MANILA, Philippines -- Senator Francis Pangilinan warned Malacañang on Saturday against using US President Barack Obama’s support for the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) to justify the continued implementation of the controversial military accord.

“For them [Palace] to do so is to suggest that they support US interests more than they do our own,” said the senator in a phone interview.

He said “Obama’s support for VFA is expected considering that the treaty favors US interests more that it does our interests.”

Pangilinan could not say for sure if Obama’s phone call was a form of quiet lobbying for the VFA, or whether the new US president, in initiating the call after spurning President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo for so long, was in effect saying that bilateral relations between Manila and Washington could be affected by the Philippines’ abrogation of the treaty.

Pangilinan has filed a resolution in the Senate seeking to abrogate the VFA on constitutional grounds.

The former Senate majority leader said Arroyo should not allow the bilateral ties of the two countries “to be framed primarily by the war against terrorism as previously enunciated and propagated these past eight years by former president George W. Bush and conducted through [the] VFA.”

He said Obama and Arroyo were “in error” by framing the bilateral ties in the context primarily of the VFA.

“This is being myopic and narrow minded. The VFA has been utilized as a staging ground in the region for the rejected war against terror employed by the Bush administration,” he said.

Pangilinan, a Harvard University fellow, called on Obama to totally break free from the questionable policies of his predecessor since the first-ever African-American president had run on a platform of change.

“It would be a mistake for the Obama administration to embrace the arrangement shaped by the highly questionable foreign policy initiatives of his predecessor. It is time to rethink and reshape RP-US ties and this means expanding the terms of our engagement with the US to include non-military bilateral arrangements and by revisiting the onerous provisions of the treaty with the end in view of removing the same,” said Pangilinan.