To feel is to believe: China, United States, and the emotional beliefs of Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte

ABSTRACT

The ongoing shifts in the global distribution of material and normative powers, particularly between the United States and China, have significant repercussions on the foreign policy strategies of smaller, weaker actors in the international system. Due to their limited capacity for dictating international politics in ways that could guarantee their survival, many in IR have argued that they usually prefer to operate within the prevailing status quo rather than attempting to revise it. Nevertheless, the Philippines, under the leadership of President Rodrigo Duterte, seems to disprove this observation by dramatically pivoting towards Beijing and away from Washington, at least rhetorically. This paper moves beyond the commonly cited systemic factors and domestic intervening variables affecting the states’ foreign policies by examining the neglected emotions and emotional beliefs that help shape these instruments. My investigation of these unseen, albeit existing mechanisms, reveals the centrality of Duterte’s emotionally constituted and strengthened beliefs in providing a more complete and realistic explanation to his China-centric (as opposed to US-centric) foreign policy stance. As I argue and demonstrate throughout the paper, because emotions and emotional beliefs are powerful engines of human behaviour, they exert enormous influence on any state leader’s foreign policy motivations, decisions, and actions.

KEYWORDS:

• Foreign policy
• emotional beliefs
• emotions
• Philippines
• China
• United States

1. Introduction

Since President Rodrigo Duterte’s tenure in the Malacañang Palace in June 2016, scholars and pundits have persistently tried to make sense of his attempts to rethink and reorient Philippine foreign policy, specifically in relation to China and the United States. Various authors have used a plethora of terms ranging from appeasement to fascism to describe and explain Duterte’s efforts in redefining the country’s foreign relations with the world’s two biggest powers (Baviera 2016; Bello 2017; de Castro 2019). In my 2019 article investigating the present administration’s foreign policy strategy, I argued that Duterte’s China-centric approach signified a small state’s attempt in securing its own interests amid the ‘Thucydides trap’ created by the continuing strategic competition between a rising Beijing and a seemingly declining Washington (Magcamit 2019; see also, Allison 2017). This ‘Duterte Method’ of foreign policy comprised of four key elements, namely: (1) cultivating a more favourable image for China; (2) mobilising state-society relations supportive of ‘Sinicisation’; (3) moderating the country’s American-influenced strategic culture; and (4) reorienting the country’s Western-based institutions to accommodate Chinese pressures and incentives better (Magcamit 2019, 1).

Applying a neoclassical realist frame, I analysed both the systemic stimuli and domestic intervening variables that guided and influenced the development and actual implementation of these individual strategies and concluded that the Duterte Method was a daring paradigm shift for small powers that wanted to navigate their own ships. Indeed, as I noted in the same article, Duterte’s foreign policy preferences directly contradicted some of the popular assumptions about small powers’ dependency-based strategy, particularly their supposed tendencies to favour the prevailing status quo and support the existing international laws and institutions (see Archer et al., 2012; Rothstein 1968; Keohane 1969; Toje 2011; Magcamit 2016). However, given its exclusive focus on global and domestic structures underpinning the Duterte Method, the said article does not address why and how Duterte interprets his surrounding context and the unfolding events within it the way he does.

To address this gap, the current paper examines the internally generated factors that help explain how the president himself understands the great power rivalry shaping the international system and society and why he views China and the U.S. in the manner that he does. More precisely, I investigate Duterte’s ‘emotional beliefs’, which I argue to be the invisible, albeit central, mechanisms that are also driving Manila’s foreign policy stance. Duterte’s perceptions of trust and credibility towards Xi Jinping and Beijing, on the one hand, and his perceptions of dishonesty and unreliability towards American presidents and Washington, on the other, are crucial in explaining the rationale and motivation behind the Duterte Method. Using Jonathan Mercer’s (2010) theoretical concept, an emotional belief is ‘one where emotion constitutes and strengthens a belief and which makes possible a generalisation about an actor that involves certainty beyond evidence’ (see also Frijda, Manstead, and Bem 2000; Frijda and Mesquita 2000). Note here that because the debates surrounding the definition of emotion are intrinsically linked to questions of ontology, epistemology, and methodology, it is difficult to provide a definition that will satisfy everyone’s requirements for a ‘complete’ theory of emotions in world politics.

Nevertheless, for the purpose of this study, I adopt Neta Crawford’s (2000) more ‘agnostic’ view regarding the sources and consequences of emotions as: ‘the inner states that individuals describe to others as feelings, and those feelings may be associated with biological, cognitive, and behavioural states and changes’. To make the distinction between emotions and feelings clearer, I synthesise Crawford’s and Mercer’s propositions and use the following definitions throughout my analysis and discussion: whereas emotions refer to the subjective experiences that possess physiological, intersubjective, and cultural components (Crawford 2000, 125), feelings refer to ‘conscious awareness that one is experiencing an emotion’ (Mercer 2010, 3).

Thus, rather than simply dismissing emotions and feelings as the opposite of rationality, my goal is to demonstrate their significance in constructing and implementing a state leader’s overarching foreign policy ethos. I do this by employing Mercer’s emotional belief framework in illustrating the following points: (1) that emotion directs Duterte’s selection and interpretation of evidence suggesting Chinese trustworthiness and credibility versus American dishonesty and unreliability; (2) that emotion creates and reinforces Duterte’s beliefs concerning Beijing and Washington; and (3) that Duterte’s feelings about China and the U.S. ultimately influence what he wants and what he believes to be true about these major powers and their leaders (see Mercer 2010).

The international political landscape that is currently being altered by the Covid-19 pandemic provides a unique context through which the utility and impact of emotional beliefs in designing foreign policy strategies such as those encapsulated by the Duterte Method can be systematically probed and analysed. As of writing, the virus that ignited this pandemic has already infected more than 168 million people and claimed the lives of an estimated 3.5 million individuals worldwide. Despite the global backlash that Xi and the Communist Party of China (CPC) continue to receive following the reports of their attempts to cover up the outbreak of Covid-19 cases in the Hubei province where the virus is believed to have originated, Duterte has repeatedly assured the Chinese president of his government’s continued support and commitment to Beijing (Aguilar 2020; Gracie 2020; Kwok 2020).Drawing on Mercer’s (2010) thesis on emotional belief, I argue and illustrate that Duterte’s belief in the credibility of Xi’s promises and threats depends on his choice, reading, and appraisal of evidence and risk, both of which rely on emotion. Scrutinising the Duterte Method allows us to observe how emotions generate and bolster beliefs and the significant implications of the resulting emotional beliefs on foreign policymaking. The point is not to favour affect over cognition but to clarify why emotion is integral to reasoning and, therefore, fundamental to understanding what and how state actors think and behave (see Crawford 2000; Geva and Skorick 2006; Mercer 2010; Kupatadze and Zeitzoff 2019). As such, instead of attempting to mitigate or eliminate the impact of emotion on foreign policy, International Relations (IR) scholars and practitioners must directly address and examine the relationship between the emotional beliefs of state leaders and their foreign policy decisions.

