President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said he wanted to “reintroduce the Philippines to the world,” and he has been jetting all over the globe to do so. What he’s actually doing is making over the tarnished Marcos image in the international mainstream on the people’s dime, or more aptly, weak peso. And he has China to thank for the project’s success.

Our peripatetic president is flying friendly skies. Diplomatic protocol gives him automatic entry into world circles of power as a duly elected head of state. But more significantly, geopolitical stakes leave major allies like the US, Australia, Japan, Britain, France, and Canada with no choice but to host him warmly, thanks to China’s unwitting gift of maritime aggression. 

If it’s Tuesday this must be Belgium. As of this writing, Marcos has made 28 trips abroad in 22 months in office (4 of them last month alone), meeting with world movers and shakers from Singapore to San Francisco to Prague and Davos. He’s back again in the United States this week in an unprecedented trilateral summit with Biden and Japan’s Kishida to mull ways of tackling China. 

World leaders would be viewing Marcos as a mere political oddity, a specimen of a discredited family’s unbelievable comeback, were it not for China’s atrocious claim to 90 percent of the South China Sea through which passes 30 percent of the world’s ship-borne trade, valued at $3 trillion. So instead, he’s lauded as a pal of the Free World and treated as a valuable peer.

By contrast, Rodrigo Duterte, a Beijing pawn, was accorded only formal welcome in international gatherings. Besides, intimidated by his own lack of social graces, he shied away from diplomaticsmall talk with more polished counterparts anyway. Marcos may not have finished at Oxford and Wharton, but thanks to his parents’ penchant for plunder, he was eminently trained in jet-setting and cosmopolitan ways, enabling him to comfortably hobnob in select gatherings of world leaders today.

Of course, the major powers’ toasts to Marcos as an “iron-clad” ally in the effort to check China’s adventurism is good for the Philippines’ sovereign interests. There’s just an off-putting aftertaste to swallow. 

Family rebranding

Arguably, Marcos’ anti-China stance is also yielding better results for family rebranding domestically than his petulant sister Imee’s full-frontal historical revisionism. His position dovetails with popular sentiment, asnearly 80 percent of Filipinos strongly oppose China’s unabated incursions. This tends to soften the hard edges of his presidency, like his failure to pull down the high prices of basic goods, and it can slow down his falling approval rating.

Besides forging political alliances, the trips have supposedly yielded P4 trillion in foreign investment pledges, but they’re mostly just that – pledges. Expect more of the same if corruption, red tape, weak infrastructures and broadband connections, and high power costs persist. No endless foreign travel, or constitutional amendments, will change these realities on the ground. The boon has been mainly in gloss for the Marcos image.

All this frequent flying costs a pretty peso. By the end of his first six months in office in 2022, Marcos had racked up P403 million in travel expenses, a 1,000% hike over Duterte’s travel tab in his last full year as president. Marcos did say he loves to travel (but not on Economy Class, excuse me). So, expect more jaunts by our high-flying president. His 2024 travel budget is P1.5 billion, double last year’s.  

So, there he is, greeted with open arms in the Olympia of world leaders, the Marcos stigma conveniently set aside and diminished. That’s why it’s bracing to see that sometimes his flights hit sudden air bumps. 

Australia’s Senator Janet Rice’s protest during Marcos’ address to the parliament was a welcome jolt. So was Australian news anchor Sarah Ferguson’s on-air question about his family’s ill-gotten wealth. When the flustered Marcos responded with a nervous laugh, Ferguson followed up sharply with “May I ask you why that’s funny?” 

Yes, at times it’s good to blow away the fairy dust to remind the world that despite Marcos’ welcome role in forging multilateral alliances against China’s wolfish territorial aims, his family’s history of human rights abuse and plunder are no laughing matters. – Rappler.com

Rene Ciria Cruz is an editor at PositivelyFilipino.com. He edited the book A Time to Rise: Collective Memoirs of the Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP), (UP Press), and was Inquirer.net’s US Bureau Chief 2013-2023. He has written for the San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacific News Service, and California Lawyer Magazine.