THE Philippine budget has always been political, but rarely has it been so systematized. Behind the 2025 General Appropriations Act (GAA) lies an internal mechanism known as the BBM Parametric Formula — “baselined, balanced and managed.” Framed as a technocratic solution to rationalize spending, it now sits at the intersection of three destabilizing developments: the death of its alleged architect, a constitutional challenge pending before the Supreme Court, and mounting allegations that money has been distributed not only for projects but even for political acts — such as signatures for the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte.

Taken together, these point to a disturbing pattern: the conversion of governance into a marketplace where ceilings, signatures and silence all have a price at the start of the Marcos administration.

At its core, the BBM Parametric Formula determines how much each congressional district can access in DPWH projects. Before Congress debates priorities, a ceiling is already computed. Lawmakers are then invited to choose from a pre-approved menu of projects — roads, flood control, slope protection — provided they stay within their “allocable.” This is sold as order and discipline. In reality, it is pre-authorization masquerading as reform.

Unlike the pork barrel of old, this system leaves no obvious fingerprints. No line item bears a legislator’s name. No envelope changes hands in public view. Instead, power is exercised upstream — through ceilings set by planners, through lists filtered before reaching the National Expenditure Program, and through approvals that occur outside the glare of plenary debate.

Investigative reporting has pointed to former DPWH undersecretary for planning Maria Catalina “Cathy” Cabral as the official who crafted the BBM Parametric Formula, allegedly upon instruction from then Public Works and Highways secretary Manuel Bonoan. Cabral reportedly acknowledged being told to design a parametric system. Her death has since closed off the most authoritative source who could explain, on record, how the formula truly worked. And there is another personality who has to be investigated, as he was the point person at the legislative branch of the 19th Congress. Today, he is chairman of the committee on public works.

That loss of institutional memory would already be alarming. But it becomes more troubling when placed against the backdrop of the 2025 GAA’s constitutionality still pending before the Supreme Court. The issue is no longer just technical compliance. It is whether the budget process has been so intermediated by formulas and informal approvals that it has drifted away from constitutional design.

The diversion/insertion happened in 2023 at P300 billion, in 2024 at P500 billion and in 2025 at P400 billion, or a total of P1.2 trillion.

The Constitution vests the power of the purse in Congress. While the executive proposes, Congress disposes. But if lawmakers are effectively confined to pre-set ceilings, and if real discretion lies with a small planning circle that decides which projects survive the filtering process, then Congress is no longer exercising power — it is ratifying outcomes.

This is why the demand to release the full proponents list is critical. Former budget officials, including neophyte Rep. Leandro Leviste, have stated publicly that proponents’ lists attached to infrastructure projects include not only legislators but also even private individuals. If private names appear as proponents of public projects, the implications are staggering for both Marcos Jr. and his administration.

And now, into this already fragile ecosystem, comes another allegation that cannot be ignored: that fees, in the form of infrastructure projects, were given to secure signatures for the impeachment of Vice President Duterte. If true, this represents the logical extension of a system that has normalized transactional politics. When budget ceilings can be managed, when projects can be traded, it is not a leap — but a slide — toward monetizing legislative acts themselves.

An impeachment signature is not a policy preference. It is a constitutional act of the highest order. If signatures were purchased — directly or indirectly — using access to funds, projects, or outright cash, then impeachment ceases to be a safeguard. It becomes a commodity.

Control over infrastructure allocations creates leverage. Leverage creates compliance. Compliance, in turn, can be mobilized not just for budgets but for political objectives: silence, alignment, or signatures.

The administration may dismiss these concerns as speculation. But in a democracy, the answer to doubt is not denial — it is disclosure. Publish the formula. Release the proponents list. Identify who endorsed which projects and why. Clarify whether budgetary leverage was used to influence impeachment proceedings.

Budgets are moral documents. Impeachment is a constitutional safeguard. When both are reduced to transactions, the Republic itself is put on layaway.

The Supreme Court’s review of the 2025 GAA is therefore about more than numbers. It is about whether technocracy has been allowed to eclipse accountability, and whether political power has quietly migrated from institutions to intermediaries.

Can the 20th Congress be able to redeem itself? Not with the way the GAA 2026 bicameral conference went. In full public glare, the porks and perks have been restored and some actually increased, all lumped in a Standby Fund, the new name of Unprogrammed Funds.

