Share this:
MANILA – Philippine President Ferdinand ily’s longstanding and often fraught relations with the US when he warmly welcomed US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the Malacanang Palace over the weekend.
The meeting was held in the same halls that the Marcoses fled 36 years earlier aboard a US Air Force plane in order to escape the wrath of the “people power” revolution that toppled Marcos Jr’s father’s once menacing dictatorship.
It marked the first-ever in-person meeting between the new Filipino president and a US cabinet member; it was also the first time that Blinken visited Manila since becoming America’s top diplomat. Weeks earlier, Marcos Jr held conversations with Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman as well as a phone conversation with US President Joe Biden.
“We cannot, we can no longer isolate one part of our relationship from the other. We are too closely tied because of the special relationship between the United States and the Philippines and the history that we share,” the Filipino president told Blinken.
The two allies underscored how “extraordinary” and “important” their bilateral relations are, significantly amid particularly turbulent times in the region. Eager to underscore a new chapter in Philippine-US relations following six years of roller-coaster ties under former president Rodrigo Duterte, Marcos Jr reassured Blinken that the US-Philippine alliance is rock solid.
“To be perfectly candid, I did not think it raised the intensity, it just demonstrated it – how the intensity of that [the Taiwan] conflict has been. It actually has been at that level for a good while, but we got used to it and put it aside,” the Filipino president added, subtly rejecting Beijing’s criticism of US House Speaker of Representatives Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the self-governing island last week as the main reason behind the latest crisis in the Taiwan Straits. Lees verder