AS conjectured in my column (TMT, Jan. 21), Venezuela has slipped from the headlines, eclipsed by Trump’s designs on Greenland. A larger stage opened, and the world’s showman arrived — not to seek permission, but to overwhelm. Davos became theater; power became performance. Attention, not consent, is now the currency of influence.

The world of 2026 has crossed the threshold into a new order. The retreat of Arctic ice has exposed a deeper truth: The “pleasant fictions” of international law are yielding to a raw, transactional politics of power. Greenland, Davos and Manila are not separate stories but a single geopolitical parable. They reveal how sovereignty is priced and how alliances are renegotiated in public.

Small nations must relearn an ancient lesson: When rules melt with the ice, survival depends on power and resolve, not promises. The moral architecture of the postwar world is fracturing. For the Philippines, this is not distant theater — it is a mirror. What is rehearsed in the Arctic may yet be performed in our waters.

Davos debacle

The 2026 Davos World Economic Forum will be remembered not for grand bargains but for a geopolitical farce. Fresh from a campaign to “acquire” Greenland, Trump arrived with AI-generated memes of American flags draped over ice sheets. He spoke of sovereignty as if it were a deed, of territory as if it were inventory — assets to be acquired, priced and moved at will.

When Denmark and its European allies resisted, Trump responded not with diplomacy but with menace. He threatened 25-percent tariffs on eight NATO states, treating a security alliance less as a covenant than as a protection racket. It was power as reality TV: the strongman’s bluff, broadcast to the world.

Then came the collapse.

Defied by a unified Europe and credible whispers of an EU “anti-coercion bazooka” — including a coordinated US Treasury holdings sell-off — Trump abruptly folded, ruling out force, suspending tariffs in exchange for a vaporous “framework of a future deal,” which NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte diplomatically described as having “a lot of work to be done.”

TACO

Thus, was re-enforced the nickname circulating in diplomatic corridors.

The mockery is deserved. But the danger lies not in Trump’s retreat; it lies in the pattern. Bluff. Threaten. Fold. Repeat. This rhythm does more than bruise credibility; it shatters the very idea of “automaticity” in alliances — NATO Article 5. Defense becomes conditional. Commitments become bargaining chips. Guarantees acquire an asterisk.

For Manila, the implication is chilling. A presidency that treats Greenland as a property may one day treat Ayungin Shoal, or Bajo de Masinloc, as line items in a grand bargain with Beijing. An ally who prices territory can trade it. An ally who improvises strategy can improvise abandonment.

The end of pretend rules

Against this spectacle stood a quiet intellectual counterweight. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney invoked Václav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless,” likening the “rules-based international order” to the greengrocer’s sign in the window: a ritual everyone knows is hollow, yet everyone continues to perform.

Canada, Carney declared, is “taking the sign out of the window.” The old rules no longer restrain the powerful. Trade, finance, technology and supply chains are now instruments of coercion. Great powers weaponize interdependence. Pretending otherwise is not idealism; it is self-deception.

In place of illusion, Carney proposed “value-based realism,” a posture that remains anchored in sovereignty and human dignity, yet unsentimental about the decline of American reliability. It does not abandon values. It abandons naiveté.

For middle powers, his message was stark: If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.

He urged a “variable geometry,” issue-specific coalitions that bypass paralyzed institutions. Canada will double defense spending, diversify trade away from America, and weave a dense web of global partnerships. Sovereignty, in this world, is no longer guaranteed by rules. It is earned by the capacity to withstand pressure. It was not a speech of comfort. It was a manual for survival.

The Arctic as the North’s South China Sea

Greenland and the West Philippine Sea (WPS) are separated by oceans yet bound by logic. The Arctic is fast becoming the North’s SCS/WPS — a maritime frontier where geography is rewritten by presence, and legitimacy follows occupation. The parallels are haunting:

– The shield of law. Both Greenland and the Philippines rely on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos). Both discover its fragility. Just as Beijing ignored the 2016 arbitral ruling, Washington’s casual disregard for Danish sovereignty reveals that “national interest” overrides law — even among friends.

