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<img loading="lazy" src="https://cdn.kahimyang.com/resources-9/philippine-presidents-sm.webp" alt="Historically in this country you don't go anti-US and be president too,  until Duterte" />
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(Philippine presidents Marcos, Estrada, and Duterte with US presidents Reagan and Clinton)
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But down the years to come, that election would be perceived as the dirtiest ever in the country's history. Angered by the alleged massive cheating and disenfranchisement of voters that gave the presidency to Quirino, supporters of Laurel in their thousands trooped to the hills of Batangas, proclaiming a rebellion.
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Objecting to the move, Laurel told his men:
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"I don't want to go down in history as the man who plunged this country into a bloody revolution that turned it into a banana republic. The presidency is not worth a revolution."
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Without Laurel's support, the uprising easily lost steam, lasting only less than two months, with the rebels surrendering their arms to the Quirino government, reportedly for a price.
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Of that incident, Laurel had this assessment: 
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"As for me, it was a revolt that I did not instigate, and I might even say, unfortunately I did not lead. The intellectual courage of an Ibarra, the militancy of an Elias, the sweeping foresight and boldness of Bonifacio, the indestructible faith in the common man that characterized all the thinking of a Mabini - these are the virtues our people must assert if they are to save democracy from being crushed, on the one hand by corrupt and power-mad usurpers, and on the other by the intolerable machinations and terroristic tactics of both the communists and neo-fascists who have begun to rear their heads in our land."
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How prophetic have those words been of what are now transpiring in the country.
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Banana republic
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From the moment Corazon C. Aquino frustrated the people's will in the 1986 snap presidential election to steal victory from President Ferdinand E. Marcos through the so-called People Power Revolution of 1986, what has become of the nation but, as Jose P. Laurel feared, a veritable "banana republic," perennially subservient to the wishes of America.
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Not only did the Aquino administration recognize the already existing military bondage to the US, like the Military Bases Agreement (MBA) of 1947 and the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) of 1951, it also shamelessly led a lobby for the retention of the MBA through a senate resolution in 1991, a resolution resoundingly voted down by a majority of the senators who since then had gained the fame Magnificent 12.
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Through a sly machination of another Aquino, the son Benigno 3rd or Noynoy, the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) of 2014 came into place, restoring what his mother failed to accomplish in 1991, in fact with a most despicable add-on. Under the EDCA, America need no longer establish its own military bases in the Philippines, but feel free to deploy men and material in the sanctuary of the bases of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, including stockpiling dangerous nuclear arsenals provocative to US enemies. It must be stressed that those US nuclear weapons, under the EDCA, are not at all subject to inspection by Philippine authorities. This means that if America gets into a war with an enemy, a priority target for that enemy are the Philippine military bases.
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Such an eventuality must be a foregone conclusion. In 1941, Japan attacked the Philippines not because Filipinos were Japanese enemies but because America had the country as a forward military base in the Far East; US military bases in the country at the time were the largest in the world outside of America.
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US imprimatur
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The Philippine presidency from its inception in 1946, had never been without US imprimatur, that is, you must be to the liking of America, otherwise you don't get in, or if you happen to get in through the eye of a needle and still you maintain your displeasure with America, you have to be out sooner or later within your coming in.
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That was what happened to Laurel, the pro-people candidate in the presidential election of 1949, who must lose, come hell or high water, to the Amboy Quirino. For advocating the Filipino First policy, President Carlos P. Garcia didn't stand a chance in his reelection bid against then Vice President Diosdado Macapagal. President Ferdinand E. Marcos played his US cards so well he made it to Malacañang in 1965 and went on sitting there all the way to 1986, when he had to "cut and cut clean" for daring to raise rentals for US military installations in the country. As early as 1982, he was proclaiming before the American media his distaste for the MDT, which he wished abrogated for its onerous provision of having to suffer the rigmarole of US democratic processes before obliging America to the Philippines' defense <i>"while we're all dying there,"</i> he said the applause of the American press.
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The MDT stays with Filipinos to this day. In the event an enemy attacks the country, it is not an automatic retaliation by America in the Philippines' behalf that takes place but an authorization by the US House of Representatives and the US Senate to that effect, while, as Marcos correctly pointed it out, Filipinos are all dying here.
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Cory's exit from Malacañang gave way to the installation into the presidency of another true-blue American Boy, Fidel V. Ramos. It was under his administration that the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) began to take shape, and he rode the tide without any turbulence from America. Ironically, the guy under whose administration the VFA was finally approved in 1998, Joseph Estrada, had the machismo of standing up to the US by crushing the rebellion of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which America didn't want done; in fact, then President Bill Clinton, sent a personal representative to Estrada with instructions for the Philippine president to desist from his plan of crushing the MILF insurgency. Estrada stood his ground, succeeding in his "all-out" war against the Muslim rebels, all the way to the capture of MILF stronghold Camp Abubakar.
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Just two months after that victory, Estrada found himself the object of impeachment, which led to his ouster and replacement by Vice President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.
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Historically in this country, you don't go anti-US and be president at the same time, until Duterte