Permacrisis can’t be the future of US–China relations
Author: Editorial Board, ANU
Confusion, miscommunication, lies, crude posturing, finger-pointing— last month’s ‘balloongate’ was the contemporary US–China relationship in microcosm.
As Paul Heer writes in the first of this week’s two lead articles, ‘[w]e now know that this rapid sequence of events reflected a rush to judgement and action before the facts were clear’. The balloon’s drift over North America wasn’t the deliberate provocation it was initially cast as — more likely the result of a spy balloon blown off-course — though in doing so it ‘exposed a Chinese intelligence program that would violate international law by operating within other countries’ territorial airspace’.
The peril to US national security from the balloon’s overflight didn’t match the overheated rhetoric. But it was alarming in how it revealed ‘mutual distrust, latent hostility, a failure to communicate and the adverse impact of internal politics on how the two sides deal with each other’, writes Heer, and ‘reinforced their exaggerated assessments of each other’s strategic intentions’.
To read this excellent first article please click here.
Our sincere thanks to the EAF and its Editorial Board located at the Australian National University for kindly sharing these insights.
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