LML Polettiques (493)

Trump on a rampage

Wednesday, 21 January 2026 09:15 Written by
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…

As empires diverge: Manila’s moment of strategic choice

Wednesday, 14 January 2026 10:25 Written by
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…

Order through fear: Trump and Duterte’s legacy

Wednesday, 07 January 2026 20:17 Written by
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.…

Beijing ascendant – the rise of the Quiet Empire

Wednesday, 31 December 2025 06:22 Written by
Last of three partsWHILE Washington gnaws on its own obsessions — Epstein’s shadow, Trump’s visible mental erosion, MAGA’s hairline fractures, and the TACO’s soft retreat on tariffs — history has slipped the room. Power did not vanish; it relocated. Beijing…

Trump’s ‘America First’ alone, outmaneuvered, outplayed

Wednesday, 24 December 2025 07:27 Written by
Second of a seriesSEVERAL 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…

Filipinas, America’s ally, taken for granted

Wednesday, 17 December 2025 06:38 Written by
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…

The power players: Forces that will decide our future

Wednesday, 10 December 2025 07:58 Written by
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…

Alternative scenarios: Lessons from Harvard

Thursday, 04 December 2025 01:04 Written by
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…
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