Smugness Means Never Deigning to Say ‘Sorry’

In 1914, the assassination of an Austrian crown prince in Sarajevo led to a disastrous war that no one wanted. The two chief contenders, Britain and Germany, were at the time the world’s leading trading partners, as China and the U.S. are today. Is it possible that in 2001, an inept and unseasoned U.S. administration will wander into a conflict with China that, although the U.S. thinks it is vastly superior both morally and militarily, it cannot possibly win?

If I had been asked to lay a bet on a future Asian flash point, I would have picked an incident involving Taiwan--although Taiwan is still likely to become a pawn in the Bush administration’s chess game with China. It will no doubt receive the ships and airplanes it wants because the Bush team dares not disappoint the right wing of its own party, many of whom are paid for by the Taiwan lobby and who consider China a “rogue state.”

In a post-Cold War world, the U.S. will find itself very much alone in its Asian adventurism. The leading Japanese newspapers reporting the spy plane incident have noted that the plane was based at Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, a Japanese prefecture even though the U.S. Pacific Command often treats it as a suburb of Hawaii. The Japanese government has been quick to say that the fact that the U.S. spy plane’s flight originated in Japan in no way alters Japan’s own relations with China. At the same time, the Japanese have been highly critical of an unannounced port call at Sasebo by a U.S. nuclear submarine. The U.S. is supposed to give the Japanese 24 hours notice, and its failure to do so (which it has called a mere “oversight”) is certainly evidence of the arrogance with which the Pentagon treats Japan.

I suspect, however, that the fuss Japan is making over this incident is also intended to send the Chinese a covert message; namely, that Japan is not in a fighting mood and resents the way it is being drawn into a conflict not of its own making.

Despite the admiring reports of the Washington press corps, the United States has not handled this case well. Even though the Pentagon itself has stated that this incident should be handled through diplomatic and not military means, the United States has no seasoned diplomats with a personal knowledge of China working on it.

The first American spokesman was Adm. Dennis Blair, the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, who asserted that the spy plane was over international waters before he had any real knowledge of where it was or how the collision occurred (the damage to the nose of the U.S. airplane strongly suggests that it was the source of the collision). The American ambassador in Beijing is also an admiral, one of Blair’s predecessors. The secretary of State is a general--and likes to be called that in the newspapers--while the secretary of Defense is a classic old-time Cold Warrior, the secretary of Defense 26 years ago.

They all seems to think that being the “lone superpower” means never having to say you’re sorry, forgetting that President Eisenhower did apologize for the flight of Francis Gary Powers over Russia and ended U-2 flights (except over China, where at least five U-2s have been lost). The United States looks absurd talking about its airplane having something called “sovereign immune status” and claiming that China is being “inconsistent with standard diplomatic practice.”

Given the demonization of China in the so-called Cox committee report on spying, the harassment of scientist Wen Ho Lee, the 1999 bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade (another “accident”), the Taiwan lobby’s attempt to obtain Aegis ship defense systems and the president’s verbal baiting of China, it is understandable that the Chinese are suspicious. They do not accept Washington’s claim of a “right of espionage,” which the U.S. says it was routinely exercising, and they know that the U.S. military does not tolerate close surveillance of American territory.

What’s at issue in the spy plane incident is whether the U.S. is interested in being a decent citizen of the world or whether it is merely a bully whose president is primarily preoccupied with not making the same mistakes made by his daddy in dealing with the right wing of the Republican Party.