Defeatism is never Filipino

National survival is the be-all and end-all of states. By their very nature, therefore, states are never inherently defeatist. They safeguard their sovereignty even when the costs are high.

But for six years, the Filipino people were given a lesson in surrender from the one podium that carries the presidential seal. How did a country with a long history of fighting for its sovereignty — one that had just won the most consequential maritime case in modern international law — come to believe that convenient accommodation was preferable to defending the nation’s dignity and sovereignty?

Duterte began making the argument almost immediately.

In March 2017, barely eight months after the 2016 Arbitral Award, China was openly discussing plans to build on Bajo de Masinloc. Asked what the Philippines could do, he replied: “We cannot stop China from doing (these) things. … What do you want me to do? Declare war against China? I can’t.”

That answer would become familiar. Again and again, the issue was reduced to a simplistic dichotomy: graceful subservience on one side, deadly defeat on the other.

Two months later, returning from Beijing, he recounted that Xi Jinping had warned him: “If you force the issue, we’ll go to war.”

Duterte did not respond by invoking Unclos, the 2016 Arbitral Award, China’s obligation under the U.N. Charter and the Asean Treaty of Amity and Cooperation to refrain from the threat or use of force, or the Philippines’ Mutual Defense Treaty with the United States.

Instead, speaking before the Philippine Coast Guard, he said he could not go to war “because it would result in a massacre.”

“Massacre” became the defining element of his presidency.

By 2018, Duterte’s defeatism was fully formed. In Cebu, he recalled telling Xi: “I will not insist on the award because it would result in a war, and it will be a massacre. I know.”

By 2020, he framed it as a personal surrender rather than a national one: “We have to go to war, and I cannot afford it. Maybe some other president can, but I cannot.”

The pattern was always the same: war or nothing, presented as plain common sense.

In his final State of the Nation Address, he even complained about critics “pushing me for something more than what I can handle.”

But no Filipino was asking for war. What his critics asked for was what any coastal state does as a matter of course: sustained patrols, diplomatic protests, closer partnerships with like-minded states and, from some, another legal procedure.

By insisting that the only alternative to capitulation was annihilation, the former commander in chief made asserting our rights look reckless and acquiescence look wise.

Then he went after the Award itself.

In May 2021, with more than 200 Chinese vessels swarming Julian Felipe Reef, he told the nation the ruling was “papel lang. … Itatapon ko iyan sa wastebasket.”

Weeks later, in his last Sona, he adopted Beijing’s talking point wholesale: “There was really no arbitration at all, because it was only the Philippine side.”

Professor Jay Batongbacal noted that the president was echoing Beijing’s official derision of the Award. When the Philippine head of state and the Chinese Foreign Ministry describe our victory in the same words, the fisherman in Masinloc can hardly be blamed for concluding the victory was never real.

The cruelest irony is that he knew better.

In September 2020, before the U.N. General Assembly, the same president declared the Award “beyond the reach of passing governments to dilute, diminish or abandon.”

Eight months later, he called it trash.

Six years of repetition did the work. We are weak. We cannot win. The ruling is just a piece of worthless paper. The alternative is massacre.

Senator Panfilo Lacson diagnosed the damage in real time: “Being weak is weakness enough, but to let our adversary know how helpless we are will discourage even our allies to stand by our side.”

Many Filipinos stopped believing the West Philippine Sea was worth defending because they had been told, from the highest office, that defending it was impossible.

Words from the top shape a nation’s spine. That is why the reversal since 2022 matters.

President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. began with a sentence that directly repudiated the old refrain: He would “not preside over any process that will abandon even a square inch of territory of the Republic of the Philippines.”

Where his predecessor called the Award just a piece of paper, he made it the cornerstone of his national security policy.

Where his predecessor said the only choice was war, he demonstrated numerous ways forward: show the Filipino people the truth, build partnerships, stand on principled ground and anchor our policy on the primacy of international law.

The transparency initiative — exposing China’s bad behavior at sea in real time — did what six years of official silence never could. It allowed Filipinos to see who the aggressor is. It ensured that the international community is well aware of the real source of instability in maritime Southeast Asia.

The shift shows up in the numbers. By December 2023, 77% of Filipinos supported pushing back against foreign expansionism, and Congress moved to fund the very agencies once told their sacrifice would end only in massacre.

And the president has been consistent.

At the Shangri-La Dialogue in 2024, asked about a red line, he answered without hedging: “If a Filipino citizen is killed by a willful act, that is, I think, very, very close to what we define as an act of war, and therefore we will respond accordingly.”

In his 2024 Sona, to standing ovations: “Ang West Philippine Sea ay hindi isang kathang-isip natin lamang. Ito ay atin.”

Asked how he wants history to remember his policy: “We did not yield.”

One president told Filipinos, “I cannot.” The other tells them, “We will not yield.”

One called our legal victory garbage; the other calls it an intergenerational mandate.

One said asserting our rights means a massacre; the other has shown it means turning on the lights.

Defeatism in the West Philippine Sea was taught from the top. It is now being unlearned the same way — through a commander in chief who consistently says the right things, implements policies grounded in principle and supports a transparency initiative that has allowed Filipinos to rediscover something intrinsic to our national character.

“Ang mamatay nang dahil sa ’yo,” declares our national anthem.

(Rear Admiral Jay Tristan Tarriela, Ph.D., commands the West Philippine Sea Transparency Group and serves as the Philippine Coast Guard’s spokesperson for West Philippine Sea matters. He holds a Ph.D. from GRIPS in Tokyo and a master’s degree jointly from GRIPS and the Japan Coast Guard Academy.)

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