The Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was in Beijing last week to denounce the US and to sign 13 agreements with China on a wide range of trade and economic contracts. Duterte has already announced the removal of US special forces from his country and declared that a new trilateral alliance between China, Russia and the Philippines would be a new paradigm of power in the region.
During the Cold War era, the US would have recruited compatriots in the Philippine military to stage a coup d’état against him, along with a shallow grave, but times have changed. What makes matters