– The strategy of presence. In the WPS, China deploys maritime militias and concrete reefs into permanence. In the Arctic, Russia and China plant “scientific” outposts. The BRP Sierra Madre stands as our lonely pathetic sentinel; Greenland’s Inuit patrols play the same role. In a transactional world, unoccupied space is deemed vacant.

– Strategic real estate. Greenland is the cork of the North Atlantic. The Philippines is the hinge of the First Island Chain. Both are viewed less as nations than as buffers. Our debate over EDCA mirrors Greenland’s fear that too much military presence invites annexation by proxy.

Geography has become destiny again. The map is no longer drawn by treaties. It is drawn by who arrives first and who stays longest.

PH’s mandate: Diversify or subordinate

The Greenland climbdown teaches Manila a harsh lesson: Transactional alliances are unstable foundations. The Mutual Defense Treaty has long been treated as ironclad. Trump’s conduct suggests otherwise. Protection now comes with a price — and a mood.

The Philippines must adopt its own version of Carney’s realism. We see its outline already:

– Multi-alignment. Security ties with Japan, Australia and Europe create a flexible web of defense. No single capital becomes a point of failure. Alliance is no longer monogamy; it is architecture.

— The value of strength. Defense modernization is not just about hardware. It is about raising the cost of coercion — for Beijing and for a transactional Washington. Vulnerability rouses appetite.

– Regional solidarity. Asean must evolve from a forum of caution into a coalition of consequence. Southeast Asia must act as a collective middle power rather than a gallery of pliant clients competing for favor.

This is not defiance. It is adulthood.

Living without illusions

As Arctic ice melts, the map of power is redrawn. The age when small nations slept beneath the blanket of a benevolent order is over. Davos 2026 revealed a divided world: those who weaponize chaos, and those who build resilience.

Trump’s TACO diplomacy is not an aberration. It is a symptom of a deeper American transformation. To remain masters of our seas, we must look beyond the horizon of the 1951 MDT. We must take our own sign out of the window. Name the world as it is. Strengthen what is ours.

Weave ourselves into those who still believe sovereignty is worth defending.

In an age where ice retreats and seas rise, power belongs not to those who wait for the world they wish for but to those who learn to navigate the world that is.

THE global community’s limp response to America’s perversion of the rule of law in Venezuela has offered something far more dangerous than silence: a template. It has shown the American presidency what can be done without consequence. Emboldened and transparent in his intentions, Trump is executing a strategy telegraphed all along: the systematic dismantling of democratic restraint.

This is no longer the behavior of a man testing limits. It is the conduct of a leader who has perfected impunity. Trump governs through calculated chaos: each new outrage is designed to bury the last. Venezuela eclipsed Epstein. Greenland now threatens to eclipse Venezuela. The press staggers from spectacle to spectacle, never quite catching up. Scandal no longer accumulates; it evaporates in the heat of the next provocation.

What emerges is not disorder, but design.

Internal politics: The great capitulation

Most damning is the total surrender of the GOP. A party once defined by institutional pride now sits reduced, cowed — its tails between its legs — before a cult of personality. A handful still mutter about legality, alliances, and norms — faking real resistance — but they are paralyzed by MAGA primed to crush defiance. “America First” was once coded as patriotic refrain. Now Venezuela and Greenland expose it as selective aggression.

This is not a partisan turn. It is the destruction of that heirloom myth — “checks and balances” — a museum piece now displayed in a republic that governs by appetite. When institutions become inconveniences, accountability becomes an artifact. America has entered a regime where impunity is policy and self-discipline is treason.

Why Greenland?

America’s fixation with Greenland is not new. It began in the Cold War, when its location rendered it an “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” a northern shield against the Soviet Union — much like China’s co-optation of islands and rocks in the South China Sea/West Philippine Sea that have been converted into Chinese military bases astride the shipping routes. Geography was destiny (this is another topic for subsequent columns).

But the appeal of Greenland does not lie in romance but in arithmetic. The Arctic is thawing, and with it, new corridors of power. The Northwest Passage across Canada — still reluctantly an ally — the Northern Sea Route along Russia can shorten global shipping between North America, Europe and Asia by as much as 40 percent. For maritime trade, time is money made visible: fewer days at sea, lower fuel costs, faster capital turnover.

