Rigoberto D. Tiglao
WE have an ambassador like this?
Jose Cuisia, our ambassador to the US during the Aquino 3rd regime, said in a television interview the other day that the Chinese had agreed to leave Scarborough Shoal in June 2012 together with Philippine vessels.
How did he know that? Kurt Campbell, the US assistant secretary of state for Asia, had told him so.
Did he ask any Chinese official to confirm what the American official said? No.
This was our ambassador to the US, chairman or CEO of this and that American-affiliated companies even when he held that post? I hope he wasn’t sold the Lincoln Memorial while he was at D. C.
How did he know that? Kurt Campbell, the US assistant secretary of state for Asia, had told him so.
Did he ask any Chinese official to confirm what the American official said? No.
This was our ambassador to the US, chairman or CEO of this and that American-affiliated companies even when he held that post? I hope he wasn’t sold the Lincoln Memorial while he was at D. C.
Cuisia said he relayed this information to then Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario, who then informed Aquino. Despite his doubts over such an agreement, Aquino ordered the Philippine vessels to leave, according to Cuisia. (Sen. Antonio Trillanes 4th’s version is that it was del Rosario who gave such orders.)
But the Chinese didn’t, which put the shoal under their control. The country lost its first territory, after Sabah, forever, as it were.
‘Intsik’
“Duplicitous itong mga Instik,” Cuisia had the gall to say on TV. But he never talked to the Chinese, only to a US State Department official of China’s competitor, even arch enemy, the United States of America, whose wily tricks to dominate the world have been legendary. (Remember Bush’s “weapons of mass destruction” that he said Saddam had?)
It didn’t occur in Cuisia’s mind that Campbell, one of the strategists of the US containment program against China that he’s been called “Mr. Pivot,” may have been lying, or simply misinterpreted the words of China Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying who had supposedly agreed to a withdrawal.
My suspicion is that Campbell deliberately fooled the gullible Cuisia as the Philippines’ loss of the shoal would not only add to the US portrayal of China as an aggressor in the South China Sea. It would also trigger outrage in the country, prompting Aquino to finally file the arbitration suit it had been planning since 2011 and which the US had been pushing.
Campbell was appointed by President Biden last January as his National Security Council coordinator for the Indo-Pacific. He wasn’t appointed to that post for nothing. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if it was his reward for engineering the Philippines’ loss of Scarborough to China in 2012, which pushed the Aquino regime to file the arbitration case against China seven months later.
This was our ambassador to the world’s most powerful nation? Take your pick: Cuisia was either too naive and gullible to be a diplomat, plain stupid, or too ignorant of China-US relations.
Agreement?
If China reneged on an agreement, Campbell would have certainly broadcast that to the world, as this bolsters the US propaganda that China is a duplicitous power plotting to control by whatever means the entire South China Sea. Campbell left government service in February 2013 but said not a word about such an “agreement.”