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we in the west are
rugged individualists, self made successes, young
in the ways of history. our cultures are only a
couple of centuries old in world history.
adolescents, realy. and like adolescents, we tend
to b defensive, naive, simplistic, idealistic and
subtlety is lost on us. we take things on the face
of it, unaware of the undercurrents, past history
and needs.
china is an ancient and 'inscrutable' civilization,
thousands of years old. chinese diplomacy is
subtle, and rooted in saving face and preserving
the appearance of dignity, formality, honor and
proper recognition. we are talkng of emperors and
dynasties that were considered the embodiment of
heaven to earth that went on for millennia at a
time. the communist regime is only a fleck on the
robes of history by comparison. you do not change
the mind of a people that steeped in their own
way.
the US is not averse to apologizing when they
have indeed done something wrong and they know it.
and they have their shifty side too, practicing
plausible deniability like any crafty adolescent,
scheming on how to con their parents with a
believable story to cover for what they were
actually up to. as grows the twig, so shapes the
tree.
but you have two terrible different cultures
here, oversensitive in radically different ways.
the US views their mission as utterly justified,
since US nuclear technology was stolen by chinese
agents right out from under the noses of the labs
and spirited back to china for implementation. the
US feels responsible for letting that dangerous
abiity get into the hands of the wrong people, and
feels duty bound to follow up and try to find out
where it went and to get it back, destroy it, or at
least monitor it, for the sake of world safety. If
they say they were in international airspace,
outside the 12 mile boundary, they probably were,
but remembering the teenage analgy, they could also
be fudging or bluffing in the hope that the rest of
the tale carries that detail without much
examination.
Then you have China, who knows they have the
secrets, knows what they are doing with them, and
knows where they are. No way in hell are they gonna
let the americans come in over their airspace and
find what they are looking for, much less blow it
up. If that means sending up a hotdog pilot who
knows full well he may have to sacrifice himself in
the sky to keep the americans from finding what
they came for, then he will do it. so he scrambles,
hazes them, but is very careful not to actually
kill them. He gives them escalating degrees of
peril, trying to deter them and give them the
choice to turn back, and when he sees that it isnt
going to be sufficient, he makes his ultimate
decision, as prediscussed before he accepted the
mission, and he disables the american plane to
insure that it will have to land in chinese space
where it can be intimately examined, without
killing the americans in an act of war, and giving
his own life for the glory of his career and the
ancient land that sent him to defend it.
the chinese pilot's mission was a success. he
accomplished exactly what he was asked to do. he
will have a hero's burial and memory with the
country.
the americans were handled exactly as the Chinese
intended. They protected their secret, obtained
more knowledge of the US spy technology from
detaining the crippled US spy plane, didn't harm
the american personnel, and get to play the
injured, wronged party due an apology on the world
stage, by portraying themselves as being invaded
over their own airspace.
they know the truth and so does the US.
The critical thing in the entire episode is to
continue to keep the chinese nuclear ability in
check. the secondary thing is to keep the episode
from touching off some kind of act of war or
declared hardened stance, vis a vis china, that
could lead to war. if assuaging their diplomatic
egos with formal dioramas at court will soothe this
over, so much the better.
the surveillance can continue.
if the US continues to assert that no apology is
justified, this can needlessly escalate to open
hostility. the dispute as to whther the collision
took place in chinese space or international space
can be used to either gracefully yeild or to create
a bone of contention.
it is a well known technique of diplomacy to
apologize even when one knows one is in the right,
for the grace of it, in providing the opponent a
way out. use of words such as 'perhaps' or
aknowledging common and similar impulses to protect
one's own borders in suspicious circumstances can
lead the face-off in less threatening,more seemly
directions that can end in more courteous
agreement. The US knows full well what the Chinese
did and why they did it. This disagreement on where
it happened is a diversionary point. If the US
chooses to stick over it, it is because it sets
precedent for future scenarios regarding where the
boundaries will be.
To back off the acuity of this moment, a way
must be found to mollify the Chinese in some manner
that relaxes them, relaxes their ego and lets them
feel right, while costing the US and the rest of
the non Chinese world nothing of value, so that
other methods of monitoring and mitigating the
nuclear threat can be used. Any good con knows how
to do this. Hell- Maharaji is doing it right now
with the meeting with Abi's dad!
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