What Suez and Panama once were, the Arctic is becoming — except this time, the map is being redrawn by climate. Greenland sits astride this transformation. It is no longer peripheral. It is pivot.

Rare earths: The new strategic hunger

What has become critical in Trump-imposed world tariff is America’s near-starvation diet of rare earth minerals. These are the sinews of modern power — semiconductors, electric vehicles, renewable energy systems, and nearly every advanced weapons platform in the US arsenal.

Dependence on foreign — especially Chinese — supply chains turns this craving into a strategic vulnerability, where economic leverage can become geopolitical coercion. China dominates both the global extraction and processing.

Greenland’s Kvanefjeld mountain contains one of the world’s largest, rare earth deposits. American mining interests have salivated for it. In a tariff-fractured world, scarcity becomes strategy. Greenland is no longer ice and fire. It is leverage.

The colonial underlay: Camp Century and Thule

After the war, Washington attempted to purchase Greenland from Denmark for $100 million in gold bullions. Copenhagen rejected the offer. The compromise was subtler — and crueler: American bases on Inuit land, including Camp Century, an underground city of tunnels and missiles entombed beneath the ice.

When the ice proved unstable, the Americans left. They abandoned radioactive water, diesel and toxic PCBs, sealed inside a glacier now melting. As the Arctic warms, Cold War poison inches toward the surface — toward a people who never consented to bear its cost.

This was not merely environmental vandalism. It exposed Denmark’s colonial duplicity and America’s strategic indifference. For centuries, Greenland’s worth was calculated by outsiders — first Danish administrators, then American generals — while Inuit life absorbed the damage. Modernization fractured communities, displaced language, and suspended identity between worlds.

The cruelty became explicit in 1953, when the US expanded Thule Air Base. Inuit families were given four days to abandon ancestral homes. They were relocated to barren ground with little shelter, less dignity. In 1968, a B-52 carrying nuclear weapons crashed nearby, scattering plutonium across hunting lands. Cleanup was partial. Illness followed.

Thule became a monument to American security. For Greenlanders, it was loss made permanent.

Today’s staggering suicide rates among young Inuit men (80-120 per 100,000) are not mysteries of climate or temperament. They are the aftershock of dispossession — families uprooted, identities thinned, futures negotiated elsewhere. This is not a public-health anomaly. It is colonial trauma unfolding in real time (US and Danish rate: 14.7 and 9 respectively).

America is complicit. Denmark enabled it. And now, as the ice recedes, the vultures gather once more.

Russia’s stake: The northern empire

For Moscow, the Arctic is not a frontier — it is destiny. The melting ice unlocks the Northern Sea Route, transforming Russia’s frozen coastline into a toll-collecting superhighway between Asia and Europe. Arctic hydrocarbons and minerals reinforce Moscow’s grip on energy and strategic materials.

Control of northern sea lanes reduces dependence on southern chokepoints policed by Western navies. It extends strategic depth against NATO. In this calculus, Greenland is not land. It is a sentinel at the Atlantic gateway. Any rival presence there threatens Russia’s ambition to turn the Arctic into both engine and moat of a revived empire.

China’s stake: The frozen Belt and Road

For Beijing, Greenland is convergence — resource security, strategic positioning, future logistics. Its rare earths offer an escape from Western chokepoints. Arctic ports promise weeks shaved off trade routes to Europe and North America.

By investing in mining, research stations and infrastructure, China advances its claim as a “near-Arctic state.” The Arctic is not a frontier in Beijing’s imagination. It is a supply chain-in-waiting. Greenland is its keystone — a frozen Belt and Road.

Geopolitical implications

What appears as Trumpian absurdity is, in fact, structural. Greenland is where climate, commerce, minerals and military geometry converge. It is where colonial residue meets 21st-century power.

This is no longer about ice. It is about authorship — who gets to write the map of the next century. The Arctic is mutating into the new Mediterranean: a basin of trade, transit, rivalry and consequence. In that theater, Greenland is Malta, Cyprus, Singapore and Suez in one glacial body. Whoever choreographs its destiny will dictate the syntax of future power.