And still, not one legislator moved for the abolition of liquidation by certification. Not one opened the budget of Congress. No one wants to be transparent and accountable in an institution directly created by the mandate of the people.

In the end, the question Filipinos must ask is not only how much was allocated, or who signed. It is far more unsettling — and far more necessary: How much does a decision cost now, and who is setting the price?

Second of a series

SEVERAL weeks ago, I began a series analyzing the tectonic shifts in global trade triggered by President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariff initiatives. The sweeping duties on 120 nations launched in April 2025, were framed as a “patriotic economic defense” — a blunt instrument designed to force the world to play by Washington’s rules. However, as the dust settles, the ledger tells a different story. These tariffs did not extract the promised concessions from rivals; instead, they functioned as a massive tax on American consumers and a catalyst for the erosion of America’s soft power.

The policy has ironically undermined the very goal of restoring American strength. While Trump trumpeted “trade war victories” — China promises to purchase soybeans and rare earths — the reality on the ground was starkly different.

Beijing delivered empty promises while quietly shifting its supply chains to Brazil and Central Asia. Today, US exports sit uncompetitive in silos and warehouses, while Chinese reserves remain at record highs. America finds itself economically strained and geopolitically diminished, while China has used the chaos to consolidate a massive strategic advantage.

Today, across global capitals, a quiet shift is under way. Alliances, markets and ambitions are being rewired not through revolutions but through recalibration. The international order, once anchored by Washington’s predictability, is loosening. Trump’s “America First” policy, delivered through tariffs and confrontational rhetoric, promised renewed dominance. Instead, it accelerated the arrival of a multipolar world where nations no longer defer to a single superpower but shop for the best deal.

The unraveling begins

The unraveling did not begin with a bang. It began with hesitation among its oldest friends. Allies watched Washington impose tariffs on friends and foes alike, threaten to withdraw from alliances, and treat diplomacy as a sentimental relic. What began as “tough negotiation” soon exposed itself as erratic governance wrapped in nationalist slogans.

America, once the conductor of the global orchestra, began playing solos that no longer matched the rhythm of the rest of the world. Washington turned inward, the rest chose not to wait. And this is the quiet tragedy: China didn’t engineer America’s decline; it was self-inflicted.

In Southeast Asia, the Philippines has felt this shift more acutely than perhaps any other nation. Long accustomed to relying on the steady, if sometimes heavy-handed, presence of America, Manila found itself navigating a landscape where American attention wavered, and security commitments seemed increasingly conditional. That uncertainty created strategic openings that Beijing was more than happy to exploit with a mixture of “checkbook diplomacy” and maritime pressure.

The vacuum that Washington created

For over seven decades, US leadership rested not just on military strength but on trust. From Berlin to Seoul, allies aligned with Washington because they valued its consistency, strategic grounding and the security umbrella that enabled global trade. Trump upended that compact, treating power as a zero‑sum contest of volume — believing that speaking louder and threatening more would force others to fall in line.

The world largely tuned him out. As the “Tariff War” expanded from steel to soybeans and semiconductors, countries moved to insulate themselves from America’s domestic volatility.

The structural consequences of that retreat are now visible across key regions. Europe, rattled by repeated threats to NATO, accelerated its push for “strategic autonomy,” striking trade deals with Beijing and securing Gulf energy without US mediation. Asia, wary of being dragged into a trade crossfire, quietly forged economic side arrangements with China through the Asean bloc. In the Middle East, Gulf monarchies — once pillars of US influence — deepened ties with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), treating Washington’s warnings as passing weather rather than binding directives.

The Philippines, caught between its treaty obligations and its geographic vulnerability, watched this unpredictability with growing unease. When the US began taking Manila’s alignment for granted, it weakened the very trust that had anchored the alliance for generations.

Sensing this hesitation, China intensified its pressure in the West Philippine Sea, testing the limits of how far Washington would actually go to defend a partner it had recently snubbed in trade negotiations.

China’s procurement strategy

While Washington treated the global stage as a theater for confrontation, Beijing treated it as a procurement exercise. China’s “quiet ascendancy” is not built on emotional volatility or late-night Truth-Social posts. It is built on manufacturing discipline, logistical dominance, and the gradual accumulation of dependencies.