Against this backdrop, the following section briefly surveys the extant literature on the emotion’s role and impact concerning various IR issues and phenomena and explain how the present paper contributes to this particular research strand by focusing on the emotional beliefs underpinning a small power’s foreign policy agenda. I then introduce Mercer’s emotional belief framework and its main propositions to explain further how beliefs are being constituted and strengthened by emotions. After which, I proceed to investigate and analyse the emotional beliefs that are also motivating and buttressing the critical foreign policy components of the Duterte Method, namely: cultivating and mobilising a favourable Chinese image and state-society relations supportive of Sinicisation, and moderating and reorienting the Philippines’ American-influenced strategic culture and Western-based institutions. I then synthesise the key findings from my analysis and discuss the main inferences drawn from the study regarding the role of interlinking emotions, feelings, and emotional beliefs in foreign policymaking. I conclude by addressing some of the notable limitations of the paper’s findings and explaining why these issues should not deter scholars and experts from incorporating the psychological-cognitive constitution of the foreign policy agents.

1.1. The literature

The marginalised position of emotion in IR scholarship has primarily resulted from the continuing divide between ‘rational’ thinking and ‘irrational’ feeling. Emotions are often treated as background noises that interfere with rationality, creating misperceptions and misunderstandings, which, in turn, prevent the otherwise reasonable political actors from making informed decisions and responsible actions (Hutchison and Bleiker 2014; see also, Jervis 1976). Moreover, complex questions about how to accurately define and measure emotions have often deterred many from adopting individual-level approaches, resulting in the discipline’s disproportionate focus on the systemic and state-level factors and methods (Geva and Skorick 2006).

Within the IR literature, pioneering studies in political psychology and foreign policy were among the first works that seriously considered emotions’ role and impact in the social realm and world politics (see Bleiker and Hutchison 2008; Hutchison and Bleiker 2014). Between the 1970s and 1980s, several IR experts started to investigate the connection between emotion and reason by examining how the state leaders’ beliefs, ideas, and attitudes (deemed to be significantly tied to the emotional part of the brain) influenced decision-making processes (see, for example, Cottam 1977; Janis and Mann 1977; Holsti 1976; Roberts 1988). Since then, IR research on emotion has continued to develop and expand as more and more scholars began probing its nature, origin, and impact to produce new theoretical and empirical knowledge about different political phenomena. Emma Hutchison and Bleiker (2014) identified three ways in which the bourgeoning literature on emotion in IR can be categorised: between cognitive and affective channels, latent and emergent models, and macro and micro theories.The first strand primarily examines the nature and sources of emotions. Whereas cognitive scholars view emotions as forms of knowledge, judgment, and thought that developed through appraisal and evaluation (e.g. Frijda 1986; Nussbaum 2001), affective experts consider them as non-intentional, non-reflective moods, sentiments, and general bodily sensations that are not directed towards specific stimuli (e.g. Parrott and Schulkin 1993; Sasley 2011; Holmes 2015). Recent advancements in neuroscience research link these two schools together by demonstrating how the interplays between ‘conscious’ cognition and ‘unconscious’ affection produce emotions (e.g. Von Scheve and Ismer 2013; Halperin 2013; Halperin 2016; Jeffery 2014). Together, these works illustrate how emotions permeate and direct people’s judgements and decisions and, as such, are crucial factors in the performance, interpretation, and assessment of politics (see Hymans 2006; Renshon and Lerner 2011; Ariffin, Coicaud, and Popovski 2016).

Meanwhile, the second strand generally investigates the origin and locations of emotions. While the latent models treat emotions as prior backgrounds that precede and trigger political actions by inducing physiological changes and cognitive awareness, the emergent models see them as the properties and characteristics resulting from the socially and culturally conditioned interactions of the mind and the body (Hutchison and Bleiker 2014; see also Harré 1986; Coan 2010; Fierke 2012, 2014; Holmes 2015). The other more ‘eclectic’ scholars combine the two approaches by proposing that emotions are inner states or subjective experiences linked to crisscrossing biological, cognitive, and behavioural activities (Crawford 2000, 125; Mercer 2010, 3). These studies, as a whole, reveal that while emotions are experienced within the body, their meanings and associated behaviours are also inter-subjectively construed and constructed and, therefore, cannot be ontologically reduced to the body (see Crawford 2000, 2014; Mercer 2006, 2010; Hutchison and Bleiker 2014; Reus-Smit 2014).

Finally, the third strand mainly explores the impact and utility of emotions. On the one hand, macro-level theorising focuses on distilling the more generalisable properties of emotions in politics to build general theories and principles of how they matter in world politics (e.g. Sasley 2011; Crawford 2014; Linklater 2014; Mercer 2014). On the other, micro-level inquiry analyses the specific cultural contexts and meanings of emotions to understand how they resonate socially and become politically significant (e.g. Petersen 2002; Lebow 2006; Zehfuss 2007; Fattah and Fierke 2009; Hall 2011; Wright 2012). But as Hutchison and Bleiker (2014) noted, analysts who use either perspective in studying emotions face serious limitations. Specifically, while the macro perspective tends to homogenise these highly complex and diverse emotions inaccurately, the insights generated using the micro perspective might not be compatible with formulating theoretical propositions. All in all, these investigations highlight the importance of finding the right balance between efforts to build general theories on emotions and politics and to recognise the diverging cultural contexts underpinning these linkages.

The paper contributes to the extant IR literature on emotions and politics by theoretically and empirically analysing how these elements constitute and strengthen the beliefs underlying a small power’s foreign policy amid the threat of the Thucydides trap and an ongoing pandemic. Moving beyond the traditional emphasis on the systemic stimuli and domestic intervening variables defining foreign policy, I shed light on how individual-turned-collective emotional beliefs could have contributed to the impetus behind the Duterte Method. As I will argue and demonstrate throughout the paper, because these emotional beliefs are potent engines of human behaviour, they exert enormous influence on our state leaders’ foreign policy motivations, decisions, and actions.

2. The emotional belief thesis

Mercer’s emotional belief thesis (2010, 4–5) is underpinned by three main assumptions about the nature, origin, and impact of emotion. First, emotions can be experienced even without cognition mediation or conscious awareness, which means that they are not always necessarily post-cognitive (see also Damasio 2004; Frijda, Manstead, and Fischer 2004; Oatley, Keltner, and Jenkins 2006). Second, emotions are crucial to giving value to facts, meaning they play an essential role in appraising or evaluating an object, subject, or event as something good or bad (see also Clore and Gasper 2000; Scherer, Schorr, and Johnstone 2001). And third, the acceptance or rejection of beliefs depends on emotions, which means that rationality also depends on them (see also De Sousa 1979; Nussbaum 2001; Fierke 2012). Together, these assumptions underscore the idea that emotion and cognition co-constitute beliefs and, therefore, reject the view that beliefs always precede emotions and that emotions only distort rationality (Mercer 2010, 5). Disaggregating feeling from thinking prevents analysts from understanding how emotions influence the construction of beliefs informing decision-making, thereby weakening the bases for normative and rational choice theories of foreign policy.