And here is the farce disguised as fate: this world-historical pivot is being entrusted to a presidency that governs by impulse over intellect, by mood rather than method. When territorial ambition is paired with impunity, strategy becomes improv. Geopolitics turns into a late-night monologue, and early morning tweets — history reduced to a punchline. The map of the century deserves a cartographer. It has been handed a showman.

BY the close of 2025, I published two essays mapping the terrain before it shifted — one dissecting Washington’s National Security Strategy (NSS), the other tracing Beijing’s quiet, methodical ascent (TMT, Dec. 17 and 31, 2025). Both were quickly buried by scandals dominating public discourse — the flood control exposés that tainted the highest echelon of Philippine political leadership. 

I have since chosen — temporarily — to step away from the exhausting task of chronicling local betrayals. Corruption is corrosive, but global power shifts are existential. Less lurid perhaps, but infinitely more consequential. Lost amid our local noise are a series of American moves, gestating since late 2025, now erupting with the capacity to reorder global stability.

Venezuela: Diplomacy by impulse

The new year’s shock was Washington’s “invasion” of Venezuela and abduction of Nicolás Maduro, a return to overt regime change veiled as law enforcement operations against a narco-terrorist. By seizing the world’s largest oil reserves, Washington blocked Maduro’s pivot to the yuan, a shift that threatened the dollar’s global reserve status, denying China a strategic financial breach. 

The operation bypassed the US Congress, strained international law, and conveniently advanced longstanding efforts to isolate Cuba by severing its energy lifeline. It fit a broader pattern — Greenland, Panama, strategic chokepoints — erratic maneuvers aimed at obstructing Beijing’s rise. This was a high-risk wager on financial hegemony: preserve dollar dominance, deny China hemispheric access, and accept instability as collateral damage. (And it conveniently knocked Epstein off the front pages.)

For the Philippines and other allies, the lesson is sobering. Power exercised by impulse renders alliances capricious. When policy follows mood instead of institutional consensus, partnerships cease to reassure.

Liberation abroad, theater at home

There is, however, another side to Maduro’s fall, one largely erased in Western political theater. In Caracas, citizens brutalized by decades of socialist misrule surged into the streets in celebration; scenes echoing our own 1986 moment, when the Marcos dictatorship collapsed and a nation seized a fleeting breath of freedom.

Conversely, American progressives responded with ritual outrage and cries of “imperialism.” This reflex is less analysis than affliction; Trump 

Derangement Syndrome has become so consuming that Venezuela itself vanished from view. 

A once-functional country was reduced to a narco-state by corruption, hyperinflation and “equality” enforced at gunpoint. Those who fled hunger and terror now find themselves lectured by activists safely insulated from the consequences of the ideology they defend.

This does not absolve Washington from scrutiny. Trump’s claim that the US will “run” Venezuela invites legitimate fears of mission creep and administrative hubris. Strategic interests and risks are real. However, the moral divide remains stark: those who endured the dictatorship are celebrating its collapse, while those who never suffered under it are the ones mourning its end.

The Iraq warning

The Venezuelan episode inevitably recalls another American “moment of liberation” — Iraq, 2003. Then, too, statues fell and crowds cheered. “Mission accomplished” followed swiftly. What came next was occupation, insurgency and a costly lesson in what happens the day after.

The parallels are instructive. Remove the ruler and you create a vacuum. Assume foreign administrators can replace local governance and you invite resentment. Dress strategic interests as moral crusades and credibility collapses. Venezuela’s operation was surgical and greeted with relief, but history warns that the real danger lies not in the takedown, but in “who runs the trains the morning after.”

The NSS: Strategy by silence

This unpredictability is now codified in Washington’s NSS — a document best described as “Trumpism in formal wear.” It speaks of strength and sovereignty, but its subtext is blunt: America will focus narrowly on what it must, and its partners should prepare to fend for themselves.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the Indo-Pacific. The Philippines, America’s oldest treaty ally in Asia, a former colony, and a frontline state in the First Island Chain — is not mentioned at all. This omission is not oversight; it is demotion.

Manila is increasingly treated as useful in crisis, expendable in diplomacy. We remain neither equal partners nor formal vassals, merely disposable assets. EDCA sites and joint patrols provide optics, not assurance. History no longer guarantees attention. Since 1898, our relationship with Washington has oscillated between utility and neglect. The 1991 expulsion of US bases was our brief apex of self-respect — an autonomy we failed to consolidate. Today, an alliance built on episodic interest is quicksand; it appears firm until it begins to pull us under.

