This year’s U.S. presidential campaign is light on policy details. For hints of what Kamala Harris might do as president, we look at her track record in public office. 

• China missile test: In a rare test, China has fired an intercontinental ballistic missile into the Pacific Ocean, adding to tensions in the region where multiple countries have overlapping territorial claims.
• U.S. death row executions: People on death row in five states are set to be put to death in the span of one week. If carried out as planned, the executions will mark the first time in more than 20 years that five executions were held in seven days.
• Thailand same-sex marriage: Thailand’s landmark marriage equality bill was officially written into law, allowing same-sex couples to legally wed.
• Haitian community charges: The leader of a nonprofit representing the Haitian community has invoked a private-citizen right to file charges against former President Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, over the threats experienced by Springfield, Ohio.

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For nearly two years, the Philippines has been on a global truth-telling campaign, dubbed the “transparency initiative.” The Southeast Asian nation has invited journalists aboard its security vessels to witness aggressive actions by Chinese ships near rocks and reefs that are clearly within the Philippines’ legal domain. In August, for example, a “60 Minutes” crew was on a Philippine coast guard ship when it was rammed by a Chinese ship near Sabina Shoal.

Has this public exposure of China’s territorial grab far from its shores done anything to head off a dangerous showdown?

This month, the Philippines plans to find out. It will ask the United Nations General Assembly to look over evidence of violent incidents by China in hopes that truth will prevail in persuading Beijing to honor international maritime law.

For now, China’s taking of islets in the South China Sea still goes on. And Beijing has launched a public relations campaign of its own. According to “60 Minutes,” for example, the Chinese government publicized its version of the ramming incident soon after it happened, blaming the Filipinos.

Yet the more that this truth-versus-lies contest continues, the more the Philippines has been winning on a bigger stage. It has gained wide diplomatic and military support from nations as far away as South Korea and Germany. 

“We have the law on our side, but the battleground is for other countries to help us recognize our rights,” said the country’s defense secretary, Gilberto Teodoro Jr.

At home, Filipinos now widely support their country standing up to Beijing after seeing videos of China’s aggression. Abroad, the Philippines now has closer military ties with Australia, Japan, Singapore, and India. It has also welcomed the United States to use four military bases, install a defensive missile system, and back up a 1951 mutual defense treaty between the two countries.

The transparency strategy by Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is modeled on Ukraine’s experience of rallying countries to its side by exposing Russian atrocities against Ukrainian civilians. “The more the world sees of China’s claims and the ugly way it tries to enforce them,” stated The Economist magazine, “the less legitimate they will seem.”

China refers to the truth-telling campaign by the Philippines as “cognitive warfare.” But truth’s power lies in dissolving lies. At the U.N. and elsewhere, the Philippines aims only “to talk some sense” into China, as one of its diplomats put it. If anything, truth can bring peace.