Jay Branegan: I think Washington is proposing that the U.S. and China conduct a joint investigation into the incident, saying "Let's figure out how this happened." There is an existing mechanism for such an inquiry under a previous maritime agreement. So you can see where the government wants to take this — away from a confrontation. Powell is saying let's isolate the problem, and deal with it. The problem here is that they think we did something wrong, and we think we didn't. There's a disagreement about what happened in the air. So let's figure it out. Some people even suspect some of the reason for the Chinese delay is that the when the incident is investigated it will make their pilots look bad.
Clearly, though, a lot of this will depend on a certain amount of goodwill on the Chinese part, and it's not clear that we're getting that.
Is the U.S. backing off from piling on pressure in order to give the Chinese leadership more room to retreat?
Today's rhetoric is certainly a lot softer than President Bush's yesterday. And it's General Powell doing the talking today. But yesterday, President Bush actually did a good job of feathering the pedal. He didn't set any deadlines, even if he did appear to be tapping his foot and looking at his watch.
The President was also conspicuously silent on the matter today. Was it a mistake for him to come out making statements early on, which the Chinese then appeared to ignore?
Obviously his statements didn't have the desired effect. But President Bush had to address the American people, he can't be seen to be ducking the issue. And he did pretty well in avoiding ultimatums, steering clear of painting himself into a corner as much as avoiding painting the Chinese into one. He's certainly learning the difference between campaign rhetoric and governing, but in his day-to-day performance he's doing fine. Of course some may argue that if you know your words are going to have no effect, better to have someone else say them. But there's no handbook on how to do this.
What's the U.S. read on the leadership in Beijing, and how it is making decisions on the current standoff?
China has always been very hard to read. U.S. officials are aware that there's a struggle under way between the more diplomatically oriented elements and the military types in the Chinese leadership, and that's going on as President Jiang undertakes the delicate task of engineering his succession. So the Chinese response to the crisis is being shaped by a lot of internal political dynamics. And there's a big hangover from the Belgrade bombing. All those factors are making it difficult to react — and China doesn't react quickly as a rule. Also they don't do very well in public. The Americans are sympathetic to these problems. Both sides realize that public diplomacy is not the most effective way of dealing with this problem.