The quiet empire: Power that builds

While Washington convulses — tariffs, scandals, impulsive strikes — China advances as a whisper. Its strategy is the inverse of American spectacle. Where the US jolts, Beijing builds.

Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China builds ports, railways, and energy corridors; through 5G and digital platforms, it installs the operating system of future economies; by controlling critical minerals, it quietly tethers global industry to its production base.

This is structural power — durable, embedded and difficult to dislodge. Nations do not wake up one day to discover Chinese influence; they simply find themselves unable to function without Chinese systems.

Converging risks

Viewed together — the Venezuelan intervention, the NSS’ strategic silence, and China’s accelerating footprint — the arc is clear. American discipline erodes as Chinese structural power consolidates. US commitment thins and turns transactional; Beijing’s presence becomes constant. One superpower behaves like a landlord who appears only to collect rent or douse fires. The other acts like the contractor rebuilding the house. Over time, the builder owns the structure. 

In Southeast Asia, particularly in the West Philippine Sea, this is no abstraction. We duel with water cannons while the map is quietly redrawn. America drops in, makes a statement, and moves on. In geopolitics, presence — not promises — decides who stays.

PH choice: Autonomy or drift

Manila now confronts an uncomfortable arithmetic of power: an America increasingly inward-looking and fatigued by commitments, and a China patiently advancing, already embedded in the region’s future. The danger is not sudden American abandonment, but a quieter decay — Washington assumes Philippine loyalty while offering diminishing returns, as Beijing steadily compresses Manila’s strategic space.

The implications are structural. Sentiment and shared memory no longer anchors the alliance. It is drifting toward cold transactionalism, where Manila must perpetually audition for relevance before a distracted superpower. Treaty language is not leverage. Geography sharpens the reality: China lies 800 kilometers away; America remains 11,000 km distant. Distance still matters — strategically and psychologically.

A new national strategy is imperative. The Philippines must build real military and economic capacity rather than subcontract its security to promises. It must widen its strategic aperture — deepening ties with Japan, Australia and other steady middle powers. And more importantly, it must finally confront massive corruption not as scandal, but as a first-order national-security threat.

Chinese influence does not arrive with banners; it embeds through systems — quiet, structural, and with unnerving permanence. If Manila fails to adapt, it will not shape its future. It will awaken to discover that the future has already been chosen around it, for it, and without it.

AS 2026 dawns, I had briefly considered stepping away from my usual rhythm of dissecting geopolitical decay and institutional autopsies. Having spent six of my eight decades confronting the machinery of bad governance, a certain occupational fatigue has set in. I once believed the martial law era was the pinnacle of predatory rule, never imagining such a state of affairs could be replicated. I was mistaken; history, it seems, has no aversion to a bad sequel, as evidenced by the son’s incumbency.

The current deluge of flood control scandals and the unbridled greed of public servants — who appear incapable of moderating their systemic looting — has left me intellectually exhausted. For the coming year, I intend to recalibrate. This is not a retreat, but a shift in perspective. I will let local infamies simmer until justice is served or a political reset occurs.

While year’s end usually invites hollow resolutions, I prefer the risk of prediction — not of markets, but of political trajectories. I focus on two men who steered democracies toward spectacle: Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte.

My prediction: Trump, increasingly unmoored and erratic, will be forced from the presidency before his term concludes. Meanwhile, Duterte, currently awaiting his reckoning in The Hague, will never see Philippine shores again. He is destined to spend his final days on foreign soil, a fading shadow of a decaying legacy.

Parallel paths of erosion

I begin the year by examining two figures who have shaped my geopolitical and local commentary: Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte. Though hailing from different hemispheres, their political architectures are eerily similar. Both rose to power by treating the rule of law as an inconvenience and institutional limits as optional.

Trump, America’s theatrical legal liability, and Duterte, Davao-bred architect of “shoot-first governance,” both represent a distinct pattern of democratic erosion. Their impact on their respective nations is not just a passing phase but an indelible stain on the political fabric.

