Asia's Cauldron

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Lee Kuan Yew in particular holds out the possibility, heretical to an enlightened Western mind, that democracy may not be the last word in human political development. What he has engineered in Singapore is a hybrid regime: capitalistic it is, even as consultations between various factions are ongoing, but it all occurs in a quasi-authoritarian setting. Elections are held, but the results for decades were never in doubt. Only recently have Singaporeans expressed dissatisfaction at the polls with the ruling People’s Action Party.

  Of course, Singapore is a city-state with no hinterland. And it is a hinterland—continental in size as in the case of China—that produces vastly different local conditions with which a central authority must grapple. And such grappling puts pressure on a regime to grant more rights to its far-flung subjects; or, that being resisted, to become by degrees more authoritarian. Lee never had to face this challenge. So Singapore will remain an oddity. Elsewhere in Asia, political Confucianism is messier.

  Here is the dilemma. Yes, a social contract of sorts exists between these peoples and their regimes: in return for impressive economic growth rates the people agree to forgo their desire to replace their leaders. But as growth rates continue unabated—to say nothing if they collapse or slow down as of late—this social contract must peter out. For as people become middle-class, they gain access to global culture and trends, which prompts a desire for political freedoms to go along with their personal ones. This is why authoritarian capitalism may be just a phase, rather than a viable alternative to Western democracy. Because Singapore is an oddity, we will have to wait until China’s GDP growth slows down for years on end, or, failing that, continues, until enough Chinese have more access to global culture: only then can we begin to draw conclusions about whether democracy represents the final triumph of reason in politics.

  “Progress includes Order,” Mill writes, “but Order does not include Progress.”32 Middle Eastern despots too often supplied only Order; Asian ones brought Progress, too. Leo Strauss, University of Chicago political philosopher of the mid-twentieth century, in his analysis of Xenophon’s Hiero or Tyrannicus, writes that the tyrant knows all men are his enemies, that the tyrant is deprived of true honor, and that the tyrant cannot abdicate for fear of punishment.33 Whereas that description fits Middle Eastern despots, it fails in the case of Lee and Mahathir—for whom the population was not hostile and for whom leaving office brought few risks. But Mill also notes that even the best despotisms are only good if they are temporary. Thus, the political future of South China Sea societies will write the final legacies for their generation of enlightened autocrats. If Singapore and Malaysia truly evolve into stable democracies, where the historic governing parties easily cede power to democratic oppositions, then that will signal the final triumph of Mahathir bin Mohamad and Lee Kuan Yew.

  CHAPTER VI

  America’s Colonial Burden

  Whenever I think of the Philippines my eyes revert to The Manila Shawl by Henri Matisse, painted in 1911 upon the French artist’s return from a two-month trip to Spain. Matisse had purchased the shawl in Seville, and draped it around a model whom he depicted in the pose of a flamenco bailaora. The embroidered silk shawls were a popular treasure brought to Europe by Spanish galleons sailing from the Philippines across the Pacific to New Spain (Mexico), from where the shawls were shipped to Spain itself. Showy, garish, with glittering splashes of red, orange, and green oil paint in floral designs, Matisse’s Shawl is the image I associate with the tropical grandeur and sensuality of the Philippine Islands, and with their occupation by Spain, by way of Mexico, for nearly three and a half centuries beginning in 1556.

  For the Philippines are not only burdened with hundreds of years of Spanish colonialism, which, with its heavy, pre-Reformation Roman Catholic overtones, brought less dynamism than the British, Dutch, and Japanese varieties experienced elsewhere in the First Island Chain, but they are doubly burdened by the imprint of Mexican colonizers, who represented an even lower standard of modern institutional consciousness than those from Spain.

