PRESIDENT Duterte’s comments on our disputes with China over the South China Sea in his recent State of the Nation Address (SONA) have resuscitated Yellow zombie ideas.

That phrase was coined by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, who titled the latest collection of his columns, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future.

“Zombie ideas,” he explained, are “ideas that should have been killed by contrary evidence, but instead keep shambling along, eating people’s brains.”

Such a huge zombie idea is the Yellow claim that the arbitration suit against China that the Aquino 3rd government filed in 2013, the award for which was handed down in 2016, was a victory in that it upheld our territorial and maritime claims in the South China Sea.

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TALK about the power of the oligarchy, and by “oligarch” I mean not just any magnate but one who has the capacity to get a state agency to do what he wants for his particular business project.

This particular case involves not just one oligarch but two, a foreign one and a Filipino one. What they got the Republic to do — through two administrations — was so significant that it nearly got us into a shooting war with the superpower in our part of the world, China.

This explains why after 10 years that Philippine-China relations flourished despite the two countries’ disputes over the Spratlys, these quite suddenly broke down in 2011.

For all its declarations of nationalist fervor in asserting Philippine sovereignty, the Aquino 3rd administration’s antagonistic stance toward China and its 2013 suit against the superpower in an international venue was triggered by a mammoth business project launched in 2008 by the First Pacific Co., one of the biggest public-utility and infrastructure conglomerates in the Philippines.

Container-port billionaire Enrique Razon Jr., who got a 30-percent stake in this project, played a crucial role in getting that project launched.

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IT is sickening for the previous Yellow regime, especially its Foreign secretary Albert del Rosario, and just recently President Rodrigo Duterte’s present Defense and Foreign Affairs secretaries to be flag-waving in claiming that the arbitration suit President Benigno Aquino 3rd had filed against China was a “victory” for the Philippines.

The truth – if Duterte’s officials would just bother to study the award and read international law experts’ voluminous analyses on it (rather than reports of United States media) – is that it severely damaged our national interests on such a scale that Aquino and del Rosario could be deemed to have committed treason.

I discussed in last Friday’s column that the arbitration award degraded our islands in the Kalayaan Island Group (KIG) into mere “rocks” not entitled to exclusive economic zones, which could have meant – if not for the award – expansive maritime areas for the country four times bigger than the size of Luzon.

But the worst ruling of the award that has put the Philippines in a situation of clear and present danger is this: it made us vulnerable to Chinese or Vietnamese military operations to control our claimed territory within the KIG, which they claim – way before Ferdinand Marcos did in 1978 – as part of their sovereign territory.

It was really stupid for the Aquino-del Rosario lawyers to have asked the tribunal to rule as illegal Chinese ships’ attempts in May 2013 to block Philippine vessels from providing supplies to our 12-man Marine detachment in Second Thomas (Ayungin) Shoal living in the BRP Sierra Madrewreck.

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