‘Project 2028’: Philippines unleashed
Washington— “What we are doing right now is planting the seeds [so that] hopefully the trees will be much larger in your lifetime,” Ambassador Jose Manuel del Gallego Romualdez told me during our hours-long conversation at our embassy in Washington. Our conversation (a large portion of which will be published on my “Deep Dive” podcast) covered the second Trump administration, the past and present of Philippine-United States relations, the China challenge, and, of course, Pax Silica.
“This is an opportunity for us to create high-quality jobs [at home],” our ambassador maintained, referring to plans by manufacturing behemoths, such as Taiwanese Foxconn, to set up a production hub in the Philippines under the Pax Silica initiative. What attracts the major investors are “our geography and human resources, [and] we have [a lot to] offer [them],” he added. Anticipating criticisms of potential environmental and neo-imperial implications of the US-led initiative, Romualdez made it clear that “this is not a data center facility [initiative], [but instead] purely [about] manufacturing and critical minerals processing.” He insisted that “this is the right way to go, this is the way for the future.” The ultimate goal of all current major agreements, especially those pertaining to our ties with key allies, is to create a “strong democratic country.”
A day earlier, I sat down for a conversation with the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ top expert on Southeast Asia, Greg Poling, to discuss similar themes. “The US is not the alternative, it’s everybody else [other than China],” he told me, when asked about the Luzon Economic Corridor (LEC) and Pax Silica initiatives. After all, this is about what top American foreign policy experts Rush Doshi and Kurt Campbell described as “Allied Scale”: the combined industrial, financial, and geopolitical capital of America and its democratic allies in the Indo-Pacific and Europe.
While it’s true that China is a top trading partner of almost all nations in Asia and the broader Global South, it has yet to become a meaningful source of quality jobs and high-grade investments, especially in the Philippines. “All of us are working in concert to provide attractive alternatives to China’s,” he said, referring to the LEC and other major US-led investment initiatives in the Philippines.
“A Filipino is far more likely to have been [gainfully] employed by an American or Japanese or Korean company,” Poling told me, referring to our Western partners’ incomparably larger investment footprint in the Philippines. Nevertheless, he rightly expressed criticisms about America’s foreign policy, including strategic “own goals,” such as Donald Trump’s multiple rounds of double-digit tariffs on closest allies, including us.
Ensuring strong momentum in bilateral economic relations, however, is of vital geopolitical importance ahead of the 2028 elections. “The next Filipino president should be able to look the Filipino voters in the eye and [convincingly] say that a robust alliance with America can [also] provide jobs and [prosperity] for their families.”
While far from perfect, the Philippine-US alliance should be understood within the larger framework of our rapidly deepening relations with the democratic world, which includes Asian economic giants such as Japan, India, and South Korea, as well as European partners.
Far from being just a cog in the American imperial machine, however, the Philippines is also rapidly emerging as a potential linchpin state. “In terms of being an upper-middle-income country, we are getting more active in terms of helping least developed countries and also advancing South-South relations [with emerging powers outside the West],” Ambassador Enrique Manalo told me in his office at our United Nations mission in New York a week earlier. “The Philippines has emerged as a force in Southeast Asia and the broader region,” he added, referring to our expanded diplomatic presence across the Pacific, most recently in Fiji. “We are very committed to advancing core pillars of the UN” in terms of advancing global peace, development, and human rights regimes, he added.
In spite of the plethora of demoralizing events at home, the Philippines is still emerging as a key player in the new brave world spawned by the eclipse of Pax Americana—and the reemergence of Asia as the center of geoeconomic gravity. In our next column, dear reader, I will discuss the “Project 2028” policy package for our next president to ensure we optimize opportunities for unleashing the Philippines’ potential for greatness in the 21st century.
richard.heydarian@inquirer.net