  Hence the shock the visitor experiences upon arrival here after traveling elsewhere in East Asia: a shock that has never dissipated for me after four lengthy trips to the Philippines within a decade. Instead of gleaming, stage-lit boulevards with cutting-edge twenty-first-century architecture that is the fare of Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and coastal China (not to mention Japan and South Korea); and instead of the beehive pace of human activity evident in Vietnam, whose French Catholic colonizers stayed for less than a hundred years (even as they brought education and development in their wake), the cityscape of the Philippine capital of Manila is, by comparison, one of aesthetic and material devastation.

  Bad roads, immense puddles of rainwater because of poor drainage, beggars at stop lights, neon nightclub signs with letters missing, crummy buildings with the look of broken crates bearing no architectural style and none matching with any other, old air-conditioning units sticking out of this and that window like black eyes, jumbles of electric wires crisscrossing the twisted palm trees: these are the visual facts that impress one upon arrival. Amidst the sparkling, watery sunlight diffused through the mist and monsoon clouds there is a near-total lack of an identifying aesthetic. Whether it is the chrome jeepneys with their comic book designs or the weather-stained building facades with their occasional garish colors, there is an amateurish, just-put-together feel to many a surface, as if this entire cityscape—minus the old Spanish Quarter and the upscale malls—is held together by glue. Whereas Vietnamese cities (which have their own economic problems) are frenetic, Manila, despite the dense crowds, is somnolent and purposeless by comparison. Weeds and crumbling cement dominate. The sprawl beyond downtown is not that of suburban houses but of slums with blackened, sheet-metal roofs and peaks of garbage.

  Private security guards, whose epaulets and insignias remind me of those in Mexico, guard five-star hotel lobbies and fast food restaurants with sniffer dogs and sawed-off shotguns. The interiors of government buildings are rendered bleak by the dead light of fluorescent tubes. Of course, there is the large and consequential splatter of up-to-date, middle-class shopping centers and chain restaurants. But what becomes apparent after several days is that despite what the guidebooks claim, there really isn’t any distinctive Filipino cuisine beyond fish, pork, and indifferently cooked rice. This is a borrowed culture, without the residue of civilizational richness that is apparent at the archaeological sites in places like Vietnam and Indonesia, to say nothing of China or India. And of course, in such a culture, prominent are the luxury, gated communities, inside which the wealthy can escape the dysfunctional environment through life-support systems.

  Asian dynamism, born in the 1970s, is something so palpable that it is felt in everything from Chinese and Taiwanese bullet trains, to the manic construction boom of Vietnam and Malaysia, to the perfectly pruned verges of the roads in Singapore. But by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Asian dynamism had, at least so far, bypassed the Philippines.

  “This is still a bad Latin American economy, not an Asian one,” a Manila-based Western economist told me. “It’s true that the Philippines was not much affected by the global recession of 2008, but that’s only because it was never integrated into the global economy in the first place. What you have,” he went on, is admittedly steady economic growth, lately over 6 percent per year, undermined by population growth of 1.7 percent, unlike other Pacific Rim economies that have churned ahead by almost a third higher that amount for decades, and without commensurate increases in population. Crucially, a “staggering” 76.5 percent of that GDP growth in recent years went to the forty richest Filipino families.1 It’s the old story, the Manila elite is getting rich at the expense of everyone else.

  Whereas the Asian tiger economies have strong manufacturing bases, and are consequently built on export, in the Philippines exports account for only 25 percent of economic activity as opposed to the standard Asian model of 75 percent. An
d that 25 percent consists of low-value electronic components, bananas, and coconuts mainly. The economist pulled out a cheat sheet and rattled off statistics: the Philippines ranks 129 out of 182 countries, according to Transparency International, making it the most corrupt major Asian economy, more corrupt than Indonesia even; according to the World Bank’s ease-of-doing-business indicator, the Philippines ranked 136 out of 183; in every list and in every category, the Philippines—with the world’s twelfth largest population—was the worst of the large Asian economies.

