History justifies Duterte’s harsh words for Obama

Not everything is eaten as hot as it is cooked. The same can be said of President Duterte’s words against his US counterpart, Barack Obama.

As a colony of the United States, the Philippines was treated as a kind of a slave colony. Also, if it hadn’t served its interest, the United States would not have helped the Philippines fight the Japanese during World War II.

 

US assistance has always been driven by its own interest. We saw this again in the Iraq war that began in 2003 and now in Syria. This might be the reason that, at present in Western Europe, especially in my homeland Germany, public sympathy leans towards Russia's President Vladimir Putin, or Russia for that matter, rather than towards the United States and Obama or Hillary Clinton.

I myself feel politically closer to Russia than to the US, but I have no problem with the simple American workers. What I don't like is their government and its foreign policy. The Americans themselves, or most of them, distrust their own politicians, as surveys show.

President Duterte says what he thinks. Indeed, it's good to have an honest president. In the world's diplomatic theatre, it's quite different, even slippery.

Can you still remember Nikita Khrushchev, former premier of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics? On October 12, 1960, while delivering a speech before the UN, he angrily banged one of his shoes on the table. That's history!

Jurgen Schifer

(Philippine Daily Inquirer/ANN)