DFA assures US will remain a close ally

From the Philippine News Agency (Oct 24): DFA assures US will remain a close ally

The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) on Monday assured the Filipino people that the Philippines will remain a close ally of the United States.

The assurance was made by Foreign Affairs Secretary Perfecto Yasay Jr., after a closed door meeting with Daniel Russel, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

He explained that the statement of President Rodrigo Duterte “was intended simply for the Philippines, for the Filipino mindset to separate themselves from that paradigm of dependency and subservience of our foreign interest.”

“It has nothing to do with breaking our relationship with the United States, or breaking diplomatic ties, we continue to work towards strengthening our ties with the United States,” Yasay told reporters covering DFA.

He reminded that even the President admitted breaking up with the United States will not be in the best interest of the Philippines.

“We will continue to respect our alliance with the United States, as its our only military ally. We will respect our treaty and associated agreements with respect to the treaty,” he noted

“We will forge ahead in making sure that our relationship will proceed on a much stronger basis, our thrust however in carrying out our independent foreign policy is to make sure that we will not have this kind of dependency or subservience that has always with against the national interest,” he added.

Yasay stressed that all treaties entered into will be respected by the Duterte administration,

“You should understand that what the President meant as so far as carrying out the joint exercises is concerned, is that it will serve the very purpose for which they have been intended, and that is to enable us to be self reliant in our defensive requirements especially in addressing our internal and external threats to our national security,” he emphasized.

“This will not be achieved, the President said, that there's no purpose of proceeding with this and the other thing is that this joint exercises cannot be undertaken as a provocative action that will make our peaceful resolution of our claims in the SCS even more difficult. We don't want to have a what do you call this, a joint patrol for instance in the Scarborough area with the United States and trying to make the suggestion that we are putting this up as a deterrent against any bad intention that the Chinese might have. This is not conducive to our peaceful resolution of our dispute especially so that in the past it has precisely resulted in both parties digging in and made a peaceful resolution even farthest from achieving,” he stressed.

However, the secretary admitted that he is not sure if there will be another joint military exercise before the year ends.

“I am not too sure. I mean the joint exercises is a matter under the procedure of the MDT (Mutual Defense Treaty) to be decided by the Mutual Defense Board and the Security Engagement Board. If they make this kind of recommendations, let's see what recommendation they will make, and then on that basis, if the President said we could not proceed, then it will happen,” he said.

According to Yasay, he did not discuss this matter in his talks with Russel but he is optimistic that they will be discussing this in the future.

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