Drawing on these assumptions, Mercer outlines three propositions on emotional beliefs central to my analysis of the Duterte Method. First, emotions function as an assimilation mechanism that ‘assimilates data to beliefs’ by helping with the selection and interpretation of evidence necessary for developing and implementing a foreign policy strategy (Mercer 2010, 9). In other words, our state leaders’ feelings do not only shape their assessments of evidence in ways consistent with their emotions but also provide the mechanism for discounting those that disconfirm and contradict their convictions (Frijda and Mesquita 2000; Mercer 2010). That people routinely assimilate and accommodate their feelings suggests that emotions are intrinsic parts of their beliefs and belief formation and should influence analysts’ explanations of state leaders’ foreign policy choices. Second, reducing emotions as consequences of beliefs undermines and skews our analysis of foreign policy decisions, given how the supposedly ‘rational’ state actors depend on their emotional beliefs (Mercer 2010, 10). Accordingly, taking the state leaders’ emotional conditions into account rather than suppressing them is key to predicting and explaining their attitudes and behaviours vis-à-vis critical foreign policy issues. Notwithstanding the widespread view that emotions weaken rationality, a number of behavioural experiments revealed that people with reduced emotional capacity make them more analytical but less rational (see, for example, Henrich et al. 2001; Bhatt and Camerer 2005; Mercer 2010).

And third, feelings carry utility in the sense that the experience of emotion(s) also determines ‘what one wants and what to believe’, (Mercer 2010, 11–12). While the ability of our state leaders to imagine their future feelings and their beliefs about future preferences is pivotal to their adoption of rational choices, doing so can be very difficult and challenging as these future feelings and preferences are highly dependent on changes from some reference point such as the status quo (Kahneman 2000; Mercer 2010). On the one hand, the state actors’ experienced feelings usually tend to be stronger and more persuasive than their expected future feelings. On the other, hypothetical future preferences often change given the inability of the state actors to accurately predict their future feelings (Schwarz 2000; Mellers and McGraw 2001; Mercer 2010). And since feelings inform preferences, the process and method through which state leaders secure specific foreign policy outcomes also determine how they and their constituents will feel about those results (Mercer 2010; see also Kahneman 2000).Together, these propositions on emotional beliefs highlight the idea that emotions are part and parcel of reasoning and that feeling (emotion) and thinking (cognition) should not be viewed in zero-sum terms. As Crawford (2000) put it, while ‘feelings are internally experienced … the meaning attached to those feelings, the behaviours associated with them, and the recognition of emotions in others are cognitively and culturally construed and constructed’. Indeed, emotions are at the core of human experiences, and people use them as evidence of their beliefs. Emotions’ role vis-à-vis beliefs, according to Nico Frijda, Antony Manstead, and Sacha Bem (2000, 1), ‘can be viewed as the port through which emotions exert their influence upon human life’ (see also Mercer 2010, 2). Rather than jeopardising rationality, emotional beliefs reflect the intersections between emotion and cognition (Mercer 2010). This emphasis on emotions’ contribution to interests neither reduces interests to pure emotions nor implies that emotions are more valuable and superior than cognition. But it does illuminate why they are central to assessing what and how people think (see Renshon and Lerner 2011).

As will be demonstrated in the subsequent section, recognising emotions’ role in generating and reinforcing beliefs have vital foreign policy implications. By scrutinising the Duterte Method of foreign policy, I will illustrate how the Philippine president’s belief vis-à-vis the credibility of American and Chinese threats and promises depends on how he selects and interprets evidence and evaluates risks. Both of which rely substantially on emotions. In the words of Gerald Clore and Karen Gasper (2000, 38), ‘the feelings of emotion provide information about the appraisal of situations with respect to one’s goals and concerns’ (see also Mercer 2010, 4–5).

3. Duterte’s emotional beliefs and the Duterte method

Xi’s commitment to Duterte is credible if Duterte believes that Xi will fulfil it. Alternatively, an American president’s promise is unreliable if Duterte believes that this U.S. leader (whether current President Joseph Biden or former presidents Donald Trump and Barrack Obama) will not respect it. Emotion constitutes and strengthens credibility (Mercer 2010; see also, Crawford 2000; Robinson and Clore 2002; Thagard 2008). Without it, credibility merely becomes knowledge that will enable Duterte to determine whether Xi and Trump will keep their commitment and promise (see Mercer 2010). Feelings can be so overpowering that they can convince state leaders of the other actors’ genuine interest, capacity, and resolve to honour their words. As the following sections illuminate, how Duterte selects and interprets evidence and how he calculates the risks involved are crucial to his evaluation of the credibility and trustworthiness of Xi versus an incumbent U.S. president, which, in turn, dictates the composition of the Duterte Method.

3.1. Cultivating and mobilising a favourable Chinese image and state-society relations supportive of Sinicization

In his first-ever speech before the United Nations General Assembly in September 2020, Duterte has raised the Philippines’ legal victory against China over the West Philippines Sea (WPS) or South China Sea (SCS) (Tomacruz 2020a; GMA News 2020). ‘The Award is now part of international law, beyond compromise and beyond the reach of passing governments to dilute, diminish or abandon. We firmly reject attempts to undermine it’, Duterte declared (Rappler 2020). Although the move was widely praised even by his fiercest opponents, it remains to be seen how the president and his administration will invoke the arbitral award in reality. As one maritime law expert succinctly put it, ‘words are still different from actions’ (CNN Philippines 2020). Such doubts and scepticisms towards Duterte’s most recent proclamations are more than warranted as they have solid bases.

During his first state visit to China in 2016, Duterte revealed some of his emotional beliefs sustaining his worldview: ‘China is good … it has never invaded a piece of my country all these years … China was portrayed as the bad guy … and all of these years, what we have read in our books in school were all propaganda produced by the West’ (GMA News 2016a, 2016b). With Beijing pulling out all the stops in welcoming the president and his contingent into the Great Hall of the People, Duterte reciprocated by announcing his separation from the United States in front of China’s Vice Premier, Zhang Gaoli and hundreds of Chinese and Filipino business people (Blanchard 2016). As the audience applauded, Duterte went on to discuss his vision of a new world order: ‘I’ve realigned myself in your ideological flow, and maybe I will also go to Russia to talk to [President Vladimir] Putin and tell him that there are three of us against the world – China, Philippines and Russia. It’s the only way’ (Blanchard 2016). Indeed, in Duterte’s eyes, America has simply ‘lost’ (see Hunt, Rivers, and Shoichet 2016).