The Belt and Road Initiative, mocked in Washington, quietly became the spine of a new economic geography. Latin America now treats Beijing as a co-equal partner. Africa’s railways and hospitals have Chinese steel in their bones. Southeast Asia performs diplomatic tai chi, balancing a rising China with a retreating America. Even Mexico, America’s economic twin, expands trade with China despite Washington’s attempts to isolate Beijing.

Trump swung at Beijing with tariffs, imagining China would buckle. Instead, China reached for its abacus. That difference — between a power that performs and one that plans — defines the new century.

The psychological shift: A ‘post-American’ world

The most significant change is psychological. For decades, America was the “steady variable” in global affairs. America First revealed a country whose commitments rose and fell with one man’s temperament.

Nations have stopped aligning instinctively. They now practice what financial managers call “strategic ambiguity.” They hedge, they triangulate, and they treat their relationship with Washington as one piece of a diversified portfolio.

The world is not “anti-American”; it is simply post-American. It is a world that has accepted the reality that the US may no longer be the reliable guarantor of global order.

In the Global South, this awakening is palpable. From Brazil to Pakistan, nations are seeking stability over ideology. They want trade without lectures and infrastructure without the threat of sanctions. As Washington turned inward to debate its own identity, Beijing stepped outward, offering “predictability” as its most valuable export.

The ledger of history

History does not judge with a gavel; it records with a ledger. And as we head toward the conclusion of this series, the ledger is remarkably clear. While Trump relied on slogans, Beijing built systems. While Washington imposed tariffs that raised the price of a washing machine in Ohio, China was signing contracts for the ports that would ship those machines to the rest of the world.

The empire that once wrote the rules of the global game is now spent arguing with the referees. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is playing a new game entirely — one designed, financed and moderated by Beijing. “America First” was meant to elevate the nation to new heights. Instead, it revealed a world that was ready and willing to move on without it. For the first time in living memory, the America is not the protagonist of the global narrative, but its loudest bystander.

The tragedy for Manila is that this vacuum isn’t just a matter of trade — it’s a matter of territory. As the US vacillates, the Philippines is left to navigate a dangerous middle ground, a frontline state in a century being rewritten by those who measure power in contracts, not applause.

To be continued next week

MANILA, Philippines — The House of Representatives approved House Bill 6636 which aims to institutionalize the Assistance to Individuals in Crisis Situations (AICS) program of the Department of Social Welfare and Development.

The bill hurdled third and final reading during plenary session on Tuesday with 270 lawmakers voting for it and eight against. Two abstained.

THE Department of National Defense (DND) on Tuesday denounced the “dangerous and inhumane” actions of the Chinese maritime forces against Filipino fishermen in the vicinity of Escoda (Sabina) Shoal over the weekend.

The DND reiterated that China’s claims of indisputable sovereignty over the feature are illegal and unfounded as “neither an international tribunal nor international law-abiding state has ever recognized Chinese sovereignty over the Escoda Shoal.”

According to the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG), the Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) and Chinese maritime militia (CMM) ships attacked the Filipino boats with water cannons and used dangerous blocking maneuvers near Escoda Shoal, a water feature well within the Philippine exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

“Water cannoning, aggressive maneuvering, and the cutting of anchor lines resulting in physical injuries of Filipino civilians are wholly inconsistent with the duty of all nations to ensure the safety of human lives,” Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. said.

The DND reiterated that maritime entitlements in the area are governed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos) and that the 2016 Arbitral Award is final and binding.

“Claims and actions that disregard these legal principles undermine the rules-based international order and erode regional peace and stability,” Teodoro said.

China’s recent aggressiveness has earned condemnation from close defense partners of the Philippines, including the US, Japan, Australia, and Canada.

Despite drawing criticisms, China’ Foreign Affairs Ministry Spokesman Guo Jiakun still stood ground that they have “indisputable sovereignty over Nansha Qundao (Spratly Islands), which include Xianbin Jiao, and their adjacent waters.”

In an interview, Jiakun accused the Philippines of having taken organized and orchestrated moves of sending large numbers of ships to provoke tensions in the waters off Xianbin Jiao (Sabina Shoal) infringing upon China’s sovereignty, rights and interest violating international law and sabotaging maritime peace and stability.

