It seemed to me at the time it was more about empty national posturing and blustering in the face of the big bad Americans than it was about protecting the purity of their daughters. Their national pride was hurt.
Time we demanded more from our partners.
The world can no longer play politics or wallow in meaningless miffdom
Trump has placed an attitude on the table and a lot of folks are picking up on it
The Philippines have their own Trump in Rodrigo Duterte ....
Things are changing .. VERY rapidly
It's shit or get off the pot time
At the time, public opinion polls in the Philippines strongly supported retaining the bases, as they always have. The public was and still is intensely pro-American. I was there at the time and I recall the controversy.
The Philippine leadership did not want the bases, or at least it was conflicted. It is dominated by the intelligentsia and the upper class, not the common tao. Nationalist hangups and psychological contradictions have always been greatest in that class.
The US, at the time, did not really need the bases, as the post Cold War drawdown was getting under way. East Asia was as peaceful as anywhere could be, and there were no obvious threats anywhere. Two very large, very expensive foreign bases could be abandoned without the politicking it would take to close comparable Stateside facilities. The US government had absolutely no interest in making deals or fighting the political battle to keep them, and also deal with rebuilding them in the midst of two ruined provinces.
The Philippine problem (one of them anyway) was and still is that democracy doesn’t quite work there.