The Philippines as Red State

Filipino writer Benjamin Pimentel is surprised to discover that his countrymen were among the very few foreign populations to prefer John McCain to Barack Obama in a Gallup international survey. A happy place for Republicans in a lonely world apparently, as in the Philippines the outgoing Bush administration enjoys a 66% approval (more than twice its abysmally low domestic support).

Pimentel then speculated somewhat interestingly that had the Philippines ever applied for US statehood or multi-statehood (the most recent proposals call for the country to be broken into three states: Luzón, Visayas, and Mindanao), McCain would handily win the general election. The Philippines 91 million plus population would easily dwarf the combined advantage of Democratic California and New York in the electoral college.

Pimentel goes on to amusingly observe that in such an event McCain’s slogan might need some retooling though, as “Country First” could be translated in Filipino as Bayan Muna, the socialist party list with controversial links to the rural communist insurgency.

Not that the proudly nationalist Philippines would still be interested in statehood, but her bloody conflict is a reasonable cautionary note for the business of making new states in other places, principally the more likely expansion corridors of Latin America.

While I am a advocate of Thomas Barnett’s often maligned proposal for the territorial expansion of the United States through democratic annexation, its worth noting that some truly dangerous things can also be brought into the republic along with the enormous benefits of revived growth. In the case of the Philippines would have come the first Muslim state (Mindanao), with its own Islamic fundamentalist insurgency which would have been a toxic import. Although one might observe that the United States military is already rather deeply engaged in trying to suppress that insurgency and assist in stabilizing the state politically. Which is of course something of a recurring adventure for the US historically.

Barnett might consider this in itself a justification for annexation actually. He has argued for the annexation of Haiti for instance, on the grounds that the cost of preserving unstable independent governments around the periphery of the American security envelope, requires expensive recurring interventions which leave the structural problem intact and supply little in return. Possibly a parallel with the Roman penchant for the maintenance of weak but independent buffer states on their borders. Something which often required massively expensive recurring interventions, such as in the endless Roman efforts in Armenia. Some countries with stability problems would be better served by permanent membership in a powerful political union and so would the United States, he might say.

I for one don’t mind a recurring intervention if the advantage is to keep militants and misery off the mainland. Some of the postwar Filipino advocates for American annexation had felt similarly it should be said. They envisioned solving the Mindanao problem by allowing the southern islands to become an arguably more natural Indonesian province, while the Chrisitian north joined the United States. Something that would be impossible to do as long as the Philippines government was independent of the American union.