  No one can deny the situation is improving. The World Economic Forum in Switzerland recently moved the Philippines to the top half of its rankings on global competitiveness.2 Nevertheless, corruption, restrictions on foreign ownership, and endless paperwork make the Philippines the most hostile country in maritime Asia for the foreign investor. No country in Asia, with the possible exceptions of Myanmar, Cambodia, and Indonesia, has weaker, more feckless institutions. The Philippines is where an objective, statistical reality is registered in the subjective first impressions of the traveler.

  Perhaps no other large country in the world has seen such a political, military, and economic investment by the United States for decades on end. Perhaps nowhere else has it made so little difference.

  America’s entry into the Philippines began at dawn May 1, 1898, when Commodore George Dewey’s nine ships, having passed Corregidor Island off the Bataan Peninsula under cover of darkness, entered Manila Bay and destroyed a larger Spanish flotilla. Like so many signal episodes in history, Dewey’s victory was both the culmination of vast political and economic forces and an accident of circumstance that might easily have not occurred, for it was not instigated by events in the Pacific at all, but by those in the Caribbean, where Spain’s repression of Cuba led President William McKinley—urged on by expansionists including assistant secretary of the navy Theodore Roosevelt—to declare war on the Spanish Empire.

  The invasion of the Philippines marked the first time that the United States had deliberately set out to conquer a large piece of territory overseas and ended up occupying it. That would not happen again until the invasion of Iraq more than a century later. Though it began with Commodore Dewey’s glorious overture, the first major conflict for the United States outside its continental limits descended within a few months into a military nightmare, as well as a domestic trauma of a kind not to be seen again until Vietnam.3

  Following Dewey’s successful entry into Manila Bay, the American military assisted Filipino insurgents in their takeover of the Spanish-run archipelago. But just as they would in Iraq and elsewhere, the Americans wrongly assumed that because local elements welcomed the ouster of a despotic regime, they would automatically remain friendly once the regime was toppled. After the Spanish were defeated, tensions mounted between the new Philippine government headed by a young ethnic Tagalog, Emilio Aguinaldo, and the American liberators, even as Aguinaldo was losing control over his own faction-ridden forces. By February 1899, Philippine anarchy and misplaced American idealism ignited into a full-scale war between American troops and a host of indigenous guerrilla armies.4

  On July 4, 1902, when President Roosevelt proclaimed the Philippine War over, 4,234 American soldiers had been killed in the conflict and 2,818 wounded.5 Overall, 200,000 people died, mainly Filipino civilians.6 Fighting in the Muslim south of the Philippines would go on for years. One could well argue that it was all unnecessary in the first place, a political blunder of the first magnitude by the McKinley administration, in which America’s idealism and naïveté led it on a path of destruction and brutality.7

  The military victory, however messy and brutal, was followed by decades of American rule that the journalist and historian Stanley Karnow calls a “model of enlightenment” compared to European colonialism.8 Samuel Tan, a Filipino historian who is critical of American policy in other respects, concurs, describing American rule as the historical engine that brought a modicum of modernity to the Filipino masses.9

  The Americans forbade themselves to buy large tracts of land. They avoided schemes like opium monopolies. They redistributed land to peasants from wealthy church estates, and built roads, railways, ports, dams, and irrigation facilities. American expenditures on health and education led to a doubling of the Filipino population between 1900 and 1920, and a rise in literacy from 20 to 50 percent within a generation.10

  The Philippines, in turn, affected the destiny of twentieth-century America to a degree that few faraway countries have. Ohio judge William Howard Taft’s leadership of the Philippine Commission propelled him to the presidency of the United States. Army Captain John “Black Jack” Pershing, who would head the expedition against Pancho Villa in Mexico and command American forces in World War I, was promoted to brigadier general over nine hundred other officers after his stellar performance in leading troops against Islamic insurgents in the southern Philippines. Douglas MacArthur, son of Army General Arthur MacArthur, came to the Philippines to command an American brigade and returned for a second tour of duty as the indigenous government’s military advisor. One of Douglas MacArthur’s aides in Manila was a middle-aged major, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who honed his analytical skills for World War II by attempting to organize a Philippine national army. The Japanese victory over General Douglas MacArthur’s forces on the Philippines, MacArthur’s last stand on Corregidor in Manila Bay before retreating to Australia, the subsequent Japanese atrocities committed against both American and Filipino prisoners of war during the Death March on the nearby Bataan Peninsula, and MacArthur’s triumphal return to the Philippines in the battle of Leyte Gulf, all became part of the Homeric legend of World War II that bound Americans to their military, and gave the American and Filipino peoples a common historical inheritance.11

