MANILA: President Rodrigo Duterte's shock "separation" from the United States has thrown Philippine foreign policy into confusion, with the Americans saying they are baffled and some of his top aides contradicting him.
The firebrand leader rarely lets a day pass without taunting or abusing the United States but his latest comments, made during a state visit to Beijing, were the strongest signal he wants to torpedo a 70-year alliance in favour of China and Russia.
"I announce my separation from the United States," Duterte said Thursday as he paused to soak up the applause from hundreds of Chinese businessmen in the audience.
"I've realigned myself in your ideological flow and maybe I will also go to Russia to talk to (President Vladimir) Putin and tell him that there are three of us against the world: China, Philippines and Russia. It's the only way."
Until Duterte took office on June 30, the Philippines had been one of the United States' most important and loyal allies in Asia, and a key to President Barack Obama's "pivot" to the region.
The Philippines had also been a bastion of democracy -- albeit a chaotic and corrupt one -- in Southeast Asia since shedding the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.
But Duterte, who describes himself as a socialist and has close links with communists still waging a rebellion in the Philippines, has revealed a deep dislike of the United States.
He has repeatedly branded Obama a "son of a whore", and called on his countrymen to remember crimes committed by Americans when the Philippines was a colony of the United States from 1898 to 1946.
Ignoring the thousands of American lives that were lost to liberate the Philippines from Japan during World War II, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid, Duterte has also told Filipinos that the United States had done nothing for them.
He has said there will be no more joint US-Philippine patrols in the South China Sea, nor will there be any further joint military exercises with the United States that see thousands of troops pass through the Philippines each year.
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