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.