A Confident Marcos Returns to the White House

Tomorrow, April 11, US President Joe Biden will host a tripartite summit in the White House with Fumio Kishida of Japan and Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. of the Philippines as guests. Announced at a time of escalating tensions in the South China Sea, the optics of the summit are as much about decline as they are about resurgence.

On Biden’s part, the summit represents a potential handing-off of stewardship of the anti-China regional alliance to Japan, even as the summit is a means to stuff the gift stockings, so to speak, of allies such as Japan and the Philippines, as uncertainty mounts over the durability of American commitments abroad, particularly if Biden isn’t reelected.

For Marcos, the summit marks the point when his administration stops being a mere restoration and more properly his own era. The past may have been assiduously cultivated to help (re)claim power, but he is left to his own devices as to how to keep it, in a world far different from that of his father. When he returns to the White House, he will be doing so armed with all the attributes of a leader who matters. He has systematically deprived the rambunctious half of his ruling coalition –the father-and-daughter Dutertes, the Arroyos, and others—of their access to public funds and their own bully pulpit. He has put together a team that in turn enables him to travel the world and gain the Philippines renewed relevance to the coalition to contain China, a role more in keeping with Filipino pride – and prejudice.

Marcos is not caught between China and America, for reasons we shall see. Rather, he is caught between the East and South Asian and Western alliance containing China, and a more ambivalent if not patently defeatist ASEAN. Nor is he caught between his coalition and those of his – and his father’s – opponents over the past half century. The first president in over a generation to obtain a majority mandate, he is caught between the major factions of an electoral coalition which has begun to come apart. First to go, jettisoned, really, was former house speaker (and president) Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Next to go was his predecessor, Rodrigo R. Duterte. He remains allied with Sarah Duterte, his vice-president, who seems tamed, for now: she has learned to say “no comment,” when asked about the South China Sea.

Still, Marcos is a princeling, and his princeling status means three dynamics are always at work: the first is that of the local, specifically in what his elder sister Imee breezily refers to (in private) as the “Grand Duchy,” their political bailiwick and home province, Ilocos Norte. This includes a glimpse into sibling rivalry. The second is domestic politics and the role public opinion plays as a kind of continuing plebiscite on incumbents, as well as the ongoing dynastic competition for the succession to the Philippine presidency. The third is foreign affairs, in which the Philippines identifies itself as part of the western alliance, and the traditional security role of the Philippines as part of the “first island chain,” principles which, in a nation of severely eroded institutions, its two least dysfunctional ones, the diplomatic and the military, are committed.

Princeling in the Middle

In every administration, there is always factional competition for influence. This is particularly intense in the formative period of the campaign. At a time of coalition formation, the time-honored Philippine political dictum that “politics is addition” applies, and for the enterprising, this is the time to put words in the candidates’ mouth, betting on the candidates’ inattention or unwillingness to be divisive, at such a crucial time.

With every sign that a Marcos Restoration was, at last, in the cards, this family division played out in public in a subtle but meaningful way: foreign policy. There is more to this than the Marcoses trying to play both sides. There seems a fundamental disagreement between the siblings as to the strategic direction that best serves the country (and themselves). The fly in the family ointment seems to be the family of the indestructible Imelda Marcos, née Romualdez.

The last time Marcos was in the White House, one of his predecessors, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, ended up irking him, sitting where she shouldn’t, and intruding herself into conversations she was merely supposed to witness. This time, Arroyo is neither a part of Marcos’s official delegation nor more than a nominal member of his coalition. Those who have proven more durable are the President’s kin: his uncle, Jose Manuel Romualdez, who is the Philippine ambassador to Washington, and his first cousin, Ferdinand Martin Romualdez, who is Speaker of the House. The former is influential in foreign policy; the latter is in the ins and outs of domestic politics.

The elder Romualdez can be said to possess the institutional memory not just of the Philippine establishment but of the Marcos family. The Chinese couldn’t have failed to notice that in Marcos’s inaugural address, he greeted the Governor-General of Australia (where one of the new president’s sons was a student at the time) by name, while China’s Vice-President was subsumed into the category of “heads of delegations.”

The Department of Foreign Affairs, under a bland career diplomat, is best understood as throwing its institutional weight behind Ambassador Romualdez. How that weight manifests itself can be gleaned from specific presidential choices. Since the time of Marcos’s father, the first overseas trip of a Philippine president after assuming office has been to an ASEAN capital. The choice of which one sends a signal about the new administration’s approach. Marcos’s choice of Indonesia, for example, marked a return to traditionally warm ties with that country, which he visited once more in 2023.

An interesting (both for what he says and if you carefully read between the lines) interview of Ambassador Romualdez early last year essentially laid out the Philippine approach.