“It is legitimate, lawful, and professional, restrained and beyond reproach for China to do what is necessary to safeguard our territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests. The Philippines needs to immediately stop its infringement, provocations and vilification, stop its endless self-directed stunts at sea, and refrain from challenging China’s firm resolve to safeguard our sovereignty and rights and interests,” Jiakun said.

Teodoro slammed Jiakun’s remarks, saying states aspiring for regional leadership “should act responsibly.”

“The attempt by the spokesperson of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to justify these actions by invoking ‘indisputable sovereignty’ and peddling blatant lies like “knife-wielding” fishermen are not supported by facts and evidence. We call on China to stop spreading false narratives and engaging in state orchestrated disinformation campaigns,” Teodoro said.

THE Senate on Monday approved on third and final reading Senate Bill (SB) 1506 putting the national budget process on a digital platform to promote transparency and ward off graft and corruption.

Voting 17-0-0, the senators passed the proposed Citizen Access and Disclosure of Expenditures for National Accountability (Cadena) Act, also known as the Blockchain the Budget Bill.

It mandates all government agencies to upload and regularly maintain detailed budget-related documents — including contracts, project costs, bills of materials, and procurement records — on a digital budget platform.

The system is designed to ensure that all files are publicly accessible, tamper-resistant, traceable, open-source and verifiable.

The measure’s approval came just days after the Cadena bill was included among the latest batch of priority measures listed by the Legislative-Executive Development Advisory Council.

Sen. Bam Aquino earlier said that the strong public outcry against corruption and the growing call for accountability, amid the massive flood control scandal, created the momentum and opportunity needed for the bill’s passage.

The senator said SB 1506, which he authored, seeks disclosure of public documents and puts all of these documents “on blockchain.”

THE United States just released its National Security Strategy (NSS) — one of those quadrennial documents each administration issues to signal priorities, prejudices, and presumptions. Trump produced one in 2017, Biden in 2022; both passed through Washington largely unnoticed, their prose forgettable, their impact diluted by events.

This year’s iteration is different, however. It is not merely a policy paper but a manifesto — less a map of the world than a confession of belief. Trump’s worldview, unfiltered and unapologetic, appears stripped of guardrails, euphemism and the institutional restraints that once diluted impulse into process.

The document tracks almost seamlessly, Project 2025, the not-so-secret blueprint engineered by the Heritage Foundation and its ecosystem of conservative think-tanks, Federalist Society jurists and former Trump officials. Its ambition is radical: concentrate presidential power, dismantle swaths of the federal bureaucracy, sideline career civil servants, and centralize authority in a unitary executive capable of enforcing hardline positions on immigration, trade, regulation and culture.

This NSS is not an accident of policy evolution. It is the foreign-policy corollary of a domestic power grab.

Doctrine by inner circle

One assumes the NSS was circulated, debated and pre-approved within Trump’s inner court long before it saw daylight. Whether the president himself — cognitively impaired and famously sleeping even during Cabinet meetings — fully grasped its implications is another matter. The document bears the unmistakable fingerprints of Stephen Miller’s migration obsessions, Navarro’s mercantilist rage, McEntee’s loyalty purges, Voight’s cultural grievances — and, briefly, Elon Musk’s techno-libertarian theatrics.

Much of the agenda — deregulation framed as efficiency, bureaucracy dismantled in the name of competence, migration policy laced with racial dog whistles — feels less like strategy than translation: Trump’s instincts laundered into doctrine. Allies and adversaries now read the NSS not for nuance, but for diagnosis.

MAGA’s strategic grievance

The 10,000-word tome — mercifully summarized by ChatGPT — lays bare a MAGA-tinted worldview without the courtesy of subtlety. Geopolitics is reduced to bumper-sticker logic; global trade explained at cable-news depth. One suspects the strategy crystallized sometime between midnight and dawn, after a Truth Social tantrum binge fueled by Fox News, Newsmax and OANN — Trump’s sealed ecosystem of affirmation.

In this echo chamber, grievance hardens into doctrine, instinct into policy, impulse into strategy.

At its core — unchanged from his first term, sharpened in his second — is the belief that America “went astray” after the Cold War. In this telling, shadowy elites and a mythical “swamp” hijacked US policy, mistaking wish-lists for strategy: chasing global primacy, overextending commitments, misreading public patience — while globalism and “free trade” hollowed out the middle class and the industrial muscle that once underwrote American power.

