Talk about leadership - first stiffing Netanyahu and getting the Iranians to play nice, and now putting the Chinese in their place.
Excerpts from today's New York times.....
But by imposing a new air defense zone over the islands last weekend, Beijing may have miscalculated. It provoked a quick, pointed challenge from the United States, set off alarm bells among Asian neighbors and created a frenzy of nationalist expression inside China on hopes that the new leadership team in Beijing would push for a decisive resolution of the longstanding dispute.
On Wednesday, after the Pentagon sent two B-52 bombers defiantly cruising around China’s new air defense zone for more than two hours, Beijing appeared to backpedal. The overflights went unchallenged, and some civilian airlines ignored China’s new assertion of air rights.
“We will make corresponding responses according to different situations and how big the threat is,” the spokesman at the Foreign Ministry, Qin Gang, said when asked about China’s lack of enforcement against the American planes.
Under President Xi Jinping, China has suggested that it intends to make a more robust defense of its national interests, including in maritime disputes, to match its rising economic and military power. But even some Chinese analysts say they wonder if the new leadership team fully anticipated the response to the latest assertion of rights — or had in mind a clear Plan B if it met with strong resistance.
Testing China’s response, Japanese military aircraft flew through a new air defense zone that Beijing has declared over disputed islands, a Japanese government spokesman said Thursday. He said there was no response to the flights by the Chinese side.
The announcement of the flights came a day after American B-52 heavy bombers flew through the same airspace in defiance of China, which last weekend announced it had the right to police a vast area over much of the East China Sea. Beijing later said that it had monitored the American bombers but had chosen not to take action.
The South Korean government also said that it had flown surveillance aircraft through the zone on Wednesday without alerting Beijing, a flight that Chinese officials said that they had monitored. Like Japan, South Korea claims sovereignty over territory in the zone, but enjoys warmer ties with Beijing than Japan does.
When China declared the air zone on Saturday, it said that it would police the airspace with military aircraft, a move that raised the specter of Japanese and Chinese fighter jets intercepting each other.
