No permanent harm was done by the U.S.

HYURA CHOI/YH

After months of trying, President George W. Bush's, DC '68, foreign policy team finally did something right. They used tact in negotiating the release of the 24 members of the United States armed services held for 10 days in China after making an emergency landing in Chinese territory. From what the public has been told, the U.S. is basically in the right, at least by formal legal standards. The plane was allegedly flying over international waters on autopilot when a rambunctious Chinese pilot came too close and hit the craft, forcing it to make an emergency landing at the nearest airfield.

A quick release would have been difficult given the many constituencies that President Jiang Zemin must accommodate: his party, the army, and the Chinese people, just to name a few. Reaching consensus am-ong these groups is certainly not impossible, but the task has been made much more difficult by the mistakes of a Bush foreign policy team that has been cryogenically frozen since just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Although the situation was handled properly, it was the first success in a series of errors that the Bush administration has committed since it gained office. It often seems that his administration is not content with its status as the sole world superpower and feels the need to create a new Cold War with the People's Republic of China. Since the campaign, the Bush team's moves have soured relations with China, transforming it from the warm and fuzzy "strategic partner" of the Clinton era into a new "strategic competitor," at the same time promising new sophisticated arms to its opponent Taiwan. And just to piss off the Chinese a little more, the Bush team is pushing the construction of a missile defense shield which could ignite an arms buildup in China.

We had arrived at a point when everyone in China was too angry to be persuaded to release the detainees. China's strategy throughout the standoff was understandable. Had the Bush administration toed a softer line and maintained the more amicable diplomatic ties created by the Clinton administration, things might have been easier. As it was, China had a tremendous opportunity to show the Bush administration that it deserved respect. This was possible because U.S. threats were not credible; revoking permanent normalized trade relations would alienate American businesses, and even with such a revocation, China could still join the World Trade Organization.

There is little chance that relations between the two countries will be permanently affected. The U.S. achieved its goals without losing face, but the Chinese got a chance to remind the U.S. that they can play hardball too. This incident may reinforce the U.S. view of China as a belligerent power. But cooperation with China is the inevitable end of globalization, and no force in Congress or the administration will be strong enough to stop it.

Ethan Guillen is a junior in Berkeley.

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