"Trump you magnificent bastard, I read your book!"
Posted on 02/29/2020 8:02:46 PM PST by SeekAndFind
MANILA, Philippines — The Philippines and the United States are already in talks to craft a new and more equitable Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) and are looking at similar pacts involving Japan and Australia as templates.
“We are now in the process of trying to find ways and means to be able to see how we can either come out with something similar perhaps,” Ambassador to the United States Jose Manuel Romualdez said at a forum hosted by the think tank Stratbase ADR Institute in Makati City.
Romualdez said the talks were looking to resolve sovereignty issues in the 1999 VFA that President Rodrigo Duterte abrogated on Feb. 11.
He said US Ambassador Sung Kim was in Washington exploring the possibility of a new agreement.
“He’s doing my job in Washington and I’m doing his job here. It’s working quite well for us and we’ve been talking almost every day,” Romualdez said.
“My responsibility,” he said, “is to continue to assure our friends in Washington that this is something that we have to face, the decision of the President. So we have to start moving forward and continue our relationship. It is not an end-all and be-all.”
Romualdez said the US-Japanese Status of Forces Agreement of 1960 was “one of those recommended for study” as well as the Philippines-Australia Status of Visiting Forces Agreement (SOVFA) of 2007 that took effect in 2012.
Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. confirmed that the Australian SOVFA was indeed being considered as a model for the new deal with the United States.
“A rose by another name smells as sweet and the same fist in an iron glove—be it bronze or steel—hits & hurts just as bad,” Locsin posted on Twitter.
The foreign secretary said the main issues include jurisdiction over personnel
(Excerpt) Read more at globalnation.inquirer.net ...
I knew Duterte was not that dumb, he needs us much more than we need him.
I guess Dutae couldn’t play dick-tator this time while his hero, Winnie Xi Pooh, is having a little virus problem in Communist China
They want a better deal.
"Trump you magnificent bastard, I read your book!"
Hopefully this will give a wakeup call to remilitarize Midway and Johnson Atoll and all of those islands which we really need to prevent China from seizing.
Two weeks ago, it sounded like Duerte hated our American guts. His term is expected to end June 30 2022.
We need someone more stable in there.
Duterte believes in the “Art of the Deal” as well, I guess.
Perhaps so. One can often learn from one’s enemy.
I think Mr. Trump has learned from “Rules For Radicals”.
He uses many of those tactics and does so sucessfully, which infuriates the Libs. No one owns philosophy.
Johnston a toll may still be radioactive. Not sure.
They were using it for emergency landings less than twenty years ago.
We need someone who will clean out the drug lords and the insurgents. Marcos was stable, but he wasn’t what anybody needed.
Johnston Atoll is a wee bit radioactive still. I helped set up a coral sand screening system to separate the radioactive plutonium particles from ‘perfectly’ clean sand. The machine did a very good job of finding and diverting the contaminates.
At the time (late 1991 - early 1992) the country’s old chemical weapon stockpiles were being incinerated on the leeward side of the atoll. Before arriving personnel even cleared Immigration, we were given a briefing on the alarm system and an emergency response kit with respirators and atropine.
The ‘hazards’ from the Pu particles didn’t even warrant a mention in passing.
He grandstands, but he is there because he brings relative stability to a country that must be nearly impossible to govern due to geography and a Muslim infestation in the south.
What about staying neutral like Switzerland?
The Butchers of Beijing (and the Religion of Pieces) would bust a gut laughing.
Who blinked first??
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