Like all individuals, state leaders like Duterte put their relationships with others into ‘emotional categories’ that influence how they perceive and interpret others and their actions (Crawford 2000, 134). These emotional relationships, according to Crawford (2000), are characterised by the degree and type of emotional involvement. For example, how one sees the ambiguous behaviour of the other depends on whether the emotional relationship between them is neutral, empathetic, or antipathetic. Foreign policy agents routinely attribute causes and motives to these ambiguous behaviours by evaluating the veracity of the reasons (or excuses) given by the other parties in explaining their actions (Crawford 2000; see also Mercer 2010; Halperin 2016). These assessments, in turn, guide how state actors view and understand a given situation and determine who their ‘real’ friends and enemies are. In this case, Duterte’s existing emotional beliefs vis-à-vis the United States and China have shaped the emotional relationships that he either perceives or wishes to pursue with his American and Chinese counterparts.

For example, in justifying his threat to terminate the Philippines’ 21-year-old Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) with the U.S. in February 2020, Duterte talked about how the Philippines had been treated as a second-class ally (Paddock 2016). A native Mindanaoan himself, Duterte has consistently expressed his resentments towards the US and the West in general and has been very vocal with his criticism of American hypocrisy. Every time those in the West criticise him for his authoritarian tendencies, Duterte fights back by reminding his Western counterparts of their countries’ history of and continuing contribution to gross human rights violations across the globe. For instance, when the United Nations representatives questioned his deadly war on drugs, the president responded by arguing that the US never apologised for the massacre of about 600 Filipinos (including women and children) in Jolo by the American troops in 1906 (Paddock 2016). To Duterte, the last seventy years of Manila’s alliance with Washington have mainly been abusive and exploitative against the Filipino people. His former secretary of foreign affairs, Perfecto Yasay Jr., validated and echoed this view when the latter summoned the Filipinos to free themselves from the ‘invisible chains’ of being the Americans’ ‘little brown brothers’ (Paddock 2016).

These statements coincided with the anti-US rally attended by an estimated 1,000 protesters who called for the withdrawal of American troops from Mindanao and expressed their support for Duterte’s vow to chart an independent foreign policy (CBS News 2016). Such feelings of dehumanisation and hostility on the part of Duterte reinforce some of his emotional beliefs, particularly those antagonistic towards the US and American leaders. As posited earlier, the process matters just as much as the outcome since how one obtains the outcome affects how one feels about that outcome (Mercer 2010). Feeling valued and respected by a foreign actor(s) throughout a negotiation process, for example, is vital as it helps determine how state leaders like Duterte (and his supporters) will feel about the results of their foreign policy decisions and actions.

Interestingly, with Duterte sitting at the helm of power, the Filipinos have found themselves a leader who not only believes in Beijing’s threat of war against those states that continue to question its territorial and maritime claims in the WPS/SCS but also uses that same threat to advance further and cement his desired relationship with China. This decision entailed the ‘temporary’ shelving of the 2016 Hague Tribunal Ruling on the WPS/SCS – a landmark case that vindicated the Philippines’ claim over its 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and effectively invalidated China’s nine-dash line theory (see Permanent Court of Arbitration 2016). To deflect criticisms at home and rationalise his action, Duterte had personally relayed Xi’s warning to those who would force China to recognise the Hauge Ruling and use it to pursue their interests, including the Philippines’ plan to drill oil in the disputed parts of the WPS/SCS (Phillips, Holmes, and Bowcott 2016; Mogato 2017). Xi’s persistent rejection of the tribunal’s decision as ‘illegal and invalid’ compelled the Duterte administration to downplay the importance of the ruling when entering into bilateral agreements with China despite the latter’s more recent calls for Beijing’s compliance (Baviera 2016; Magcamit 2019; Tomacruz 2020b).

Such behaviours on the part of Duterte demonstrates the power of emotional beliefs on foreign policy agents: they enable generalisations about actors (e.g. Xi and his perceived credibility and trustworthiness) with certainty beyond evidence (see Mercer 2010). Emotions and feelings influence the wants, beliefs, and actions of our state leaders. And when they constantly question or suspect the correctness and accuracy of their emotions and feelings vis-à-vis specific contexts, they lose confidence in their own judgements (Mercer 2010). Convinced that he has no chance of changing Xi’s position, Duterte has repeatedly framed the WPS/SCS disputes as a zero-sum game that would ultimately end badly for the Philippines. Thus, even as Beijing continues to act as the sole rightful owner of the disputed territories by building air and naval bases, conducting military drills, and renaming the features and districts in the WPS/SCS, the Philippine government has remained largely acquiescent to Xi’s authority (Chandran 2017; Chellaney 2018a).The country’s commander-in-chief went as far as questioning the capacity and resolve of the Armed of the Philippines (AFP) in defending the Filipinos against Beijing in case of a war, claiming that such a prospect would be a ‘suicide mission’ (Romero 2018; Magcamit 2019). At one point, Duterte even accused some AFP members of planning to stage a revolt should they be sent to the disputed areas of the WPS/SCS to fight the Chinese, insisting that his military would rather oust him than lose their troops (Corrales 2018a). While Beijing’s actions were met with fierce opposition from other Southeast Asian claimant states, the U.S., and key European powers like the United Kingdom, France, and Germany (Ramos 2020), Duterte maintains his trust and ‘love’ for Xi, whom he considers to be ‘a very important ingredient’ in his ‘Build, Build, Build Program’, and the only leader who genuinely understands his predicaments (see Legaspi 2018). As warnings from the other state leaders against Chinese encroachment intensify, Duterte has insisted that based on his simple risk calculations, antagonising Xi would only mean a great loss for the Philippines (Corrales 2018b; Magcamit 2019).

This type of risk assessment on the part of Duterte underscores why attitudes towards risk, as Mercer postulated, can also depend on feelings rather than the objective properties of choice (Mercer 2010). In general, people (including our state leaders) have a multidimensional view of risk that contains and entails emotion, which means that a way to understand risk is to treat it as feeling (Mercer 2010, 16; Hogarth et al. 2011). Doing so allows us to elucidate why Duterte believes Xi to be a credible and trustworthy ally who is most likely to keep his words, both his threats and commitments. For example, in manipulating the framing of choice between invoking the Hague’s arbitration on the WPS/SCS and risking a guaranteed all-out war with China, Duterte is essentially tailoring his and his supporters’ attitudes and feelings in a manner that amplifies risk perception. Experiencing the fear of having to wage war against China makes the object of that fear seem tangible and real and, in turn, stimulate the subjective perception of risk attached to that object (Mercer 2010; Halperin 2016.). To echo Frijda and Batja Mesquita (2000, 69), events that are ‘present to the senses cannot easily be doubted to exist’ (see also, Mercer 2010, 19).Indeed, the stronger the president’s positive feelings towards Xi and China get, the more forceful and persuasive the evidence for his beliefs become. Consequently, the president has been very consistent with his message to the Filipinos that they need China more than China needs them and that they must ‘remain meek and humble’ to receive Xi’s mercy and compassion (Esmaquel II 2018; Magcamit 2019). The ongoing pandemic has drawn the president ever closer and deeper into Beijing’s sphere of influence as the country gets ravaged by the Covid-19 virus. With one of the highest numbers of Covid-19 infections (1.7 million confirmed cases and more than thirty thousand deaths as of August 2021) and the weakest public health infrastructures globally, Philippine authorities seem to be losing the fight against the virus (Fonbuena 2020; World Health Organization 2021). The country’s underdeveloped Research and Development (R&D) institutions have left Duterte with no choice but to sit and wait until the other countries discover an effective vaccine.