Allies are recast as freeloaders, especially NATO. International institutions are portrayed as anti-American irritants. Trump’s first term becomes the “course correction”; this second-term NSS markets itself as consolidation — a new golden age anchored in clearer ends-means alignment, sold as American ascent.

Hard borders, hard power, harder lines

Trump’s long-ridiculed “I’ll build a wall, and Mexico will pay for it” chant has now been bureaucratized with a vengeance. DHS promises “full border control,” with top-dog enforcer, Secretary Kristi Noem, overseeing deportations reportedly so indiscriminate they swept up American citizens and even war veterans whose chief offense was looking South American.

Deterrence is recast as credibility: a modern nuclear shield, layered missile defenses, and a military restored to pride and purpose. Power rests on economics — reindustrialization, energy dominance, technological supremacy and guarded intellectual capital.

Soft power comes from cultural confidence, not apology — a nation secure in history, family, faith and future. America First is no longer a slogan; it is doctrine.

A world compressed: Interests, not ideals

The strategy compresses US interests to essentials. In the Western Hemisphere, stability over chaos: curbing mass migration, crushing cartels, and reviving the Monroe Doctrine — now reborn as a “Trump Corollary” — to bar extra-hemispheric encroachment and reserve America’s right to intervene.

In the Indo-Pacific, open seas, secure supply chains, economic reciprocity and credible deterrence.

In Europe, especially NATO: security without dependency — sovereignty, self-confidence and real defense spending.

In the Middle East, deny domination of energy chokepoints without sinking into endless wars.

Across all regions, American technology and standards must set the pace, not follow it.

The NSS argues the means remain formidable: a vast innovative economy, reserve-currency finance, technological primacy, unmatched military power, alliances, geography, soft power and civic patriotism — reinforced by deregulation, tax cuts, energy expansion, reshoring and renewed science investment.

The silence that speaks — an ‘assumed’ ally

Scrutinize the Indo-Pacific sections closely and one absence is deafening. The Philippines — America’s former colony and treaty ally — is not mentioned at all. Neither, for that matter, is most of Southeast Asia. The CFR noted the same blunt fact.

This is not a clerical oversight. The NSS explicitly defends omission as virtue, warning that naming every place leads to bloated, unfocused strategy. Prioritization requires choosing. The silence is deliberate. We were not forgotten. We were filed under “assumed.”

For the Philippines, the implications are profound — and uncomfortable. The alliance has become transactional by doctrine, not merely by Trumpian temperament. History no longer buys affection, only utility counts. Manila is no longer a “special relationship.” It is a use-case — a logistical asset whose relevance must be continually justified.

Deterrence remains, but attention is rationed. EDCA sites, joint exercises and maritime patrols create the illusion of muscular commitment. Yet the NSS clarifies the harder truth: America seeks narrower obligations and expects partners to carry more of the load. The Philippines may be vital in a contingency — but it is not narratively central. Useful in crisis. Disposable in diplomacy.

Beijing will read the omission as strategic daylight. China exploits gaps, not promises — applying calibrated pressure, harassment without escalation, fatigue as strategy. The lesson is simple: resistance is costly, and patrons may arrive late.

What the omission demands

Manila must stop confusing access with assurance. Bases improve logistics; they do not conjure political will. In a multipolar world, weakness signals vulnerability. Poor governance, erratic policy and hollow capabilities turn allies into variables, and great powers hedge against variables. In that space, the temptation to drift — or to seek the brutal predictability of Beijing’s blunt offerings — will only intensify.

The answer is neither panic nor nostalgia, neither louder speeches nor deeper dependency. It is capability: a coast guard that can hold water, infrastructure that survives pressure, institutions free of patronage, and a strategy that survives elections. It is networks, not crutches — embedding alliances within regional systems so no single patron becomes indispensable or exhausted. And above all, it is strategic seriousness — the discipline to plan for indifference, not reassurance.

The omission is not abandonment. It is a warning shot — quiet, deliberate and lethal to illusions. History is merciless to small states that mistake comfort for security. For an archipelago perched on the front porch of the century’s defining contest, irrelevance is not peace.

It is consent — for others to decide our fate.

