IN 2016, President Rodrigo Roa Duterte did the milestone act of snubbing an important APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) meeting event. Press reports cited a bum stomach as the president's reason for not attending. A later story by Rappler quoted Duterte as saying the 'bum stomach' spin was false. What was true, he clarified later, was that he wanted to avoid a head-on clash with US President Barack Obama.

Indeed, in the whole six-year term of President Duterte, he never wavered in his anti-US, and therefore, pro-China, stand. Had Duterte not given respect to civil decorum, and repeated again and again his disdain for Obama whom he called a s*********h, nobody could imagine what a verbal ruckus the 2016 APEC meet would have degenerated into.