And as far as the Covid-19 vaccines are concerned, the president has repeatedly stated his preference for the Chinese-made vaccines, arguing that, unlike some western countries, Xi neither requires ‘reservation fees’ nor demands other leaders to beg him for supplies (Reuters and Bloomberg 2020). This contradicted his earlier statements during his State of the Nation Address (SONA) last July 2020, where he admitted to pleading with Xi to prioritise the Philippines in its distribution of the vaccines while also confessing about feeling ‘helpless’ in fighting for Manila’s interests in the WPS/SCS as China is ‘in possession of the property’ (Robles, Robles, and Bloomberg 2020). Despite these serious limitations and shortcomings on the part of the president, Duterte’s 91.0% approval rating as of September 2020 (Esmaquel II 2020) indicates (at least to a certain degree) the impact of Duterte’s emotional beliefs among his Filipino supporters. The preceding discussions highlight how Duterte’s like for Xi and China, on the one hand, and his dislike for the U.S. and its leaders, on the other, guide his perceptions and judgements of credibility, trust, and risk vis-à-vis the two camps. Whereas the supporters of China will see the anticipated joint exploration activities in the WPS/SCS as evidence of healthy and improving bilateral relations between the two countries, opponents will interpret it as yet another evidence of China’s attempts to steal and seize control of the Philippines’ resources and territories. Likewise, observers who oppose Beijing will tend to judge Duterte’s relations with Xi as highly risky and only marginally beneficial, while those analysts who are favourable to Beijing will tend to view Duterte’s pivot towards Xi as significantly positive and low risk.

As some scientists demonstrated in their experiments, most people base their judgements of an activity ‘not only on what they think about it but also on what they feel about it (Slovic et al. 2004, 315; see also, Mercer 2010, 18). This implies that state leaders like Duterte would often perceive what they like as more beneficial than risky, and those that they dislike as more risky than beneficial. The ‘pro-Duterte, pro-China’ and ‘anti-Duterte, anti-China’ factions experience and feel the ‘China threat’ differently, and these diverging emotions and feelings are part of their assessments. To quote Mercer, ‘different conclusions based on the same evidence are irrational only if one believes in a naïve accommodation of beliefs to evidence … [people] accommodate [i.e. to update] their beliefs to evidence while also assimilating [i.e. to absorb] evidence to fit their beliefs (Mercer 2010, 8, 16, 19).

3.2. Moderating and reorienting the Philippines’ American-influenced strategic culture and Western-based institutions

Although the 2017–2022 National Security Policy (NSP) document of the current administration gives the impression that Duterte’s central foreign policy ethos and strategy will remain U.S.-centric nevertheless, a careful examination of his actual rhetoric and conduct reveal the president’s revisionist outlook and approach vis-à-vis the Philippines’ international affairs (NSC 2017; Magcamit 2019). Since assuming office, Duterte has been gradually reorienting Manila’s foreign relations by aligning closer and being more accommodating with Beijing while distancing itself from Washington. Accordingly, despite the government’s recognition of ‘the dispute over the West Philippine Sea’ as ‘the foremost security challenge to the Philippines’ sovereignty and territorial integrity,’ Duterte has consistently downplayed the significance of the 2016 Hague Ruling to strengthen the country’s political, economic, and social ties with China (NSC 2017; Baviera 2016; Tiezzi 2018). In February 2020, the president officially ordered the termination of the VFA that has accorded legal status to American troops to conduct military exercises and humanitarian assistance operations in the country for more than twenty years. The move underlines Duterte’s desire and perceived need to downgrade Manila’s alliance with Washington in favour of Beijing (Aspinwall 2020; Esguerra 2020).

The threat to scrap the said agreement escalated further when the U.S. Embassy voided the visa of Senator Ronald de la Rosa, the president’s former police chief who oversaw the administration’s deadly drug war that has already killed thousands of Filipinos. The senator intimated that his visa denial had something to with the extrajudicial killings committed by the government under his watch as part of Duterte’s war on drugs campaign, although no official statement was provided by the U.S. officials (Aspinwall 2020; Rey 2020). Despite Malacañang’s initial claim that former president Trump wanted Duterte to change his mind and save the VFA, the former was reported to have reacted to the news by saying that the move would save the U.S. a lot of money (Reuters 2020). Duterte’s suspicion, contempt, and distrust towards his counterparts in Washington and the West make Beijing the more attractive ally (see Bierman 2017). In the same way that Duterte’s positive feelings of trust and love for Xi influence his beliefs and behaviours towards China, the president’s hostile feelings also change how and what he thinks towards his American counterparts. Not only do they help determine how and what Duterte ends up believing, but they also enhance the value of the ‘facts’ that he selects and provide a distinctive lens for (re)interpreting given situations. As such, evidence is arranged and re-arranged to justify and give more credence to beliefs that go beyond the evidence (Mercer 2010). His beliefs regarding Xi’s credibility, on the one hand, and Trump’s or Obama’s unreliability, on the other, cannot be accurately and realistically analysed without understanding how he feels about these actors. The emotions that state leaders feel towards other foreign actors are not just trappings of their beliefs but are also essential elements of those beliefs.