IN my Nov. 26 column, I described the Trillion Peso March as a valiant attempt at national unity by “getting everyone equally furious at the same crooks at the same time.” Indeed, it succeeded, if success is measured by the volume of our shared rage. But a protest fueled by communal fury still falters when its anger is divided. Our wrath splinters across multiple villains: corrupt political leadership; a bureaucracy that confuses public service with personal enrichment; and private contractors whose construction empires are built on sand, kickbacks, and asphalt priced like gold bullion.

Ambivalence kills momentum. Outrage diluted by caveats — “Sara is not as crooked as BBM” (referring to Vice President Sara Duterte and President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.) — turns a precise target into a foggy abstraction. In that ambiguity, the guilty find room to breathe.

The “accountability and transparency” slogan, while noble, lacks the primal ring of “Marcos resign!” — a chant turbo-charged by the surviving die-hard acolytes of former president Rodrigo Duterte, who have only swapped posters, not philosophies. Their decibel-level enthusiasm masks a dangerous truth: mass mobilization without unity becomes a political demolition derby — Marcos vs. Sara vs. Yellows vs. the Left — and the nation is the vehicle totaled in the crash.

Unless these marches transcend partisanship, they become merely a Texas hold ‘em poker all-in bet with a nothing hand — a bluff in a game where the house always collects the country’s future as its winnings.

History is rarely kind to those who dismiss the seemingly futile. Revolutions begin as murmurs. Crises stalk until they pounce. The question now isn’t if our national frustration erupts into something larger, but how and when it blows.

I see three decisive forces that will shape the immediate future: the masses, the military and the international arena. Together, they will decide whether we cross the “final tipping point,” and together they will lay before us what we Filipinos love most: A smorgasbord of choices that we will pile on our plates and leave uneaten.

The street: Where change begins — or stops?

The Trillion Peso March was a warning shot, a flare fired from a ship taking on water. But a single march is theater; sustained demonstrations are pressure. They must endure long enough to alter the calculations of the one group that truly makes governments tremble: business. While activists talk about principles, capital speaks the only language politicians listen to: profit. When protests make investors sweat and malls empty, when imports stall and dividends shrink, the business sector drops its neutrality faster than a stock market during a coup rumor.

Remember EDSA I and II. It was not merely the priests, students, or cause-oriented groups that tipped the scales. It was people from the middle class marching with car keys in their pockets and mortgages on the line. When that sector shifts allegiance from stability to upheaval, it signals that the cost of the status quo has become intolerable. Street action must, therefore, sustain enough discomfort to reach that crucial threshold. When the middle class moves, regimes fall. This is always the first domino.

Men with guns: The real ‘checks and balances’

Let us not rewrite our fairy tales: EDSA I and II were not purely civilian love letters to democracy. They were military-backed, Western-trained transitions, with Fidel Ramos from West Point and Angelo Reyes from Harvard (“Alternative scenarios: Lessons from Harvard,” Dec. 3, 2025). The Armed Forces, whether we like it or not, remain the arbiters of order when civilian leadership loses legitimacy. But in this current crisis, the officers face a stark questionnaire: Is the civilian government still legitimate? Is the state machinery still functioning? Is public fury still tolerable?

If “yes” remains true, the military stays reluctantly in their barracks, nervous but restrained, cautious but compliant. But when the answers tip to “no,” the Philippines risks replaying the old tragedies of South America, Africa, and the Middle East: coups executed with surgical precision and patriotic cover stories. Western schooling may have once softened the uniforms, but without a steady civilian helm, even Harvard epaulettes cannot guarantee constitutional loyalty.

We must, therefore, shape the narrative, so that the perception of both the masses and the military become one. Once soldiers decide that democracy has collapsed, even temporarily, they will reshuffle the poker deck, so to speak, with cards no one else can hold. Once unleashed, the genie never returns to the bottle. Toothpaste does not reenter the tube. And power, once seized, rarely walks itself back to its cage.

International calculations: When elephants fight, the grass becomes collateral

Filipino transitions have never occurred in a strategic vacuum. EDSA I only concluded when the United States, our ever-ambivalent patron, told the dictator to “cut and cut cleanly.” And he did cut cleanly, and got a free, first-class plane seat not to Paoay, but to Hawaii.

