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Britain’s leaders are pissed off at us, their American cousins. Most of the world’s leaders are, or seem to be. 

Why? In its collective (though myopic wisdom) the world’s leadership thinks that the United States should offer an apology to the Peoples’ Republic of China for the downing of one of their airplanes and the death of a Red Army pilot. Well, sort of.

The facts of the matter are not much in dispute (unless you read the Chinese, Cuban, or North Korean press).  A lumbering American reconnaissance aircraft with two dozen young ‘service persons’ aboard, flying some sixty-two miles from the Chinese mainland over international waters was rammed by a hot rod sky jockey. Our plane limped to the nearest land; the Red pilot apparently did not survive the collision.

Our military personnel have been held by the Chi-Coms for more than a week now; the U.S. Government has told the PRC that we ‘regret’ incident and loss of life. The Chinese are demanding a full apology in which the United States will assume blame for the incident. The xenophobic Red military also want us to stop such recon flights off their coast. We are at a stalemate on the surface; a war of words rages in the media and Internet.

So far America’s leaders have avoided the dreaded ‘H Word’, hostage, preferring, instead, ‘detainee’. But the collective will of the American people, usually slow to anger, is showing an increasingly strident edge. The anger is directed at Beijing. 

Most of the world’s nations seem content to go along with China’s demands for a full-monty apology or are ignoring the fracas completely. After all, it is reasoned, an apology by the Super Power would mean little and would quickly put an end to a nasty little sticky wicket.

Among the silent are many of America’s traditional allies, watching to see how the new administration handles its first crisis. 

The question is why should we, apologize, that is? If the facts are as we have them, then the Chinese should apologize to us. And there is no reason to dispute those facts at this point in time. A military craft attacking another nation’s on the high seas or in international airspace is an act of war. Of course the last time we declared war was in 1941. Hasn’t kept us from fighting a few since then, has it?

We know that there has been some minor diplomatic activity in a few capitols including London. Several governments have tepidly asked the Chinese to return our young men and women. But for the most part the silence from our allies and ‘competitors’ alike has been deafening. One exception is the British official who declared publicly that “the U.S. lacks savoir-faire.” 

Lack it we must: most of us can’t spell it let alone know what it means. Americans are long on the home-grown commodity of ‘Savvy’, which is a more pragmatic way of dealing with problems, lacking certain ‘niceties’, perhaps, but a whole heck of a lot quicker and somehow more satisfying when the resolution arrives. 

The way China is viewed from different quarters is critical. There are those who see in her teeming population fertile ground for trade and exploitation; and there are those who see her as the next communist colossus and therefore a threat to the ‘democracies’ which have sprouted up world-wide mostly during the last half century or so. 

The first view was held by the British way back in the 1830’s when they forced opium production on the Chinese to even out the balance of trade grown intolerable by the conspicuous consumption of tea by the English people. Many historians, incidentally, trace China’s distrust of the West to that period.  China has a much longer history and longer collective memory than do most of us.

Americans tend to hold the second view if they remember the parka-clad hordes who, spilling out of Manchuria, drove American armies southward in the Korea of late 1950. If not, they are drooling over the prospect of trade and undreamed of wealth through economic cooperation. The human psyche has changed little since the exploitation of the non-European world beginning in the late fifteenth century. We are a greedy species.

To end the standoff, diplomatic channels must be pursued, first and foremost. It is driving some of our media bonkers because they do not have access to the inner workings of what is going on as they did under previous administrations. Occasionally Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney or Mr. Powell will make a public statement about the status of the negotiations, but they are careful to keep such pronouncements low key and non-specific. 

The strident rhetoric comes primarily from the Chinese and their incessant demands for submission and admission of guilt. No matter how much pressure the self-serving media brings to bear, the Bush administration will never be paralyzed by this situation. Washington is showing strength and dignity in face of knee-jerk, idiotic, wide spread, weak-willed opinion. Appeasement didn’t work in 1939 either.

But if diplomacy does not work, then it will be time…and that time is coming soon….to show the Chinese that they cannot, through acts of blatant high seas piracy, intimidate the West, or at least the United States. The weapons will not be bombs and bullets, but subtle economic pressure. And the first thing to go will be the very 2008 Olympic games the Chinese government so desperately craves to showcase that ancient land’s newest face. 

Stay tuned.

That’s it for now. Next time, WHY THE UNITED KINGDOM SHOULD PULL AWAY FROM THE EUROPEAN UNION AND ESTABLISH CLOSER TRADE TIES WITH THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE. Or. Do you really want Jacques Chirac and his ilk to have ultimate control over British North Sea Oil? Centuries of British Common Law is being undermined as a pan-European political entity draws closer to reality. 

But then again we might simply publish our ten favorite recipes for braised or bar-B-qued Chinese Panda. Yum-Yum!!