of being an American puppet.

The wiser thing for him to do is to place the Philippines in Ukraine’s shoes. In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine as an urgent matter of preventing its complete encirclement by the US-NATO tandem. Had the attack not happened, Ukraine would have already joined NATO and thus opened up the installation of an intermediate range missile system for use against Russia.

Ukraine was a threat to Russia’s national security. Russia was justified in invading it. National security is the primordial duty of every state.

And it should be Bongbong’s, too, if he is to be worth his salt as Philippine president.

But by his every word and deed, he appears to continue dealing the Filipinos to America’s insatiable colonial aims by maintaining the unequal military treaties with the US (the MDT, the VFA and the EDCA), of late topped by the installation by America of the Typhon missile launch system here and there in the Philippines, targeting mainland China and Chinese forward military bases in the South China Sea. At the same time, Bongbong awarded America with the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade, which, among other concessions, grants America the right to exploit the natural resources of areas claimed by the Philippines in the South China Sea.

There is no hiding the animosity between China and the United States for world domination, with this big difference: America First for the United States, World Shared Future for China. Trump’s tariff war had boomeranged on America’s business, leaving it with no other option but to continue with its world war adventures. Thus, the resumed intensity of the war between Israel and Gaza with Iran in the Middle East, Ukraine and Russia in Europe, the aborted Hindu-Pakistani war and the Thai-Cambodia border war in Southeast Asia.

In the South China Sea region, the Philippines has since 2014 been answering to the marching orders of the US to war with China. The orders are in the form of propaganda undertaken by one Raymond Powell, a former US Air Force officer who takes satellite images of law-enforcement moves by China Coast Guard ships and passes on these images to Philippine media as Chinese attacks.

The idea is to generate war mania among Filipinos. So far, the mania has caught on only with Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Jay Tarriela, Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr., and some defense and Philippine Navy officials, and the mainstream media.

The Philippine-China war has been in the making since 2014, when the Ukraine-Russia war was also hatched — also when the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement came into being. This plan was revealed by the commander of the III US Marine Expeditionary Forces who claimed that a put-on Taiwan crisis would erupt, forcing the Philippines to intervene.

And presto!

The China-Philippines war. Just as Bongbong said in the interview he would do.

How providential can he get! Perfectly, according to America’s timetable.

China is understandably enraged. The Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a warning against the Philippines “playing with fire.” It said Taiwan is China’s internal matter which needs no foreign interference.

Precisely for that reason, I had written time and again in this column that the One-China policy precludes the US-promoted idea of mainland China invading its own province, Taiwan.

“But then again, Bongbong must play to the hilt his role of sparking the South China Sea prairie fire.”