Today, however, the geopolitical terrain is treacherously altered. The United States is helmed by a cognitively impaired president who weaponizes ignorance with pride, and who has — with breathtaking incompetence — surrendered his country’s economic primacy to a quietly encircling China. Donald Trump’s Indo-Pacific grand strategy has mutated into meme diplomacy: tweets as treaties, tantrums as foreign policy.

China watches like a patient creditor awaiting default. It warmly remembers a Philippines once led by a man now facing judgment at The Hague — and his successor-in-waiting, a heartbeat from power, whose inclination toward China defies fiscal logic or national interest. In our domestic turmoil, China sees an opening: influence invited or imposed.

The US will resist any transition that weakens its Indo-Pacific foothold. China will seize any shift that expands its reach. And our military — US-trained at the top, but its edges courted by China — must choose not only between powers, but also between futures. In geopolitics, there are no spectators. Only players — and prizes.

The day after order collapses

The masses may roar. Politicians may wobble. Markets may panic. But the day after any upheaval, peaceful or otherwise, does not belong to the crowds. It belongs to those who can govern, not merely topple. That future hinges on one defining question: will the Philippines march toward reform, or stumble into disorder? The road forks sharply ahead: a negotiated accountability process, painful but peaceful; a constitutional succession, predictable but uninspiring; a military-backed reset, risky but decisive; a geopolitical tug-of-war, where we lose more than sovereignty. For now, the trains still run, though delayed, overpriced, and occasionally underwater. But soon, the question may no longer be who runs them, but whether they run at all. Meantime, we must persist with other Trillion Peso Marches — in Davao, Cebu, the Bangsamoro region — and then again and again — until the preconditions in my Nov. 26 column have come to pass — the incarcerations of six or seven senators; the 15 to 30 House representatives; the Discayas; the Gardiolas and their cartels; and the BGC Boys of the Department of Public Works and Highways — and yes, Martin Romualdez and Zaldy Co for good measure.

And then? History reloads.

Abangan ang kasunod!

IN the late 1980s, at the Harvard Kennedy School, quite a few of our colleagues were veterans of political turbulence from South America, Africa and the Middle East, where governments fall with the regularity of our typhoons — they offered a curriculum far more vivid than anything in our syllabus. Over brown-bag lunches, they conducted blow-by-blow tutorials on how revolutions, coups d’état, putsches and every imaginable extra-constitutional maneuver are actually managed.

And yes, these convulsions do topple regimes. They do install new ones. But beneath the romance and rhetoric lies a brutal constant: the ordinary citizen — Muhammad, Jamil, Ofedie — is almost always the casualty. Revolutions crown victors but bury the nameless. The slogans are noble; the body counts are not.

Rewards for survivors – Harvard’s curious role

Those who survive the upheavals, from either side, rarely go home empty-handed. They collect ambassadorships, appointed to cabinet posts they are barely trained for, receive mansions with Ferraris in the garage as if they were medals of valor. And then, of course, there are those curious cases where former revolutionaries are “sent” to Harvard.

Not as a prize, far from it. But because history has shown a quiet logic: victorious rebels must undergo metamorphosis. A guerrilla commander who once managed platoons in the mountains must now manage ministries, budgets and the machinery of the modern state. That is where Harvard enters — not as an ivory tower, but as a diplomatic laundromat. Harvard teaches the grammar of statecraft: public finance, diplomacy, negotiation, governance, and pairing the correct wine with the right food, etc.

It is also part of the post-conflict ritual favored by Western and multilateral agencies. They prefer their new partners housebroken, credentialed, and able to pronounce “macroeconomic restructuring” without blinking — and eat at McDonalds without the rice. A year at the Kennedy School transforms insurgents into policymakers with global rolodexes and stylish double-breasted blue blazers. Harvard gets prestige; the revolutionaries get legitimacy. Everyone gets a photo-op.

Why we landed in Cambridge

But in my case and Alex “Babes” Flores’ — I have long suspected a more local logic. Sending us to Harvard was less about polishing our skills and more about temporarily exiling potential political rivals. After all, my last government assignment before grad-school was that of Minister Aquilino “Nene” Pimentel Jr.’s deputy minister replacing Marcos holdovers with hastily appointed OICs, some of whom were more enthusiastic than competent.

