Rodrigo Duterte has vowed to expel American troops from the Philippines, accused the C.I.A. of plotting to kill him and insulted President Obama with an obscenity.
But beyond the blasts of hyperbole — he recently compared himself to Hitler — lies a real and potentially historic shift in Philippines foreign policy.
In public statements and interviews during the past week, Mr. Duterte’s top foreign policy advisers said he was seeking to break the Philippines out of the United States’ orbit and signal to China that he is ready to negotiate closer ties after years of wrangling over its military presence in the South China Sea.
The move is a radical departure for a country that has historically been the most dependable American ally in Southeast Asia, and could undermine Mr. Obama’s so-called pivot to Asia, a keystone of his foreign policy. That strategy depends on American allies to counter China’s increasing power in the region.
move has already tilted the balance of power, said Richard Javad Heydarian, a political scientist at De La Salle University in Manila. By declining to press claims against China over disputed territory there, despite a favorable ruling by a United Nations tribunal, Mr. Duterte has made it hard for the United States to galvanize international pressure on China over the issue.
“Almost single-handedly Duterte has reshaped the regional strategic dynamics, with both Beijing and Washington recalibrating their next move in the South China Sea as they try to anticipate the Filipino strongman’s foreign policy trajectory,” Mr. Heydarian said.
Mr. Duterte, who is expected to visit Beijing this month, has made no secret of his worldview.
“I will be reconfiguring my foreign policy,” he said in a speech last week. And at some point, “I will break up with America.”
Often after Mr. Duterte makes an over-the-top pronouncement, an aide emerges to walk it back. But in this case, the retreat was slight.
Mr. Duterte was not seeking a breakup with the United States, the president’s spokesman, Ernesto Abella, explained, so much as “an open relationship.”
On Tuesday, Foreign Secretary Perfecto Yasay Jr. went further, explaining in a statement posted online that the Philippines needed to chart a new, independent foreign policy because “America has failed us.”
independence from the United States, its former colonial master, in 1946, Mr. Yasay wrote, “the United States held on to invisible chains that reined us in towards dependency and submission as little brown brothers not capable of true independence and freedom.”
American officials have sought to deflect and diminish the significance of these statements, and emphasize the benefits to the Philippines of the American presence.
“Our history of cooperation spans 70 years, and our commitment to this country remains unchanged,” the United States ambassador, Philip S. Goldberg, said Wednesday in a speech to the American Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines here. “The Philippines is a key strategic partner of the United States, and our military alliance, development assistance and commercial cooperation continue.”
Although Mr. Duterte declared last month that the annual joint military exercises now underway on the island of Luzon would be the last during his administration, American officials said his government had made no formal requests to halt any programs. Nor has it followed up on Mr. Duterte’s threat to eject American forces from the southern Philippines, where a rotating force of 50 to 100 troops helps combat Abu Sayyaf, an Islamic-themed kidnap-for-ransom gang.
“As it has been for decades, our alliance with the Philippines is ironclad,” the American defense secretary, Ashton B. Carter, said late last month.
The United States is giving the Philippines over $90 million in military aid this year and has provided more than $1 billion in nonmilitary support over the last five years, much of it for disaster relief, American officials said.
On Friday, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said that “we can live without” the military aid.
Some of the tension between the allies has come from international outrage over Mr. Duterte’s bloody campaign against drugs, which has led to the killing of about 1,400 suspects by the police and hundreds of other extrajudicial killings. It was his concern that Western powers would lecture him over the policy that prompted Mr. Duterte’s denunciation of Mr. Obama, as well as similar tirades against the United Nations and the European Union.
Mr. Duterte, 71, identifies himself as a socialist and views the West through the lens of the Cold War and the Philippines as the victim of historic American imperialism.
But the recalibration also provides an opportunity to improve ties with China, the region’s biggest military power and largest economy. China was the Philippines’ second-largest trading partner last year, with total trade of $17.6 billion. (The United States was third and Japan first.)
China has been making inroads in the region with promises of investment and with its military expansion in the South China Sea, where it has occupied islands claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam and other countries, in some cases building forts.
That dispute led to deteriorating relations under the previous Philippines administration, which filed a claim against China with the United Nations maritime tribunal over the Scarborough Shoal, a reef claimed by both nations and occupied by China.
The tribunal ruled in the Philippines’ favor in July. There is no enforcement mechanism for the ruling, and it has been dismissed by China.
But the victory has given Mr. Duterte a stronger hand in negotiations, where he is expected to use the ruling as leverage in reaching his own deal with China in a way that will allow its leaders to save face.
In August, he sent former President Fidel Ramos, 88, to Hong Kong to meet with officials in what Mr. Ramos described as an effort to build trust and find common interests.
Advisers to the president say one potential deal would be to let China maintain control of Scarborough Shoal if it made concessions such as restoring access to Filipino fishermen and investing in infrastructure development in the Philippines.
“He doesn’t want to provoke China any further,” Jesus G. Dureza, a longtime friend of Mr. Duterte’s who holds the cabinet post of peace adviser, said in an interview. “He feels aligning with our allies against China is not going to benefit the country.”
Mr. Dureza said he and other cabinet members favored opening direct talks with China in part because of fear that, despite a 65-year-old mutual defense treaty, the United States would not be willing to defend the Philippines.
“The idea is that our allies are not going to go to war for us, so why should we align with them?” he said.
Relations with Beijing have already grown warmer, he said, with Chinese officials saying that now “we can talk like Asians across the table with Asians.”
At the same time, despite the sometimes harsh words, Philippine officials have made it clear that the new president does not want to abandon the United States.
“While we would like to foster a closer relationship with China, we will certainly not engage in any alliance with China in a military viewpoint because that has never been the intention of the president,” Mr. Yasay, the foreign secretary, said at a Senate hearing on Thursday. “The president, on many occasions, has said categorically that he will only have one military alliance, and our only ally in that respect is the United States.”
That statement may suggest a future in which the Philippines plays the big powers against each other.
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