Working Papers

“Negotiating Room as Statecraft: Duterte's ‘Pivot’ in Continuity with the Aquino III Administration,” WP Series 2026. Download.

Abstract. We show that widely repeated accounts of a Philippine foreign-policy pivot away from the United States under President Rodrigo Duterte obscure a deeper continuity with strategic architecture assembled during the administration of President Benigno Aquino III. Aquino internationalized the South China Sea dispute through arbitration, thickened the alliance with Washington through the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, widened external-defense modernization, cultivated Japan and ASEAN partners, and kept channels open for Chinese trade and investment. Aquino also used public expressions of frustration with the United States to widen Manila's negotiating room. His statements on American inattention, delayed security support, and Philippine capability gaps carried a bargaining function that linked alliance maintenance with demands for more concrete benefits. Duterte inherited this framework, intensified its language, and applied it through a politics of sovereign equality, threat inflation, and transactional signaling. Operative outcomes stayed anchored in the same strategic frame. The arbitration award remained available as a legal asset. The Mutual Defense Treaty and the Visiting Forces Agreement endured. EDCA remained in force and moved toward implementation. Philippine policy continued to combine security dependence on the United States with economic engagement with China. We develop this argument through process tracing grounded in the exact source base listed in this article, including official statements, court rulings, the arbitration record, Reuters reporting, and the major scholarly works already cited here. Duterte's diplomacy emerges in this reading as an amplified register within an inherited policy design, not as a self-contained strategic departure.