Just when we thought the US presidential campaign had turned to its most bizarre path, with reelectionist President Joe Biden mumbling and fumbling and causing nightmares among Democrats, a 20-year-old American was shot dead after shooting former president Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday evening, July 13 (US time).
Trump survived the assassination attempt, but the presidential race will change dramatically and maybe even violently, Reuters said in this piece. Investors and analysts shared their views on what could happen next. And the Biden campaign shifted gears, calling for unity and taking down all ads attacking Trump. Walden Bello paints a grim scenario but also an “opportunity for the rest.”
The last elected US president to have been wounded in an assassination attempt was Ronald Reagan, in 1981. In the land of milk and honey, four presidents have been killed in its history.
I must admit that assassinations have been on my mind the past weeks after watching the TV series Manhunt, a historical thriller inspired by the chase for the killer of Abraham Lincoln, the first American president to be felled by a bullet in 1865. I was just telling friends that, in a strange way, the series helped me situate the combustive landscape leading to the November elections. But not even the most cynical journalist was prepared for the kind of violence that erupted over the weekend in Pennsylvania.
The world awaits with trepidation as a wounded America grapples with this turbulence and elects its next president in barely four months. It’s terrifying.
Meanwhile, in our region, the wounds of war continue to heal. It’s been a week since Manila and Tokyo signed a military pact that, once ratified, would facilitate, among others, joint military exercises between the two once-warring countries – wiping away any remaining scars from the savage Japanese occupation of the Philippines in World War II.
China’s saber-rattling in the seas and against Taiwan give Manila and Tokyo every reason to put up a united front against aggression.
- What is the Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) that was signed by the Philippines and Japan on July 8? Read all about it here. What does this mean for us? Watch this Rappler Talk episode. The full text of the deal is here.
- The agreement was signed on the second death anniversary of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe who, writes Rappler managing editor Miriam Grace Go, “started the vision of equipping democratic allies in the region.” The longest-serving leader of modern Japan was gunned down in 2022 at a campaign rally, the first post-war Japanese leader to be killed by an assassin.
- Ties between Manila and Tokyo have warmed since the rebirth of Philippine democracy in 1986. But the turning point began in 2013, when Japan began its gradual shift to a new security strategy that was built on deterrence, as Rappler editor-at-large Marites Vitug explains in this piece. (Tokyo also relaxed its visa rules for neighbors that year.) The Philippines held its first two-plus-two talks in Tokyo under the previous Duterte government, in April 2022, where both sides agreed to facilitate reciprocal visits and exercises of their armed forces. The second one was held in Manila on July 8, where those visits were formalized in a document.
- The RAA was preceded by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s two visits to Tokyo last year, as well as the visit of Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in November 2023, where he announced, among others, security assistance for the Philippine Navy.
- It was the late former president Benigno Aquino III, in 2015, who made the first state visit by a Philippine president to Japan in 13 years. As early as then, Aquino and Abe lashed out at China for building islands in the South China Sea.
This cherry blossoms relationship would have been unthinkable just three decades ago. As a reporter with the Manila bureau of Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper in the mid-1990s, I recall covering the hottest issue involving the two countries then: comfort women. Japan has apologized for the sexual abuse of women at the hands of Japanese soldiers during World War II, but the victims’ demand for reparation has yet to be heeded. The first Filipino comfort woman to come out and recall her harrowing experience was Lola Rosa, whom I interviewed various times back then.
- For years, the tireless champion of the lolas’ cause was beauty queen-turned-activist Nelia Sancho, who died in 2022.
- In 2019, after exhausting all legal remedies in the Philippines, a group of Filipino comfort women asked a United Nations committee to urge the government to provide “redress and reparation” for what had happened.
- Four years later, in 2023, the UN committee ruled in favor of the comfort women, saying the government violated their rights and that it should compensate for this. It’s not immediately clear what actions the Philippine government has taken since then.
To many Filipinos, however, Japan is now the gentle giant that has atoned for its sins – a reliable friend, a peace advocate, a model of discipline, a dazzling world of pop culture, a tourism mecca. The Philippines, in fact, has become Japan’s second biggest source of visitors among ASEAN countries, according to the latest available data.
More importantly, both nations share a common dread, China, and a mutual friend, America. But with their friend now in a catastrophic meltdown, Marcos and Kishida cannot possibly even begin to fathom what the coming months will bring.
There’s China’s omnipresence, after all – even in Japan, which has centuries of protectionist policies. In last week’s visit to Tokyo, I made sure to visit the Tsukiji fish market that was built in the pre-war period. The grilled unagi beckoned and gave joy to the palate. When I asked where it was fished, the seller was honest enough to admit: China. Aghast, I asked: Are you sure it did not come from the West Philippine Sea? He gave a bewildered smile.
Here’s to less tumultuous waters – and politics. – Rappler.com
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