President Rodrigo R. Duterte has been referred to as a "colorful president" by US President Barrack Obama, after the US State Department peremptorily cancelled the scheduled bilateral talks between the two heads of state in Laos PDR. Well, President Obama (no pun being intended)is the first and only colored president of the most powerful country in the whole world. To call President Duterte "colorful" might have been the most polite, the most statesmanlike, the most diplomatically and politically correct adjective that a US head of state could have called our chief executive, after all the really colorful expletives that our President Digong uttered in answer to a press interview question from a Reuters correspondent.
The sudden, if peremptory, cancellation of the bilateral meeting between Presidents Duterte and Obama in Laos was seen by all ASEAN member-nations as an important experience that we should learn from. Because our president made some statements before he left for Laos, some rather provocative and confrontational phrases that irked the US diplomats advising their chief executive, they have decided to back off from the scheduled meeting. The USA is our closest and strongest ally, a treaty ally in fact, as mentioned by former senator and former ambassador Letecia Ramos-Shahani. We cannot, as a nation, afford to send wrong signals to our closest friend. Only the US can provide a balance of power in the West Philippine Sea, and thus we cannot antagonize the Americans.
In fairness to our President, however, the substance of his statements were only called for and politically appropriate, given the well-known propensity of the US and its leaders to condescendingly lecture us on the fundamentals of human rights. The context of the question propounded by the Reuters reporter was quite antagonistic because it was premised of the high probability that President Obama would have raised the so-called summary executions and alleged extra-judicial killings, under the short stint of the Duterte administration. As the president of our sovereign nation, it was only logical for President Duterte to retort with some sarcasm touching on the Americans' own unsavory records on human rights.
On the substance of his statements, we are all-out behind President Digong. Indeed, we are no longer a US colony, thus, we cannot be told by any other country how to run our country and how to address the internal problems affecting our people. Like the USA, the Philippines is an independent and sovereign nation. No other sovereign nation can dictate on us on our foreign policy, much less on the domestic policies on how to resolve our internal problems. In style, however, the manner by which President Duterte referred to President Obama could have stood some diplomatic finesse. He was making reference to the most powerful leader of the most powerful nation in the world. He was not talking about Senator de Lima and her driver.
We should all remember that President Obama was the first world leader to call President Duterte to congratulate him after he won the last elections. With that alone, Obama deserved a little courtesy. Not to mention that the US is host to millions of Filipinos who find it as indeed the land of milk and honey, and the land of the free, the home of the brave.It is the US that stands up to China who keeps on bullying us in Scarborough, in Kalayaan and in Spratlys. We have a long history of friendship although we also have some issues against each other. Thus, it is important that our "colorful president" should do some damage control and rapprochement efforts with Uncle Sam. What matters most is that we do not damage our friendship with the nation that will most probably defend us from China, Russia and North Korea.