ASIA PIVOT: Duterte wants US forces out of southern Philippines.

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte said Monday he wanted U.S. Special Forces out of his country’s south and blamed America for inflaming Muslim insurgencies in the region, in his first public statement opposing the presence of U.S. troops.
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Duterte’s relationship with the U.S. has been a bit rocky since he became president in June. Duterte has been openly critical of American security policies aimed to chart a foreign policy that would not depend on America, his country’s treaty ally.

The U.S. military deployed troops to train, advise and provide intelligence and weapons to Filipino troops battling Al Qaeda-linked militant group Abu Sayyaf militants in the southern Philippines in 2002, but when most of them pulled out last year, the U.S. kept a few military advisers.

With China’s growing power, sometimes aggressively so, there’s an almost inevitable tendency for the smaller countries around China to gravitate toward the U.S. — a friendly outside power with no territorial ambitions. That’s in stark contrast to China, which has made claims or grabbed land (or even made land) in or near a semicircle of nations from India all the way up to Japan. It would take a really determined effort by an American President to screw up those natural alliances from developing or strengthening.

Well…