This critique is not aimed at their followers — MAGA or DDS — but at the leaders’ shared imprudence. When heads of state transform institutions into mirrors of their own ego, accountability fractures. Whether it manifests as comedy or tragedy, the result is the same: democracy quietly hollows out from within.

Authoritarian by accident, felon by verdict

Trump treated his presidency like a reality show that never stopped filming. What started as a branding move ended in a long list of legal battles. He is the first US president to become a convicted felon, having been found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records in New York.

Beyond that, he was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation and faces charges for trying to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents. While he claims these legal troubles are just unfair attacks for “loving America,” the records tell a different story. He has managed to bridge the gap between commander-in-chief and criminal defendant, spinning serious felony charges as if they were a badge of honor.

Trump’s authoritarianism is not ideological. It is incidental. It is what you get when a man with no respect for rules is handed an office built entirely on rules. He didn’t seek to dismantle democracy on purpose; he just didn’t think the rules applied to him.

This behavior did real damage. He turned basic facts into political food-fights and made people lose faith in elections. Instead of following the law, he governed through personal grievances and demanded total loyalty. He treated the Constitution like a suggestion rather than a boundary. In the end, he behaved like an autocrat not because he studied history — he is history-illiterate — but because he followed his own unchecked instincts, leaving the country more divided and cynical about the truth.

Authoritarian by design, now in The Hague

Duterte is a different strain of strongman. While Trump used chaos, Duterte used cold, calculated methods. He is currently under International Criminal Court custody for “crimes against humanity” in connection with the thousands of deaths in his war on drugs. Unlike leaders who use metaphors, Duterte’s public calls for violence were treated as official policy.

If Trump chipped away at democracy, Duterte took a chainsaw to it. He turned fear into a tool of the state, using the police and bureaucracy to normalize the killing of suspects without trial. Under his rule, neighborhoods became crime scenes.

The main difference is efficiency: Trump’s mistakes often slowed him down, but Duterte’s competence made his authoritarianism faster, deadlier and immediate. Even so, he remained popular. He convinced many that “strong leadership” meant a government that could act as judge, jury and executioner before breakfast.

Similar deadly styles

Trump and Duterte both weakened the systems meant to keep leaders in check. Trump attacked the courts and the press, while Duterte targeted human rights groups and the judiciary. Both demanded personal loyalty over the law, valuing their own authority more than legal rules.

They also used fear to control the public. Trump focused on outsiders and national decline, whereas Duterte focused on crime. By creating their own versions of reality and questioning facts, both leaders convinced people to fear external threats more than the loss of their own democratic rights and freedoms.

Strongman paradox, flourishing even when failing

The tragedy of modern strongmen isn’t just that they rise, but that they never truly leave. Even after losing elections or facing legal trouble, leaders like Trump and Duterte remain powerful figures. They survive by creating an illusion of order. Trump provides emotional order, where his followers feel like winners in a world of conspiracies. Duterte offers physical order, using intimidation and violence to make the streets feel “safe.”

One comforts his base with theories, the other with force. Both convince their supporters that democracy is actually safer in the hands of a leader who doesn’t respect it. They turn their personal power into a permanent part of the political landscape.

Legacy of weakened institutions

The true legacy of Trump and Duterte is a landscape of damaged institutions and broken civic trust. In the US, election faith has eroded and political violence has increased. In the Philippines, state-sponsored killings have become an accepted tool of power. Both nations are now struggling with a culture where the rules of democracy have been fundamentally altered.

Trump weakens democracy through constant falsehoods and spectacle, while Duterte erodes it through force and coercion. One acts through improvisation, the other by deliberate design. Despite these different methods, both lead their countries toward a lack of accountability.

Their rule serves as a warning: Democracies cannot survive when citizens trade their rights for performance or fear. While the institutions might still stand, the civic spirit required to sustain them has been deeply wounded. The cost of their leadership isn’t found in their speeches, but in the lasting damage done to their countries’ political fabric.

Trump and Duterte prove that democracy is fragile. Whether through spectacle or force, they convince citizens to trade accountability for the illusion of order. Their lasting legacy is a wounded civic culture where fear often outweighs the rule of law.