This view helps explains Duterte’s conviction that there is no reason why he should fully commit and adhere to Western-defined norms, rules, and principles, especially when the chief architects of this supposedly liberal democratic global order are implementing strategies that undermine its foundations (Magcamit 2019). In particular, Trump’s infamous ‘America First’ doctrine assures Duterte that his efforts to align more closely with China are warranted. As I have argued in my earlier article explaining the linkages between securitisation, realism, and foreign policy, Trump’s ‘principled realism’ (a euphemism for growing American exceptionalism, isolationism, unilateralism, and revisionism as means of securing US primacy and interests above all) has validated Duterte’s perceptions about the prevalence and disastrous effects of American hypocrisy (Author 2017, 2019, 15). Consequently, rather than anchoring his foreign policy on deteriorating Western multilateral principles and institutions, Duterte has reckoned that it would be more strategically sensible to begin realigning Manila with a rising China and away from a declining US/West (Magcamit 2019; see also Baviera 2016; de Castro 2017). It is not difficult to imagine Duterte asking his cabinet members and advisors as to why the Philippines must prioritise its relations with the U.S. and continue to observe Western standards when Trump himself (and those before him) has been guilty of violating international laws and regulations in efforts to ‘make America great again’ (Author 2017; see also, Koh 2018). To be clear, emotions and feelings could create illogical and groundless beliefs, pervert judgement, and induce self-destructive behaviours (Kaufman 2001; Petersen 2002, 2011; Elster 2004; Halperin 2013, 2016). And while emphasising the distortive effects of emotions and feelings is neither erroneous nor inappropriate, such an approach is inadequate and incomplete when dissecting an actor’s foreign policy choices (Geva and Skorick 2006; Mercer 2010; Hutchison and Bleiker 2014; Kupatadze and Zeitzoff 2019).

Duterte’s anger and resentment towards western figureheads like Obama and Pope Francis and western-led institutions such as the United Nations (UN), European Union (EU), and International Criminal Court (ICC) confirm his own belief that the U.S. and the West are unreliable and cannot be trusted. Conversely, his belief that Xi is the only foreign leader that understands and is ready to help him (see Legaspi 2018), or that China is not the bad guy since it never colonised another country (see GMA News 2016a, 2016b) is informed by a specific understanding of history combined with a feeling that the Chinese leadership is credible and honest. Indeed, ‘feeling is believing’ because emotions are evidence for beliefs (Mercer 2010, 1, 11). Accordingly, instead of focusing solely on how rational state actors should think, emphasis must also be placed on how they actually think.

Doing so allows us to understand better why the heads of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) behave the way they do in relation to China and the WPS/SCS issue. During the 2017 ASEAN Summit chaired by the Philippines, the member states agreed not to bring up China’s military activities in the WPS/SCS. This silence was also reflected in the 25-page final Chairman Statement issued by Duterte, which made no direct mention of the Philippines’ arbitration victory over China just a year before the event (ASEAN Secretariat 2017). The president thought it was pointless to raise and discuss the issue at the summit since the arbitration ruling was between Manila and Beijing, and no other ASEAN leader dared to confront Xi (Avendaño 2017). Instead, Duterte spearheaded the adoption of the ASEAN-China Framework for the Code of Conduct (COC). The said document is intended to ‘establish a rules-based framework containing a set of norms to guide the conduct of parties and promote maritime cooperation in the South China Sea’ (see Storey 2017; Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative 2018).

Although the Southeast Asian claimants initially envisaged a legally binding agreement, in the end, the COC has been downgraded into a ‘rules-based framework’ due to the Chinese opposition against a legally binding code (Cabato and Gotinga 2017; Storey 2017). Note that the COC neither mentions its geographical scope (e.g. whether it applies to both the disputed Paracel and Spratly Islands or only to certain areas) nor the necessary measures and mechanisms for enforcement and arbitration (Storey 2017, 6). This prompted some security and foreign policy analysts to label the Philippines as one of China’s vassal states along with Cambodia and Laos (Chua 2017; Chong 2017). By consenting to the agreement, Duterte and the other ASEAN country leaders have been accused of helping consolidate China’s already growing power and presence within the organisation. The president’s opponents, in particular, have argued that such decisions prevent the Philippine government from effectively pursuing an independent foreign policy and show that it is a mere pawn to China rather than a true sovereign leader (Ramos 2020).

Interestingly, Duterte tried to deflect such allegations not by reassessing its relations with Beijing but by refusing to follow Washington’s move to sanction Chinese firms involved in building and militarising artificial islands in the WPS/SCS, arguing (through his spokesperson) that Manila was ‘not a vassal state of any foreign power’ (CNA 2020). Notwithstanding such pronouncements, the president’s preference for Chinese loans despite the lingering fears concerning Xi’s ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ demonstrates his resolve to revise (if not, at least rethink) the country’s U.S.-oriented foreign policy stance. Duterte has repeatedly rejected his critics’ warnings that China is using these ‘opaque contracts, predatory loan practices, and corrupt deals’ (Var and Po 2017; Chellaney 2018b; Fernholz 2018) to seize the Philippines’ natural resources within its EEZ in case of a government default (Calonzo 2019). Likewise, the president ignored critics who sounded the alarm against a government’s deal that would allow China Telecom to develop and build communications facilities on the Philippine military camps amid possible national security threats (Reed 2019). And more recently, the president has been vocal in his defence of the Chinese people coming into the country against the global backlash precipitated by the Covid-19 pandemic (Robles, Robles, and Bloomberg 2020).

Here, we see how Duterte’s perceptions of credibility and trust vis-à-vis Xi and China rely on the evidence that he decides to evaluate and how he evaluates them. Whereas proofs aligned and consistent with one’s feelings do not create dissonance or require further investigation, disconfirming proofs could lead one to simply disregard them instead of searching for new ones (Mercer 2010). Although Duterte’s critics and opponents may not believe the evidence showing China as a benevolent rising power with no hegemonic ambitions, nevertheless, Duterte believes them and use them as proofs of Xi’s kindness towards him and the Filipinos (see Sarmiento 2020). Disbelieving, as Frijda and Mesquita (2000, 70) posited, is an effective mechanism for discounting information (and proofs) that refute one’s convictions (and beliefs) (see also Mercer 2010, 9). Because belief-consistent feelings are often taken as evidence that validate and confirm one’s beliefs, the acceptance or rejection of beliefs significantly depends on one’s emotions (Clore and Gasper 2000; Mercer 2010, 7). This underscores how emotion, as an assimilation mechanism, guides how foreign policy agents like Duterte select and interpret evidence.

