IN his State of the Nation Address (SONA) on July 25, 2022, he devoted one short line to it: “The Philippines shall be a friend to all, an enemy to none.” It was a celestial vision of an earthly policy, which seemed to say “neither America nor China, but all of us together.”

For a while I could sense the words of Isaiah the prophet (11:86) come to life: “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together, and a little child will lead them.”

The vision marks the final triumph of good versus evil, of love and peace and goodness over everything else. But it was too soon for that. There were those whose minds were still occupied with the thoughts of Armageddon. Before the Apocalypse reduces everything into nothing, questions of war and peace are questions of national or international security and foreign policy. And the Philippines and the United States have lived long with them. There was a time when many islands on our archipelago looked like US warships in the Pacific.

On March 14, 1947, to abbreviate our history, President Manuel Roxas and US Ambassador Paul V. McNutt signed a Military Bases Agreement that allowed the US armed forces to operate vast military bases in the Philippines, without rent, for 99 years. This agreement was amended through an exchange of notes between Foreign Secretary Narciso Ramos and US Secretary of State Dean Rusk on Sept. 16, 1966, shortening the agreement to run for the next 25 years until 1966, unless sooner terminated by either party upon one year’s notice.

So, in 1991 the agreement was finally terminated. The Americans pulled out amid a national emergency caused by the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Pinatubo, at the tri-point boundary of Pampanga, Tarlac and Zambales provinces — the second biggest volcanic eruption in the 20th century. Before that, and before President Corazon Aquino became “revolutionary president” — she used to march against the bases with the leaders of the Left. Then she turned into a new leaf, became entirely pro-bases, and wanted the term of the expiring agreement extended by another 10 years through a treaty negotiated by Foreign Secretary Raul Manglapus and Richard Armitage. But the Senate, in its infinite wisdom, rejected it.

Five years earlier, at the instigation of the group of the late Senate president Jovito Salonga, Lorenzo Tañada, Jose Wright Diokno, Joaquin “Chino” Roces, Jimmy Ongpin and others, Cory Aquino’s Constitutional Commission (Concom) had written into the 1987 Constitution the following provision:

“Article XVIII, Section 25. After the expiration in 1991 of the Agreement between the Republic of the Philippines and the United States of America concerning Military Bases, foreign military bases, troops, or facilities shall not be allowed in the Philippines except under a treaty duly concurred in by the Senate and, when Congress so requires, ratified by a majority of the votes cast by the people in a national referendum held for that purpose, and recognized as a treaty by the other contracting state.”

The prohibition was unmistakable and nearly absolute: no foreign military bases ever within Philippine territory. Perhaps outside the Spratlys, at the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, or elsewhere, yes, but not in Palawan, Nueva Ecija, Isabela, Cagayan, Cebu or Cagayan de Oro. This constituted an immovable roadblock to a return of the US bases anytime in the future.

This, however, did not affect the validity of the 1952 Philippine-US Mutual Defense Treaty nor the right of US troops under the MDT to make rotational visits. To define the rights and duties of the US forces on such visits, a Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) was concluded between Foreign Secretary Domingo Siazon, Jr. and US Ambassador Thomas Hubbard in 1998.

The next year President Joseph Estrada, who as an activist movie actor-mayor used to be critical of the bases, decided to ratify the VFA. As Senate majority leader I co-authored the Senate resolution of concurrence in its ratification, together with Sen. Blas F. Ople, chairman of foreign relations, and Sen. Rodolfo Biazon, chairman of defense. Sen. Wigberto Tañada challenged the VFA’s constitutionality before the Supreme Court, but the court upheld it as an “implementing agreement” of the MDT.

In 2014, the Philippines and the US signed another “implementing agreement” of the VFA. So we now have an implementing agreement to implement an implementing agreement. This has not happened before or since. This was the Enhanced Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) signed on April 28, 2014 by Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin and US Ambassador Philip Goldberg, which grants the US autonomous operational sites inside Philippine military bases where it can pre-position its forces, weaponry and materiel for use in war. These are called “agreed locations,” but except in name, they are obviously meant to function as military bases. In fact, some international news media have begun calling them as such.

I say the document was “signed” by Gazmin and Goldberg, but the signature page contains no readable signature except something that looks like chicken scrawl, with nothing typewritten underneath.

The Constitution, such as it is, despite its weaknesses in some areas, has set a bar so high that one could hardly imagine the foreign bases ever returning to the Philippines within the next few generations. But EDCA outsmarted the most militant and far-seeing guardians of the national interest by circumventing the constitutional prohibition.

This was made possible by thenpresident Benigno Aquino 3rd taking personal control of the Supreme Court by bribing members of the House with the notorious pork barrel funds to impeach Chief Justice Renato Corona on trumped-up charges, and bribing 19 senator-judges of the Senate impeachment court (at P50 million to P100 million each) to convict and remove the same poor chief magistrate. That done, Aquino named his own docile chief justice to implement his idea of political and judicial reform. She was also subsequently removed in a “quo warranto” proceeding rather than in the constitutionally ordained impeachment process.

Once the Supreme Court’s deck was clear, Aquino proceeded to constitutionalize the constitutionally infirm EDCA, the equally infirm Reproductive Health Law and other things. But no president after him dared to correct his mischief or undo the consequences thereof. So EDCA stares us in the face, with dragon eyes, ready to inflict its continuing damage. It needs to be revisited, the sooner the better, and like the Roe v. Wade case in the US Supreme Court, which was overturned only last year after having been part of US jurisprudence since 1973, it should, in my view, be overturned.

(To be continued on March 24, 2023)

ERRATUM

In the first part of his three-part column “Geopolitics under Marcos Jr.,” published on Monday, Francisco S. Tatad mistakenly wrote that he keynoted the second Philippine Leadership Forum at the University of the Philippines Global campus in Bonifacio Global City on Friday, March 17. The correct date is Saturday, March 18. He apologizes for the error.