What better way to neutralize a politically inconvenient reformer than to ship him off to Cambridge, Massachusetts, a fellowship, a year’s stipend, the seductive illusion of meritocracy and bragging rights! And Babes may have stepped into the toes of several generals. A bemedaled colonel and a loyal participant in the winning side of EDSA I, we absorbed our lunchtime revolution seminars with missionary zeal. Alex would often declare — without irony — that if destiny required, he now knew exactly how to apply the arcana of regime change. Yet even in these spirited discussions, one haunting question etched itself into our collective consciousness: If you overthrow a regime and succeed - who runs the trains the morning after? That question separated dreamy revolutionaries from actual nation-builders. And should we fail this time, there’s always Primo Arambulo — our bow-tied, cigar-puffing Fil-Am contemporary, equal parts martinet and polymath, offering exile bed-spaces in his Maryland manor like a benevolent landlord of lost patriots.

When power meets the real world: cautionary tales

Our Cambridge experiences were not academic abstractions. They were foreshadowings. One fellow student — a charismatic politician from Ecuador — returned home, ascended to the presidency, then was promptly incarcerated for anomalies. Last we heard, he was exiled back to America, his presidency reduced to a cautionary footnote.

Another peer, an Islamic governor from Kaduna state in Nigeria, lived his Harvard years in polygamous splendor, each of his wives equipped with a BMW in the Peabody Terrace parking lot. On weekends he would jet off to London to play polo with Prince (now King) Charles.

These classmates were strictly nonrevolutionaries, yet their trajectories eerily mirror the beneficiaries of our present-day flood control corruption — men who have not yet endured a revolution but already behaving like survivors of one. Comfortable in their villas in Portugal, Paris and Forbes Park, they lounge as if the country’s suffering were events between chukkers or a Superbowl intermission.

Precondition to a PH upheaval

Which brings us to this week’s “trillion-peso march” and the question capturing our national imagination: Quo vadis, Filipinas? At the very least, such a mobilization should spark the swift jailing of senators, congressmen, bureaucrats, and the contractors who masterminded this grand heist — as a crucial build-up towards the tipping point.

In a country where the legal path to a China-style remedy — swift execution — or the North Korean custom of jailing relatives to the second degree of consanguinity is unavailable, the next best option is full restitution. Every peso stolen, every kilometer of asphalt overpriced, every Birkin and Gucci bag bought with public funds, every Rolex and Patek Philippe flaunted as trophies of impunity, the Gulfstream 350 and yes — because symbols matter — the Paraiba Tourmaline ring. All must be returned to the plundered nation.

These prescriptions are not academic indulgences. They arise from lived experience — from the hard lessons Babes, Primo and I absorbed at Harvard, listening to men and women who watched their countries implode and claw their way back. From them we learned a simple truth: Toppling a regime is easy; governing a nation is the real revolution. And regardless of how loud the streets become, the trains must still run the morning after.

The alternatives

The pathways ahead — constitutional, extra-constitutional, violent, nonviolent, reformist, dystopian, or merely farcical — will be dissected in my coming columns. Yet whatever form transition takes, any credible national program must contain one nonnegotiable proviso: systemic reforms. Not the cosmetic tinkering Congress peddles, but real structural correction — the very demands citizens have raised long before legislators perverted the process to protect themselves.

Foremost among these is the passage of a genuine anti-political dynasty law, not the pantomime version that conveniently exempts its authors. Equally vital is revising the 1987 Constitution, trading our dysfunctional unitary-presidential system for a parliamentary-federal model where accountability is unambiguous, incompetence rejected, and authority acquired by merit, not heredity — with dynasts firmly prohibited from steering the overhaul itself.

Only after the plebiscite’s ratification can Marcos and Sara depart — toward imprisonment or exile, at the people’s pleasure — carrying a sliver of dignity for having midwifed, by design or sheer accident, a more coherent constitutional order. And not before then! Nations do not rise because they shout the loudest, but because they choose the hard path when cowardice is easier. The trillion-peso march may ignite a reckoning, but reckoning alone does not shape destiny. Destiny is forged when a people, betrayed too often, finally decide that this time the thieves will not write the ending.

In the end, the question is no longer who falls, but who dares run the trains after the wreckage and who has the courage to rebuild a nation worthy of their arrival.