It is also worth noting how Duterte’s most zealous supporters have assimilated these hostile emotions and beliefs vis-à-vis the U.S. and seem to have acquired a more positive perception of Xi (and China) despite the latter’s aggressive activities in the WPS/SCS. It is not a stretch to argue that before Duterte’s tenure in Malacañang, most of his supporters, like the majority of the Filipinos, expected Washington to retain its role as the global police that would help defend the Philippines’ strategic interests amid the looming China threat in the region (Magcamit 2019). Yet, the relatively successful cascade and socialisation of Duterte’s personal emotional beliefs has allowed him to convince his staunchest supporters to set aside the Hague Ruling (to avoid war with China); oppose local and international human rights groups and practitioners (that criticise his war on drugs); question the value of democracy and free speech (to defend him against his critics); and be defiant of international organisations and other world leaders (that paint Duterte and the Philippines in a bad light) (Magcamit 2019, 9; see also, Simangan 2018; Gallagher, Raffle, and Maulana 2020). As Crawford (2000) argued further, ‘not only are beliefs socialised, so are emotions and emotional relationships’.And as I have pointed out in my previous analysis of Duterte’s strategic behaviour using a neoclassical realist lens, the president’s seemingly crude answers to some of the most polarising issues are neither entirely wrong nor immoral (Magcamit 2019, 9). For instance, his perceptions regarding the western countries’ arbitrary implementation of humanitarian intervention and continued exploitation of small and weak countries help justify his aversion towards western interpretations of the human rights principle and general scepticism towards multilateralism. Meanwhile, his realist view about the nature of power, coupled with his post-modernist understanding of history, help explain his efforts to revive the Philippines’ relations with China and his antagonism towards US values and hegemony.In line with the logic of Mercer’s (2010) emotional belief thesis, Duterte analyses the China-versus-U.S. conundrum; creates and forms his choices; introduces and interprets his selected ‘relevant’ facts; and decides for himself whether Xi or any sitting American president will honour a commitment or not. This tells us that state leaders simultaneously accommodate their beliefs to evidence and assimilate evidence to fit their beliefs. The tendency of foreign policy agents and analysts to translate how they feel about an actor into an attribute or quality of that actor allows them to view credibility [and trustworthiness] as properties of the actor in question (see Mercer 2010, 2014). Duterte’s subjective feelings and declarations of ‘love’ and ‘admiration’ towards Xi give the Chinese leader the objective persona of a credible and honest person. That is, Xi, being the object of judgement, is Duterte’s subjective rendering and representation.

Note that while letting one’s feelings influence interpretations is common or assessing another as honest or dishonest can be practical, it is important to recognise that people’s feelings can vary and, as such, will have distinctive explanations and expectations (Mesquita and Frijda 1992; Mercer 2010; Crawford 2014; Linklater 2014). Although it is neither wrong nor immoral for Duterte to view Xi and Beijing as credible and honest (instead of an American official and Washington), other state leaders, analysts, or audience members certainly have their own characterisation or delineation of the Chinese president. Again, how foreign policy actors feel about certain referents shape what they believe. Duterte’s beliefs can undoubtedly change when faced with credible evidence, but what he will judge as persuasive, realistic, and satisfying will also significantly depend on his prior beliefs. All these feelings and emotions, ‘of trust or distrust, like or dislike, approval or disapproval, love or hate, pride or humiliation’, ultimately figure into one’s assessments of the other’s credibility and trust (Mercer 2010, 16).

4. Key inferences

Four key inferences about the role of emotional beliefs in foreign policymaking can be drawn based on the preceding analysis and discussion of the Duterte Method. First, emotional beliefs do not reside exclusively in people’s minds, and neither do they come entirely from the social world (see Ahmed 2004; Fierke 2012; Hutchison and Bleiker 2014). Although the emotions that constitute and reinforce such beliefs are experienced at the individual biological level – in this case, the ‘inner state’ of a foreign policy agent – these emotions are also highly attached to what Karin Fierke (2012) referred to as ‘entailments’ through which different objects, subjects, or events, are cognitively and culturally processed and interpreted (see also Crawford 2000).

As the effective propagation of some of Duterte’s personal emotional beliefs demonstrate, emotions are not just purely physiological or cognitive but are also highly interconnected and socialised as they are normally expressed in relation to others (e.g. Xi versus Trump or China versus the U.S.) and expressed in a language understandable to the insiders (e.g. Duterte’s supporters and target audiences) (see Crawford 2000; Fierke 2012). As such, emotional beliefs simultaneously develop and flow from one’s ‘internal’ physiological and cognitive realm towards external referents and from the ‘external’ social realm towards the internal referents (Ahmed 2004; Fierke 2012; Hutchison and Bleiker 2014).Second, to the extent that they produce generalisations about certain actors deemed to be certain beyond the evidence, emotional beliefs are a form of world-making (see Fierke 2012). As the creation and pursuit of the Duterte Method underscores, emotions are powerful engines that drive our state leaders’ decisions and actions by exerting enormous influence on their beliefs (see also Frijda 1986; Crawford 2000; Mercer 2010; Halperin 2016). The resulting emotional beliefs of Duterte helped regulate and control the direction and content of the Duterte Method, leading to a more Beijing-centric foreign policy stance or ethos designed to help promote the ‘ideal’ values of Xi and China while de-emphasising Washington’s and the West’s ‘undesirable’ influences. The manner through which Duterte’s supporters have defended and remained loyal to him even to this day reveals how emotions and feelings guide the people’s selection, interpretation, and assessment of evidence and risks associated with the China threat. Again, in Mercer’s (2010) words, people ‘accommodate their beliefs to evidence while also assimilating evidence to fit their beliefs’.

Third, emotional beliefs can be seen as the rational responses of individuals to objects, subjects, or events that are crucial to them and their existence (see De Sousa 1979; Nussbaum 2001; Mercer 2010; Petersen 2011). The emotions at the core of these beliefs are not irrational but are vital to a more accurate and realistic understanding of how and what people think (Fattah and Fierke 2009; Fierke 2012). The emotional beliefs behind Duterte’s foreign policy choices, for example, show that they are expressions of his insecurities and vulnerabilities towards essential matters that are beyond his control. Relatedly, as discussed, some of his emotions and feelings (e.g. towards the U.S.) have histories tied to memories instead of just being entirely biological (see Collins 2004; Rothberg 2009; Fierke 2012). Emotion and cognition should not be viewed in zero-sum terms precisely because feeling is a component of thinking and vice versa (Crawford 2000, 2014; Mercer 2010, 2014).

And fourth, despite their persistence, emotional beliefs are neither permanent nor fixed but are malleable, just like the emotions that comprise and support them (see Halperin 2013, 2016). Manila’s pivot towards Beijing under the Duterte administration, after decades of Washington-dependent foreign policy, demonstrates how these ‘internal’ shifts impact a state’s foreign policy decisions and conduct (see Mercer 2010, 13).

Taken together, these findings illustrate how and why emotions and feelings, and the emotional beliefs attached to them, are all crucial to foreign policymaking and analysis. However, emphasising the centrality of these elements does not mean that other plausible explanations, particularly those that prioritise the rationalist causes and materialist factors, are not as relevant or useful. As can be gleaned from the paper’s scrutiny of the main components of the Duterte Method, and as other authors have convincingly pointed out, several existing ‘non-emotional’ – tactical and strategic – considerations are also vital to understanding the president’s foreign policy choices (see Winger 2021; Wong and Tan 2021). These include, among others, the government’s interest in exploiting the potential benefits from enhanced economic linkages with China while managing Beijing’s security threat over maritime territorial disputes, coupled with the perceived decline of American hegemony and Washington’s lack of support for Southeast Asian leaders disputing with Xi.

