For one who would like to see U.S. relations with the Philippines democratic in form and content, the landing of General Douglas MacArthur at Leyte in October 1944 inspires feelings that are decidedly ambivalent. On the one hand the landing signifies the defeat of Japanese rule in the Philippines, and so can be seen as an important link in the global victory over the fascist axis. So much is positive. But in moving from a consideration of the general and global meaning of the event to its more particular and local significance for the Philippine people, the picture becomes darker, more negative. Viewed from this standpoint the MacArthur landing bears a striking resemblance to an earlier U.S. military incursion in Philippine affairs, Admiral George Dewey’s entry into Manila Bay in 1898.

William H. Sullivan is a self-acknowledged champion of the executive usurpation of Congressional powers, in their ultimate, war-making capacity. In Laos, as ambassador, he directed all the military and intelligence operations of the U.S. government. Due to his experience there and in Vietnam, he has become the United States’ foremost expert on counter-insurgency warfare in Southeast Asia. His public record in word and deed indicates that he would have no qualms about the commitment of the U.S. air force and ground troops to counter-insurgency operations in the Philippines, were he sent there as ambassador. The Senate would be wise to reject his nomination. The United States cannot afford another Vietnam.

The irrational and horrifying concept of "limited nuclear war" now being promoted by the Reagan administration cannot be divorced from the historic position of the U.S. corporate empire at this time. It is an empire in decline. Its economic and poitical influence waning, it turns to the ultimate weapon of terror, nuclear war, in a blind and desperate attempt to redress the balance and preserve U.S. commercial and military superiority. And the U.S. military-industrial complex appears to be willing to risk the lives of the Filipino people (and everybody else's, for that matter), for this ignoble cause. Should a theater nuclear war in the Mideast or Asia erupt into a general nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, U.S. nuclear installations at Clark, San Miguel and Subic would drag the Philippines in with disastrous results.

In 1980, the Friends of the Filipino People (FFP) presented a paper to the United Nations Non-Governmental Organizations' (NGO) Conference on Disarmament stating that U.S. bases in the Philippines contravened the principles having to do with national sovereignty, military intervention, and nuclear arms put forward by the Final Document of the 1978 UN Special Session on Disarmament. FFP declared that U.S. bases, by their very nature and existence, undermined Philippine national sovereignty; that they constituted launching pads for U.S. military intervention in the affairs of other nations, as in Vietnam; and that they served as storage depots for U.S. nuclear arms and weapons. The present paper will serve to reaffirm these assertions. At the same time it will focus on a new feature of the present international situation that places these bases in even more pronounced opposition to the principles of disarmament enunciated by the 1978 Special Session: the Reagan Administration's adoption of limited nuclear war as U.S. policy.

In 1947, when the newly independent Philippine government granted the United States the right to use military bases at Subic Bay and Clark Air Field, the United States government saw to it that the terms included the right of the U.S. to install on these bases "any type of weapons." From the very beginning the Pentagon insisted on establishing the right to relate U.S. bases in the Philippines to possible plans for nuclear war. Also, from the very beginning many Filipinos opposed U.S. bases there. In April 1983, the United States government and the government of the Philippines are to begin a review of the bases agreement of 1979. Opponents of the nuclear arms race in both the Philippines and the U.S. can greatly benefit from the work of Jorge Emmanuel detailing the potential effects of nuclear war upon the Philippines.

The Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines and U.S. aid thereto are attempts to nip growing nationalism in the bud, and to check a movement for effective independence before it gets too strong. The Marcos regime and its U.S. support constitute a threat and a menace to peace and security in Southeast Asia.

Talk delivered by Daniel Boone Schirmer in Manila, Philippines celebrating the 1991 vote in the Philippine Senate that rejected the renewal of the treaty between the United States and the Philippines to allow the continuation of U.S. military bases in the Philippines. The bases were closed in 1992, a year after the treaty was rejected.

A review of United States-Philippines relations from 1898-1973 drawing parallels between the Philippine-American War, U.S. support for the Martial Law regime of Ferdinand Marcos, and the war between the United States and Vietnam.

One of the main sources of international tension in the world today arises from the opposition of the U.S. corporate elite, the U.S. multi-nationals, to the effort of Third World peoples to gain control of Third World raw materials and natural resources. An example of this is now to be seen in the Mideast. Here the United States is making massive preparations for military intervention, for war, to control the prime natural resource of the Mideast, its oil. Because of the presence of U.S. bases, the Philippines is intimately and decisively connected to these war preparations right now.

The political question facing the voters in the United States is this: Will they allow an escalation of U.S. military and economic aid to the dictator Marcos to occur, carrying with it the threat of U.S. intervention Vietnam-style, to save the 2 - 3 billion dollar U.S. corporate investment in the Philippines and the imperial military bases? Or will the U.S. voters and taxpayers insist on an end to all military and financial aid to Marcos (or to any other repressive and puppet regime that may follow) so that the Philippine people may, at last, be allowed to determine their own destiny without United States interference?