  This is to say nothing of the deep involvement of American policymakers in supporting Philippine governments with aid and advice ever since World War II, especially the critical role the Americans played in ushering dictator Ferdinand Marcos peacefully from power in 1986. And it wasn’t just grappling with Marcos’s dictatorship that engaged American officers and diplomats from the 1960s to the 1980s: for there was, too, the task of supporting Manila against communist and Islamic insurrections right up through the present.

  Indeed, anyone who doubts that America is, or was, an imperial power should come to the Philippines, where the white baronial U.S. embassy fronting Manila Bay occupies the most beautiful downtown real estate in the same way that British and French high commissions and embassies do in their former colonies; where the Americans have their own hill station for cool weather retreats, like British hill stations in India; where leading local military officers, businessmen, and politicians are graduates of West Point just like the leading personages of former British colonies have been graduates of Sandhurst; and where the country’s romantic hero is not a Filipino but the protean figure of Douglas MacArthur, who in the Filipino mind rescued the country from the butchery of the Japanese occupiers.12

  Imagine Iraq, nine decades hence, if the United States were still deeply involved with the problems there as a reigning outside power. That would be the Philippines. The Philippines was for much of the twentieth century an American colony in all but name, whose pro-American defense and foreign policy has been taken for granted for too long.

  Given this legacy, arguably the fate of the Philippines, and whether it eventually becomes Finlandized by China, may say more about America’s trajectory as a great power than the fate of Iraq and whether it continues under the sway of Iran. Make no mistake, the Philippines is crucial: it dominates the eastern edge of the South China Sea as much as Vietnam does the western edge and China the northern one. With a population of nearly 100 million, the Philippines is more populous than Vietnam even.

  And yet, despite a century’s worth of vast annual outlays of American aid, the Philippines has remained among the most corrupt, dysfunctional, intractable, and poverty-stricken societies in maritime Asia, with Africa-like slums and
Latin America-style fatalism and class divides. Indeed, the Philippines has been described as a “gambling republic” where politicians “hold power without virtue,” dominating by means of “capital” and “crime.”13

  The early-twenty-first-century Philippines, as corrupt as it is, constitutes to a significant degree the legacy of one man, Ferdinand Marcos, who manifestly represents the inverse of Lee Kuan Yew, and to a lesser extent the inverse of Mahathir bin Mohamad and Chiang Kai-shek. Whereas those other men left behind functioning states with largely clean institutions, primed to become well-functioning democracies, Marcos left behind bribery, cronyism, and ruin. Marcos and the Philippines, unlike Singapore, Taiwan, and to a smaller extent Malaysia, were not at all enriched by Confucian values. While those other men complexify the thinking of the great political philosophers by showing how restricted authoritarianism in some cases can lead to political virtue, Marcos represents the greater majority of cases in which authoritarianism leads, well, to crime and political decay. The other three men were each extraordinary in their own right, whose early life made them especially attuned to unpleasant truths about their own societies that needed correcting. They pierced the miasma of convenient rationalizations to always see the harsh reality that confronted them: especially so in Lee’s and Mahathir’s cases, less so in Chiang’s. That was their particular genius; whereas Marcos’s world became one of self-delusion. Lee and Mahathir were efficient, corporate-style managers; Chiang strived for that in his latter years in Taiwan. But Marcos stood all of that on its head. Listen to arguably America’s greatest journalist-historian of late-twentieth-century Southeast Asia, Stanley Karnow: