So what are the alternatives. Ignore the Phillipines? Try to effect regime change--that has worked so effectively everywhere else we have tried it. . .NOT! Go to war with them? Or maybe the right tactic is to try to restore some form of conversation and diplomacy that might turn out better than expected.
Remembering that Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as 'the evil empire':
. . .of all the foreign policy achievements of the Reagan Presidency, none is more important, or had more lasting impact on the world, than the fundamental change in U.S.-Soviet relations.
It was not due to luck or accident. Speaking of U.S.-Soviet relations and his steadfast determination to reduce arms, President Reagan would often say: “We don’t mistrust each other because we’re armed; we’re armed because we mistrust each other.” He believed that if the mistrust was eliminated, then so, too, could the dangerous, destabilizing weapons. President Reagan was confident that if he could just get his Soviet counterpart in a room and tell him face-to-face that America had no hostile intent, the mistrust would begin to evaporate.
Instinctively he knew that could not be accomplished through the traditional diplomacy of a bureaucratic State Department. So, to the horror of some long-time career government employees, he did what no President had ever done. While recovering from the assassination attempt in 1981, he handwrote a letter to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in reply to Brezhnev’s rather belligerent letter sent less than six weeks after President Reagan’s assumption of office. In his reply, President Reagan sought to find common ground and to establish a better tone to relations between the White House and the Kremlin.
But as things turned out, the President would have to be patient. Brezhnev died in November 1982, and was replaced by Yuri Andropov. Less than 2 years later, Andropov died, and was succeeded by Constantin Chernenko. Incredibly, Chernenko died just 13 months later.
To replace him, the Soviet high command chose a younger leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. It was Gorbachev with whom President Reagan would finally have that long-sought opportunity to begin to form a new relationship, one that would lead to a lessening of tensions between Washington and Moscow, and eventually to meaningful arms reduction. . .
https://www.reaganfoundation.org/ronald-reagan/the-presidency/mikhail-gorbachev/
A poignant but in a way exhilarating moment in my memory was at President Reagan's funeral as I watched Mikhail Gorbachev, with tears in his eyes and on his cheek, paying his last respects to President Reagan at graveside.
We never know what can be accomplished unless we try.