What the probing of Duterte’s emotional beliefs adds to our knowledge of foreign policymaking are plausible explanations to what and how state actors think and behave amid these given structural conditions. How does Duterte select, interpret, and evaluate both the opportunities and risks presented by these underlying tactical and strategic issues, which, in turn, made him believe that China is credible while the U.S. is untrustworthy? By comparison, why do other Southeast Asian leaders (notably, Vietnam’s Phạm Minh Chính, Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad, and Indonesia’s Joko Widodo) have maintained a more cautious and ambivalent stance vis-à-vis Beijing? As I have attempted to demonstrate in this paper, these state actors’ emotions and feelings help guide their selection and interpretation of evidence; produce and strengthen their beliefs; and determine what they want and what they believe to be true. These insights enable a better understanding of why and how our leaders’ decisions and outlooks can shift despite the relatively analogous and constant external structural factors confronting them, on the one hand; and recognise the equally important role of agency, specifically the actors’ psychological-cognitive constitution in co-producing the internal structural contexts in which they operate. The point is that domestic and international structures that simultaneously enable and constrain foreign policy rhetoric and action, such as those encapsulated in the Duterte Method, are the outcomes of human agency (see Carlsnaes 1992, 2016). Consequently, as Walter Carlsnaes (1992) noted, the relationship between these actors and the structures in which they exist must be viewed ‘in terms of mutual linkage rather than causal reduction’.

Thus, instead of challenging or competing against the material, structure-centric explanations, these non-material, emotion-based inferences are meant to supplement the mainstream rationalist approach to foreign policy analysis. The explanatory implications of the foregoing discussions are not criticisms against institutional arguments, but they do highlight the importance of going deeper than materialism’s ontological view, empirical scope, and epistemological rationale vis-à-vis foreign policy analysis. As I have argued and demonstrated throughout the paper, far from impediments to the pursuit of rationality, emotions, feelings, and emotional beliefs are all fundamental components of humans’ decision-making processes. Discounting them creates an inaccurate image of ‘politics without passion’ (see Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, 916) which can never be vastly different from the world in which we exist.

5. Concluding remarks

Rather than summarising the main points from my discussion and analysis, I would like to conclude by addressing the limitations of the paper’s findings which the readers might point out, and my views about these potential issues. Admittedly, the strong emphasis placed on human agency and the actors’ intertwining affect, emotion, and cognition presents specific challenges that limit the arguments and inferences drawn from such studies. In interrogating the role of Duterte’s emotional beliefs in his administration’s development and pursuit of foreign policy using this approach, for example, two obvious challenges arise.The first one is the difficulty of determining the ‘truthfulness’ and ‘veracity’ of Duterte’s emotional beliefs and their exact sources, especially when there are disconnects between the president’s words and actions. This problem makes it tricky for analysts to decide whether they can and should believe Duterte’s (or any other state leader’s) verbal expressions of feelings and emotions vis-à-vis a specific referent object. If not, then what value can we gain from incorporating these intangible and unquantifiable elements in our analysis? The second one relates to the difficulty of predicting the future direction of the Philippines’ foreign policy with high accuracy based on the inferences drawn from the paper, given the nature and origin of the emotional beliefs on which they are anchored. Is the Duterte Method a temporary deviation from the country’s ‘ordinary politics’ or does it mark the beginning of Manila’s ‘new age’ of foreign relations?

The lack of tools for accurately determining the credibility of emotional beliefs neither invalidate nor dissolve the emotions and feelings that underpin them and their constitutive role in foreign policymaking. Duterte’s rhetoric cannot be simply dismissed as mere hot air or wishful thinking but as signals of potential paradigm shifts in Philippine foreign policy. Borrowing from the Copenhagen School’s securitisation theory, the president’s rhetorical expressions of his emotions and feelings vis-à-vis specific referents are akin to the ‘speech acts’ performed by a securitising actor when framing certain issues as ‘existential’ security threats (see Buzan, Wæver, and De Wilde 1998). As Ole Wæver (1995) put it, ‘the utterance itself is the act … by saying it, something is done’. Accordingly, Duterte’s ‘extraordinary’ articulation of his emotional beliefs vis-à-vis the China and United States is a channel through which he attempts to bring his vision of Philippine foreign policy into being. The president’s speech acts are extraordinary precisely because they go against the traditional language and lexicon used by former Filipino leaders to facilitate Manila’s foreign affairs and day-to-day politics since the commonwealth government and, therefore, are radical enough, not least in terms of intentionality and method.

The observed gaps between rhetoric and ‘reality’ (at least at present) neither suggest that emotional beliefs are imaginary and false nor indicate that they do not have any real power over Duterte’s foreign policy decisions and actions. On the contrary, I will argue further that such incongruences are the manifestations of the constant push-and-pull between the non-material influences of psychology and cognition at the agent level and the material forces of institutions at the structural level. Consequently, these non-rational, non-material elements need to be acknowledged as legitimate constituents and instruments of realpolitik and be given proper attention in foreign policy scholarship. Focusing exclusively on the concrete and quantifiable ways of explaining domestic and international politics can profoundly misread and miscalculate the various political phenomena and trends happening across the Asia-Pacific and beyond.

Thus, regardless of whether the Philippines’ post-Duterte foreign policy stance will be a continuation of the Duterte Method or see Manila realigning ever more closely with Washington to put things ‘back to normal’, the more critical point the paper raises is that the invisible mechanism of emotional beliefs would have played a sufficiently vital role in either of these two potential trajectories, alongside existing structural conditions. Indeed, as Crawford (2000, 156) argued, humans make foreign policy decisions that are ‘always both classically self-interested and emotional’. The institutionalist perspective often favoured in foreign policy analysis should not preclude interpretative epistemology given the centrality of both the ‘operational’ and ‘psychological’ contexts in which the state leaders’ non-material emotions provide interpretative links with their environments’ material structures (Carlsnaes 1992, 253; see also Brecher 1972). To echo and paraphrase Carlsnaes (1992), ‘the [foreign] policies of states are a consequence of, and can hence only be fully explained with reference to, a dynamic process in which both agents [e.g. psychological-cognitive constitutions] and structures [e.g. institutions and rules] causally condition each other over time’ (see also Wendt 1987; Archer 1988). That a state leader’s emotional beliefs are fundamental constitutive elements of a nation’s foreign policy (whether it is the Duterte Method, Trump’s ‘America First’ doctrine, or Xi’s ‘charm offensive’ approach in question) suggests that a sound and realistic assessment a post-pandemic Asia-Pacific international relations and politics hinges on our capacity and willingness as scholars to bridge the artificial gap between these two realms effectively. After all, human emotion is not a mere addition but is essential to human reason and rationality (see Mercer 2006, 2010).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Magcamit

Dr Michael Magcamit is currently a Lecturer in Security Studies in the School of History, Politics and International Relations at the University of Leicester and a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London.